Loud And Quiet 28 – Tom Vek

LOUD AND QUIET ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 28 / THE ALTERNATIVE MUSIC TABLOID

TOM VEK

B A C K , A F T E R F I V E

THE BULLITTS DELS

L O N G

TIMBER TIMBRE

Y E A R S

SARABETH TUCEK THE HISTORY OF APPLE PIE CHAD VANGAALEN

CONTENTS J U N E 2011

09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BEGINNING SLIGHT CLUB: STEPHEN FRY AND KISSY SELL OUT VERBALLY SLOG IT OUT

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10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SI NG LES / BOOKS THE LATEST 7” RELEASES AND PAGE-TURNERS, FEATURING TRIBES AND BRET EASTON ELLIS

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY GABRIEL GREEN

13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TH E P RE V I E W RADIO LADIOS: THE WIRELESS GOES DIY IN A CAFE IN HACKNEY

14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LE FTO V E RS BIG DEAL ASK PHILLY’S KURT VILE IF HE THINKS KEITH RICHARDS IS FOR REAL

DE LS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 OBSESSED WITH IAN CURTIS AND A MAN WHO HAS NIGHT TERRORS EVERY DAY OF THE WEEK

TH E H ISTORY OF AP P LE P I E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 FROM TWO VERY DIFFERENT PARTNERS COMES ONE VERY SWEET NEW BRIT POP FIVE-PIECE

CHAD VANGAALE N . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 WE CAN’T BE SURE THAT CHAD LIKES HIS NEW ALBUM... OR BEING A ROCK STAR

TOM V E K . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 WHERE HE’S BEEN, WHY HIS SECOND ALBUM TOOK SO LONG, AND WHY IT’S BEEN WORTH THE WAIT

SARAB ETH TUCE K . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 THE NEW YORKER’S NEW ALBUMS IS CALLED ‘GET WELL SOON’ FOR GOOD REASON

TI M B E R TI M B RE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 SOMETIMES SOMBRE MUSICIANS TURN OUT TO BE THE MOST CHATTY. ONLY SOMETIMES, THOUGH.

TH E B U LLITTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30

CONTACT INFO@LOUDANDQUIET.COM LOUD AND QUIET PO BOX 67915 LONDON NW1W 8TH EDITOR - STUART STUBBS ART DIRECTOR - LEE BELCHER SUB EDITOR - ALEX WILSHIRE FILM EDITOR - IAN ROEBUCK ADVERTISING ADVERTISE@LOUDANDQUIET.COM CONTRIBUTORS BART PETTMAN, CHRIS WATKEYS, DEAN DRISCOLL, DANIEL DYLAN WRAY, DANNY CANTER, DK GOLDSTIEN, DEAN DRISCOLL, ELEANOR DUNK, ELINOR JONES, EDGAR SMITH, FRANKIE NAZARDO, HOLLY LUCAS, JANINE BULLMAN, LEE BULLMAN, KATE PARKIN, KELDA HOLE, GABRIEL GREEN, LEON DIAPER, LUKE WINKIE, MANDY DRAKE, MARTIN CORDINER, MATTHIAS SCHERER, NATHAN WESTLEY, OWEN RICHARDS, PAVLA KOPECNA, POLLY RAPPAPORT, PHIL DIXON PHIL SHARP, REEF YOUNIS, SAM LITTLE, SAM WALTON, SIMON LEAK, SIMON GRAY,TIM COCHRANE, TOM GOODWYN, TOM PINNOCK THIS MONTH L&Q LOVES BEN WHYBROW, COSMO AT DE RIEN, DAN MILLER, JAMES HEATHER, JON WILKINSON, KATE PRICE, KEONG WOO, MR & MRS GREEN, NAT CRAMP, STEVE PHILIPS, THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN LOUD AND QUIET ARE THOSE OF THE RESPECTIVE CONTRIBUTORS AND DO NOT NECESSARI LY REFLECT THE OPINI ONS OF THE MAGAZINE OR ITS STAFF. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2011 LOUD AND QUIET.

INTO THE CINEMATIC WORLD OF THE BULLITTS, AND A HIP HOP GENRE HE CALLS ‘ACTION/ADVENTURE’

36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ALBUMS FILMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 FAIR OHS, ARCTIC MONKEYS, THURSTON MOORE BATTLES AND ALL THE MONTH’S KEY RELEASES

IAN ROEBUCK LOOKS AT TWO NEW MOVIES THAT ASK, ‘WHAT THE HELL ARE WE DOING HERE?’

42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LI V E PARTY W OLF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 RECENT LIVE SHOWS FROM WILD BEASTS, ROLO TOMASSI, KATY B, DEERHOOF AND MORE

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THE PERSISTENT WORLD OF IAN BEALE GET THE ELTON JOHN LOOK / POLI-TWIT

The problem with absence is: it doesn’t always make the heart grow fonder. It’s a cliché that – like all others – is only half true. Its strike rate is 50%, at best. Love interests can quickly become love uninterests as our magpie eyes are seduced by the new, shiny thing that’s here right now, and Thomas Timothy Vernon-Kell – or Tom Vek – has spent so long out of our gaze we were starting to think we had imagined him ever existing at all. Vek’s long-awaited return was announced last month on Zane Lowe’s Radio 1 show, prompting a generation who’d abandoned the wireless to give it one last five minutes of undivided attention. And suddenly, an interview that we’d spent years chasing had us at it once again. Back then, in 2005, once Vek’s debut album, ‘We Have Sound’, was put to bed in a venue that’s since been flattened (London’s Astoria 2), an appearance on US emo-teen-soap The OC stood in our way, before… silence. So now, with hearts feverishly still fond of the multi-instrumentalist, we finally get to ask him where he’s been, why he’s back, and has new album ‘Leisure Seizure’ been worth six years in the wilderness?

CONTRI B UTORS 01

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P OL LY R A P PA P OR T

G A BR IE L GR E E N

S A M WA LT ON

WRITER

PHOTOGRAPHER

WRITER

In questions most asked to music journalists, ‘Who’s the worst person you’ve interviewed?’ is only ever beaten by ‘C’mon then, what bands are good at the moment?’ Timber Timbre [pg 28] might not be Polly’s ‘worst’ interview in her three-year writing career (which has seen her contribute heavily to both The Fly and Artrocker also), but it’s certainly one of the most awkward, namely because the band seemed bewildered whenever she mentioned the new record they were in front of her to promote. It was almost as bad as when she mentioned Wagner to These New Puritans last year.

“Don’t do that,” she warns. “Just don’t!”

Gabriel was born in west London, which made him the perfect person to shoot local hip hop mind The Bullitts [pg 30], even if we didn’t know that they grew up in the same area. “Jeymes seemed to me to be a man going places and was a pleasure to shoot,” says Gabriel, who also regularly contributes to Vice, Front and Dummy. He also shot Tom Vek [pg 20] for this issue, not on home turf but kinda – we took over his parent’s Clerkenwell flat for the afternoon. “As for Tom, he showed a keen eye for colour, picking out the chair with matching green and beige to the wall. My Mum found that chair in the street a day earlier.”

Handsome chap, ain’t he? Maybe not, but if you scan this QR code Sam will receive a text saying that his L&Q article are cool. He could do with the cheering up too – after he interviewed Sarabeth Tucek [pg 26] for this issue, she told him she’d “hated every minute of our interview.” “It’s nothing personal,” she said, “I just don’t really like other people.”

Since the genesis of Loud And Quiet five years ago, Sam has interviewed plenty of others who’ve actually enjoyed his company, and he’s got a blog too, called thedecade. wordpress.com, where he counted down his favourite tracks of the noughties last year. So go on, scan his face.

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BEGINNING J U N E 2011

AMERICAN BOY / TALES FROM THE OTHER SIDE

BY LUKE WINKIE: OUR MAN IN BAR AK ’S BACK YARD

SLIGHT CLUB HARDLY A KNOCK OUT FIGHT, SAYS REEF YOUNIS OF THE RECENT FRY/SELL OUT DEBATE

LISTENING TO THE BOSS AND PONDERING ROAD MUSIC: THE STUFF OF TEENAGE DREAMS

“Dubstep is my life.” It’s probable that it’s the first and last time those words will reverberate around a Cambridge University chamber. But as the opening gambit to Stephen Fry’s impassioned rebuttal to the burning question of ‘This house believes that classical music is irrelevant to today’s youth’, it’s the perfect introduction.

Tonight is the celebrated alumni versus the city urchin homeboy; Stephen Fry vs Kissy Sell Out, with classical music awkwardly sandwiched in-between.

On paper, it’s an unlikely threesome; in the flesh, so it proves. Talking to a packed hall, a visibly nervous Kissy jerks and bobs his way through an energetic, if disjointed, appraisal of classical music’s youth worthlessness, seemingly comforted by the fact his decks are just fingertips away. In opposition, Fry typically seduces a partisan audience with charisma, speaker’s eloquence and Thesaurus-like verbosity, giving a brief history of, and displaying an ardent love for, among others, Wagner, Handel and Beethoven.

In the periphery, pretty girls flash smiles and flutter eyelids in elegant evening wear; boys in tuxedos and suits modelled on ventriloquist dummies regurgitate cheese-eating smiles to anyone in their eye line as a horde of open-shirted, sweaterdraped Henry’s get incredulous and red-faced at any comment not bordering on the partisan: “You’ve clearly never heard Mozart’s, Le Nozze di Figaro” one rosy faced cherub angrily shouts across the hall.

Rarely is tonight a debate about anything; it’s a confirmation of the standing and stuffy pretension that exists within these exclusive walls; a society bash for some cheque-wielding philanthropists to get a front row seat to a celebrity graduate, and a snickering opportunity for the middle class faithful to wallow in their status.

One member of the media raises their head above the parapet; “Youth culture is about going out and having a good time. If you go to most clubs, everyone’s together, everyone’s dancing and the atmosphere is just… awesome,” he ventures. “I would suggest that you’ve never been to a club sober,” comes the reply to the great guffawing mirth of the congregation – not exactly fierce, constructive, hard-hitting discussion.

It’s the moment the night crystalizes: Cambridge University is Decadent and Depraved and the fear and loathing is all mine. We didn’t come here to hear discussion and debate, just a glorified sideshow of self-aggrandising and one-eyed, deaf-eared partisanship. Trudging out to cast a yes/no “vote”, it already feels worthless.

For all of its problems, its chortling suburbia, the fringe, anti-realist politics, and its occasional lack of culture, American music can certainly seem seductive to the average teenager. I’ve recently found myself going through the back catalogue of Bruce Springsteen, in parts out of curiosity, but mainly from faded nostalgia, and the fact that ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ has found itself in a certain renaissance following that widely acclaimed reissue.

Naturally there’s a constant emphasis on escapist anthems, teenage love on the road, dissolving unjust hindrances with the power of miles and miles of pavement. It’s so well ingrained in pop music it’s almost redundant mentioning, but then I look outside my dorm room and I see stretches of highway blending with a warm, sunshine horizon. The open plains of Texas only accentuate that effect – for every deadbeat small town lays a car, a couple, an ambition, and an endless, interconnected highway escape route.

The interstate highway system is estimated to run 46,876 miles, across all 50 states, and it serves as the primary means of transportation for almost every American. That beckoning freedom has permeated every aspect of classic American pop. Our most universal heroes are something of road-poets; Dylan, the surrogate adoption of Neil Young – and even in modern times the vigour of icons like Craig Finn or Josh Ritter have inspired similar, if more bated critical respect. The prose of U.S. pop is always tied to landscape; Sufjan “drove to Chicago,” Doug Martsch wanted to see “their faces turn to backs of heads and slowly get smaller,” and Springsteen’s own “tramps like us, baby we were born to run” has become one of the most cited singular lyrics in music history. These little quips have planted seeds of rosy anarchy in the cores of millions of young people.

Often, outside my dorm room a collection of homeless runaways gather and peddle for change. We call these fellows ‘drag rats’, given their dishevelled demeanours, but it’s easy to drum up some sympathy. I see them as the trainwreck of the American teenage dream, inspired more literally by the same music that inspired me, but brave enough to act on it.

Some do find that erstwhile enlightenment that Springsteen talked about, but others crash and burn, shredded to bits by the weight of their undertaking – so they huddle together, finding some solace in the embrace of their fellow’s broken wings. We can all attest to the dangerousness of this rampant, musicfuelled idealism, but I certainly think we can lift a toast to the times when we were green enough for it to make sense.

Illustration by Peter Beatty - peterbeatty.co.uk

“YOU CLEARLY HAVEN’T HEARD MOZART’S LE NOZZE DI FIGARO”

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09

BEGINNING SINGLES / BOOKS 01

BY JA NIN E & L EE B U L L M A N

(ISLAND) OUT JUNE 6

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HU S B A ND L O V E S ONG / S L O W MO T ION

C L OU T !

EP

(ROBOT ELEPHANT) OUT NOW

(DIRTY BINGO) OUT NOW

Bologna duo Husband don’t approach Italo disco like you’d expect them to. On ‘Love Song’, for example, clacking tribal drums take centre-stage while faint spaceship drones endlessly bother the kind of weightless zombie vocals you’d find on an ambient HEALTH remix. It makes for an alluring and arresting debut single. It waggles a curly, come-hither finger, but it’ll probably vaporise you if you surrender yourself to the temptation. ‘Slow Motion’, ironically, is a lot faster, and a lot more overtly threatening. Its beat isn’t loose and spiritual; it’s hard and industrial. The duel vocals aren’t as friendly as they used to be either. They’re sparse but upfront and talking gobbledegook, practising witchcraft over demonic, analogue synth lines and the sound of what may or may not be an elevator being called. And of course music like this lends itself perfectly to the remix crowd, but none of the re-workings here match the terror of the originals.

Southend five-piece CLOUT! are proud to be of a generation that has always known the Internet. The way they see it is, genre cross-pollination is nothing but a good thing, and with untold resources and influences bouncing around cyberspace, new musicians these days are able to be more innovative than ever. There’s an argument, of course, that the practice of meshing hip hop with jazz and chillwave could spell disaster in the wrong hands, but not in CLOUT!’s, it seems.

‘Maxwell’s O’ is the crowning glory of their 7-track debut release – made up of various tinkering electronics, a snappy hip hop beat and the vocals of an angel (well, artwork designer Bradley). Unlike their new, agressive noisecore live show, it’s beautifully forlorn, noisy to just the right extent and surprisingly baggy. ‘It’s Too Late’ cranks up the crackle, and ‘The Dodo Riddim’ is plainly experimental, but there’s still a groove there from a band inspired by everything.

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JU S T K ID S B Y PAT T I S MI T H (BLOOMSBURY)

Part memoir/part poetic myth, Just Kids recounts the story of Patti Smith’s defining relationship with maverick New York photographer (and the man responsible for the cover of Smith’s iconic ‘Horses’ album) Robert Maplethorpe. The pair met in 1967 in the first Summer of Love and forged their enduring friendship against the backdrop of 1970s New York as the city became, for a while, the hippest spot on earth. The book tells first hand the stories that have since entered into rock’n’roll folklore, describing, as only Patti Smith can, the time the pair spent looking out onto New York from their room at the Chelsea Hotel, communing with the ghosts that stalked its corridors and planning their assaults on the worlds of art and culture. It’s a sublime and heartfelt book and a testament to true friendship.

BR E T E A S T ON E L L IS B Y IMP E R I A L BE DR OOMS (PICADOR)

Also new to paperback is Bret Easton Ellis’ sequel to his stunning and era defining debut, Less Than Zero, which sees us catch up with the cast of over privileged, uncomfortably numb and emotionally detached characters twenty-five years on.

Clay is now, unsurprisingly, making his living as a movie scriptwriter when he returns from his adopted home of New York to his native Los Angeles. Whilst in the City of Angels he gets in touch with some old friends and some of the darker corners of his own psyche. While unlikely to set the world alight to the extent that Less Than Zero did, Imperial Bedrooms is nonetheless an intriguing work from a generation’s highly important writer and earns its place near the top of the list of the year’s best novels.

With many thanks to the Hebden Bridge Bookshop. Single reviews by Danny Canter

T R IBE S W E W E R E C HIL DR E N

One early profile piece on Camden quartet Tribes had them down as “Kings of Leon to Yuck’s Strokes”. It was actually meant as a compliment, and although plainly offensive in light of what the Followill family band has rotted into, it’s a pretty good comparison. Tribes are an indie rock’n’roll band, and they clearly have their eyes on mainstream success. This, their debut EP, echoes their manifesto that speaks of the band turning their back on “experimental weird music” that you “stroke your chin to”, which is the kind of thing that Liam meat-n-meat Gallagher might say to convince you that The View are the “only proper fucking band out there doing it!”.

Tribes are slightly cleverer than that though, and not only because who isn’t? ‘Girlfriend’ is particularly difficult to argue with, combining a grunge-light power chord chorus with an overall anthemic nod to Weezer and Americana pop. It’ll clean up on Xfm. ‘We Were Children’ then owes so much to Britpop that it can’t help but confess “we were children in the mid-90s” – no kidding. And while the acoustic ‘Coming of Age’ whiffs of desperation like its title suggests, Tribes are quite brilliant in an FM pop rock kinda way. See ‘em supporting Razorlight in an arena near you soon... no doubt.

BEGINNING TH E P RE V I E W

IT ’S A SHIT BUSINESS: SIMON GRE Y WAS IN A BAND ONCE

Photography by Owen Richards

T HE W R I T ING PA R T NE R Andrew “Quinn” Clarke was a year older than me, the leader of the ‘A-list’ group in the school – the guy who went out with the best looking girls, the guy who everyone liked (and secretly wanted to be), and most importantly of all, the guy who was himself an excellent guitarist and bassist, and the owner of a sweet, high-octane singing voice.

He had even been in a few moderately successful bands around the city since he was in his mid-teens.

There wasn’t much that humbled me at this point in my life (I’d met Timmy Mallet after all), but this guy came the closest.

Unless you’re one of those freakishly gifted types who must be part alien, like David Bowie, or a vulgar thing that no one wants to spend time with, like Johnny Borrell, it’s key: finding a perfect writing partner that makes being in a band not a completely gawky, introverted past time. And I’d found mine in Quinn.

My bro-mance, to use modern vernacular, with that most-coveted of grant-maintained school holy grails – the coolest cat on the science block – was cemented after discovering a mutual obsession with not just the usual suspects of The Jam and The Clash, but also early-90’s almost-rans like Senseless Things and Neds Atomic Dustbin.

Before you could say, “Cherry red Doc Martens,” we were ticking another box on the rock’n’roll cliché list – ‘jamming’ (a word that has never been cool, not even then) in the music room on school-owned acoustic guitars. Who would have thought it would all end so acrimoniously just 3 years later?

The rest of the band was made up of Quinn’s mate Nathan, on bass (who, if you remember, gave us our name: Plaster Scene), and through a friend known colloquially at the time as ‘Drugs Darren’ (now residing in Wales under the moniker ‘Double-Espresso Darren’), we met the man whose Panzer-esque, Bonhamian beats would underpin our songs… and he lived in a windmill. We were a natty bunch. Enough to get ourselves a record deal at least. But while the others prevented us from being The Proclaimers, it was Quinn who proved as indespenible as a bag of sick at a Piers Morgan book signing.

R ADIO L ADIOS THE WIRELESS GOES DIY IN A HACKNEY CAFE It was the modern photocopier that turned print DIY, coughing out fanzines from the mid-’60s and reaching its eventual boom at the end of the ’70s. For TV, early ’80s Cable first did the job of cutting out the establishment (“Party On! Excellent”) before Youtube finally turned up and gave us all our own channels, filmed on mobile phones. Recorded sound had the revelation that anyone could walk into a pressing plant, followed by Tascam 4-tracks and the tape cassette, and GarageBand and the MP3. Legitimising the medium of homemade radio, though, seems to have taken forever. Pirate stations of the early ’60s (like Radio Caroline, which would broadcast from a boat in ‘international waters’ to slip through

“SOME PEOPLE SHIT THEMSELVES WHEN THEY COME IN TO DO THEIR FIRST SHOW”

a legal loophole) were finally outlawed in 1967, and few stations have been looked on as little more than trouble (and noise) makers ever since. London’s Rinse FM – which was finally awarded a community FM broadcast license a year ago next month – beat the odds, but that only came after sixteen long pirating years, four of which had them also broadcasting on the Internet.

Like most things, it’s the Web that’s really revolutionised the wireless. More and more DIY Internet stations are springing up, and perhaps the most idyllic of them all is London Fields Radio, ran from the corner of a working Hackney café by Kate Hutchinson and Sarah Bates.

“People have to record their shows when the café is open,” insists Sarah. “That’s the whole point, because we like the atmosphere of the public chatting and the coffee machine going…”

“And you can hear it all in the background,” adds Kate.

“Some people shit themselves when they come in to do a show for the first time because they’re not use to having a lot of people sat around, or the sound of a coffee machine going off, but it all adds to the atmosphere of the shows.”

The Wilton Way Café – on Wilton Way, London, E8 – wasn’t so much chosen by Kate and Sarah, but rather chosen for them, by the station’s founders and café owners, who run another community-based creative space on the other side of town – Notting Hill Arts Club. “David and Dom opened the café in December 2009,” says Sarah, “and their only thing was that the station had to be inclusive. So it became local radio for local people, but anyone can come in and do it.”

“There’s the music based shows like ‘For Folk’s Sake’, but it’s kinda like Radio 4... for Hackney people,” says Kate of the spontaneous chat found on LFR, like one show that consisted of its hosts leaning out of the café’s window and interviewing male customers of the bookmakers next door about their girlfriends and love-lives. “Again, it comes back to the café,” says Sarah, “a lot of the shows discuss the kind of things that people talk about in cafes or down the pub.”

Most of ‘The Men-o-pause’ (the gambler’s Question Time) was, perhaps unsurprisingly, not suitable for public airing, but that’s the beauty of a station still in its infancy – it allows a project to be more liberal than the busy bodies that whipped up ‘Sachsgate’, and, still in its 1.0 podcast guise, the odd unquestionable offence can be cut before being uploaded to the Web. “We try not to edit the shows, though,” says Kate. “which is what makes us different to all other pre-recorded stations.

They’re edited to the enth degree; we’re a bit more organic.”

--LFR in ‘on air’ now. Find it at www.londonfieldsradio.com

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BEGINNING LE FTO V E RS

BIG DEAL

KU RT V I LE

LAST MONTH WE QUIZZED LONDON DUO BIG DEAL. THEY LEFT THESE QUERIES BEHIND FOR PHILLY’S KURT VILE

Books on tour: Lord of the Flies or Lord of the Rings?

I’d say Lord of The Flies, but only to reference my song ‘On Tour’. It’s funny that you mention both though. [In my song] it’s a reference to the fact that your band is your island and you’re ready to kill each other, but just today we were watching that Lord of The Rings parody of the end scene [see it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb-xOmXPukY], y’know when they’re blown out after the war and they’re all jumping in bed together and smiling at each other with these really creepy smiles, and they’re rocking and making sexual noises at each other. You know the one I’m talking about? It’s really, really funny.

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Now that you’ve done one UK tour before, what was it that you were looking forward to when you were here last week?

It’s an obvious answer, but this time around the shows in London and Brighton were sold out, and that’s a big difference. I was very excited. I played a Rough Trade instore and was stoked to do that. People are definitely enthusiastic over in the UK… and I like the English breakfasts… and your kebabs.

It’s always cloudy in London, but, as the TV show says, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Who’s your favourite character?

Y’know what, I’m not much of a TV guy, so I’ll say Danny DeVito, because I liked him in Twins.

“OF COURSE KEITH RICHARDS IS FOR REAL! HE’S KEITH RICHARDS!”

You’ve done a few tours of the U.K. and loads of the States. I [Kacey] think tour treats blow over here (although you can drink beer in the car, if you’re not driving, which is what we are doing now). What do you miss when you are away?

I guess in the States, obviously you know what you’re getting into, but I’m pretty laidback so I’ll eat what’s there. I will say though that in Europe, say, for example in a gas station, you can get a quality sandwich. If you get food at a gas station in the States, forget about it. It’ll be crap. So I’d say Europe has points over the US there.

Alice wants to know if it’s true that you’re married. If so, can she come out on tour with you at all? (Your wife... not Alice).

I’m not only married, I have a one year old daughter now, and when she turned six months old she came to the west coast of the States where I was on tour to hang out. It was cool, and they’ll come to visit when I play San Francisco again.

But, y’know, it’s work, so you can’t bring your wife and kids to work every day, but they’re obviously welcome to be around when they can. I probably won’t ever get to Neil Young status, but if I do get to that point, I’ll have a bus or something.

We read somewhere you are a big Rolling Stones fan.

Have you read Keith Richards new memoir?

Oh yeah, of course. It’s a monster of a book. I loved it, but I will say that I’m glad I read the Victor Bockris bio on him first, because it’s very factual and historical and studious, whereas Keith Richards will just blow years in a couple of words, and choose instead to say, [Kurt adopts an loud American English accent] ‘Don’t get me wrong, I love Mike, he’s my brother… but I HATE HIS GUTS!’ He’ll rip into anybody – rip into Bill Wyman. I read [Wyman’s autobiography] Stone Alone too, and it’s literally the most educational Rolling Stones book you could read, because he collected everything. Granted it’s a little more difficult to get into at the beginning, because it’s very dry and factual, but it’s so rewarding. With Keith, who’s my hero – like my dark hero – he probably doesn’t remember everything right, so he goes off on these rants, which is totally awesome too.

But do you think this guy is for real?

Keith Richards? Of course he’s for real! He’s Keith Richards!

He can’t be anyone else apart from himself. He’s been on a pedestal for all of his life, and for good reason. He’s in an alternate universe to any of us – it’s the way he’s always lived.

In some ways you feel for him because he can’t get around as much as us and can’t follow everything that’s going on – like the way he puts down the punk movement in a couple of sentences, like, ‘Once you go out there and start spitting on each other it’s bullshit!’. Y’know, it’s not as simple at that. But, then, he’s a Rolling Stone 365 days a year.

Photography by Elinor Jones

We really love your new record, ‘Smoke Ring For My Halo’, as well as ‘Childish Prodigy’ [2009], which were both recorded at proper studios. You’ve also done a lot of recording on your own, so what was the transition like for you, and do you prefer one over the other?

Well… ok… the transition, like most of my career was very, what’s the word?, organic! I started out DIY, of course, because it was the only way I could do, so I recorded at home and I self-released my own stuff. Then I had small labels put out my stuff, all of which still didn’t give me any money. The song ‘Freeway’ I did record in a proper studio, and I saved up for that myself, and that was me wanting to go into the studio. Our shows were then getting tighter and more rock’n’roll, so I went to a local guy called Jeff Zeigler who did ‘Childish Prodigy’ on his 16-track, 1-inch reel-to-reel – he’s got great gear; it’s not top of the line but it’s by no means low grade. So that was another step, still with no producer, so it still had a DIY punk edge. And then once I got Matador interested in that record, they wanted me to go in with a real producer, but I wanted to as well because I was kinda exhausted. I’d say that it depends on the producer though, and how they are as people – it’s not just about the fidelity. So here I am now and I love it. To tell you the truth, for now, I prefer recording in the studio. It’s akin to a lot of my influences, and for them it was never an issue because people always used to make records in a studio.

D E L S LIKE THE BEST GRIME OUT THERE, KIERAN DICKEN’S DEBUT ALBUM IS DARK, PLAYFUL AND COMPLETELY BRITISH PHOTOGRAPHER -

If you didn’t know already, there’s a new boy on the grime scene and in his fold are a crack team of the hottest musicians around at the moment. DELS, the pseudonym of 27-year-old rapper Kieren Dickens – so called because of a high school mix up with a boy called Delroy, leading to the nickname that caught on with such force even his mum uses it – has teamed up with modish producers Joe Goddard, co-founder of electropop juggernauts Hot Chip, musician Kwes and experi-popstrel Micachu.

He follows in the school of slow-rhyming (think more Roots Manuva than Giggs) but where his contemporaries plough a dub-oriented furrow, Dickens takes the back alleys of Clubland, using an abundance of dirty synth lines and juxtaposing beats to create gritty, gloom-laden hip hop that’s somewhat akin to Kano, who in fact worked with Hot Chip’s other founder

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PHIL SHARP

WRITER -

DK GOLDSTEIN

Alexis Taylor on his last record, ‘Method to the Maadness’.

Saying that, however, lyrically the two couldn’t be more different.Where Kano raps about sexual conquests, rudeboys and the sleazy side of showbiz, Dickens spits rhymes about the darkest realities and escaping to dream worlds, which may stem from his love of melancholic rockers Joy Division. “I’m obsessed with Ian Curtis,” he states when citing his influences, among which also fall Andre 3000, MF Doom and Biggie Smalls. “The way that he wrote his music – I think there’s something quite beautiful in that. It’s morbid as well and I’m quite a morbid person.”

Death is something that’s always on Dickens’ mind as he has constant night-terrors about it. “I’m always dreaming about death. I think it’s because I’ve been going through a rough patch recently, but I can’t help it,

every night I’m getting killed in some way or I’m about to be killed, or I’ve already died and I’m watching myself dead on the floor. I don’t know what all these things mean but it’s quite weird and it’s really disturbing because it’s fucking up my sleep pattern. I’m waking up every night, sweating my arse off.”

‘GOB’, his debut album that was released on May 2, treks a macabre route too, which is a leap away from his single ‘Lazy’ that was recorded with Goddard and released as part of independent London label Moshi Moshi’s ‘Singles Compilation,Vol. 1’ back in early 2008.

The track was a fist-pumping number full of odd beats and quick wit, but Dickens was apprehensive about becoming a “club act.”

That’s what I was conscious of,” he tells me. “When I made ‘Lazy’ a lot of people thought my live show was going to be really intense, but I’m into different types of

“I’m quite a morbid person. I’m always dreaming about death. Every night I’m getting killed in some way.” music and I wanted to reflect those influences. I wanted it to be almost like a rollercoaster – the highs and the lows of life, I guess.There’re a couple of upbeat tunes on ‘GOB’, but I just wanted to show depth because some of the songs, some of the things I’m talking about, like ‘Droogs’, couldn’t be up-tempo. It’s heavy shit, so I felt like it needed to reflect what I was talking about.”

The song ‘Droogs’ is a minimal, lingering track towards the end of the LP that details the sexual abuse his friend suffered in her childhood – something that she really didn’t want him to write about. “But I just couldn’t not do it,” Dickens professes. “I heard this beat that was sent to me and I just thought that would be perfect for what I really wanna talk about. It’s something that happens a lot, every day, under the surface and I’m trying to shed light on that scenario. I’m not trying to unite the world with this song or anything like that, but it’s a window into someone’s life, you know?

“This is what happens to women and the way I wrote it was like a movie, a visual.The first line is ‘If you pan to the left…’ and the way I saw it was like reality TV, but what if it was in someone’s house? A real life scenario. So I imagined all these different cameras focusing on my friend’s house and that’s where I got the inspiration from. She liked [the song], but it really upset her because of what I was saying.”

Having grown up in Ipswich, Dickens went on to study graphic design at Kingston University – he had applied to do illustration, but they advised him against it – where he acquired video making and artistry skills, which is why so much of his work is written on a visual level. “I’m inspired by visuals as much as I am sounds,” he explains. “I’m always thinking about how the sounds can be represented in a visual format and I can’t get that out of my brain, because I’m like a droid – it’s been drummed into my head for the last three years at uni.”

Some of the directors that Dickens looks to for inspiration include David Lynch, Tim Burton, Ridley Scott and artists such as Yoshitomo Nara and Hayao Miyazaki. “I’m in to storytelling a lot, you know?” he offers up plainly, almost as a throwaway comment.

“Maurice Sendak’s ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ always stuck out in my mind because it’s quite a simple story,

but with the pictures you can lend your own meaning to them and make up your own story. I was always obsessed with stories as a kid, always reading and drawing pictures of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Drawing them obsessively until I didn’t need a visual any more – I could literally draw it without even watching it,” he laughs and leans back into the sofa that he’s been perched on the end of until now, finally starting to relax.

It’s clear from the way he rings his fingers and shifts on the spot that Dickens isn’t yet comfortable – or jaded for that matter – by this whole ‘fame’ business.“The idea of random strangers just coming up to me and knowing who I am freaks me out a little bit,” he admits. After all, it was only a year ago that he was picked up by the Coldcut lads’ Ninja Tune imprint Big Dada, which led to a three-album deal – perfectly suited to the Suffolk boy who has already told us he doesn’t want to be a 30year-old rapper.“What have I got? Three years? So three albums and I’m gone,” he proclaims.

But before we touch on the end, let’s go back to the beginning.“I’ve always been obsessed with words, always writing down my thoughts in the back of my exercise books,” says Dickens of his childhood. “One of my friends read my lyrics and said I should rap, but I was really shy as a teenager, so the idea of being on stage and performing in front of people was such a daunting prospect. I used to be in this group called The Alliance back in Ipswich, though.We used to make garage music, rapping over fast tempos, which then progressed when I went to university when I was 21 and felt like I had more to say. With garage there’s a limit to what you can say because it’s so quick, but a hip hop tempo fitted me perfectly because I could project what I really wanted to say.”

Goddard didn’t come onto the scene until Dickens was at a graphic design work placement in 2006. “I met them all on Myspace,” he mentions when explaining how he came to know his band of producers.“I messaged Joe after I heard the Hot Chip album ‘The Warning’ and told him I really liked it and that I could tell he was inspired by some garage music because of the rhythms and the drum patterns. He messaged me back saying, ‘Yeah you’re right. One of my biggest inspirations was

Wookie’ and he said, ‘I love your music, I really want to work with a rapper’, and I thought woah, this must be a joke. I was sweating my arse off in this office, typing away to Joe on Myspace… I had to log out, turn my computer off and turn it back on because I thought it wasn’t real.”

As it is, Goddard only features on three songs on ‘GOB’, despite being the only producer to work in the same room with Dickens. Kwes, who produced the majority of the album, “loves to work on his own,” Dickens clarifies. “So he’ll send me something, I’ll record over it and then he’ll go away and put this bit together.”With Micachu he didn’t want to tamper with the two tracks she sent him. “Her beat-making is really raw and all over the place, so I left it how the demo was because I didn’t want it to be too polished.”

In regards to the concept of ‘GOB’, Dickens describes it as “the space between fantasy and reality,” commenting that he and Goddard didn’t think there was enough fantasy in hip hop. “I wanted to explore that space,” he continues, “that’s how I ended up writing ‘Shapeshift’, which is written from a child’s perspective about me turning into any old thing I want. But I didn’t want people to not be able to relate to it – I didn’t want it to become too self-indulgent – so I had one foot in reality and one foot in fantasy world.

“In ‘Violina [a song about his ex-girlfriend], I was writing it like a musical. So, I talk about the ally cats and the street rats – they’re singing in the alleyway,” he makes clear. “And I called it ‘GOB’ because it’s a very British word that’s quite fitting for a hip hop record. It means ‘to spit’ and ‘mouth’ as well. But I also quite like the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory idea of the Ever-Lasting Gobstopper. I wanted to make music that had longevity because a lot of hip hop that’s out there today is quite throwaway. I wanted to make an album that was good for something and would last longer. Plus, I wanted to forge a British sound with this album. I wanted it to sound like it came from the UK.” We’re beginning to catch on to the excitable imagination of Dickens, much like that of a child’s, that he can’t make sense of unless he can work undisturbed – something the night time lends itself well to.“I have to be really tired to write my best music,” says. “Really awkward thoughts start pouring out after midnight and it’s such an effort to write something, but then suddenly you get this burst of inspiration.

“The hardest thing about writing when you’re really tired is you think everything’s shit, but maybe you listen back to the recording the next day and think, ‘Oh actually, it’s quite good.’ I think it’s because that’s when I feel most relaxed. When my brain’s too awake I’m thinking about other stuff that I need to be getting on with, everyday things, but when I’m really tired, I really do feel like it’s just me on my own. When everyone’s asleep you don’t get distracted by anything else.”

This is one technique he’ll doubtless be taking to approach his sophomore LP, but one thing’s for sure, it won’t be in his hometown. “I really want to write my next album in another city, maybe Tokyo or New York, because I think just being in a different environment will inspire me. I can’t write another album in Ipswich,” he sighs, pausing for thought.“Yeah, I’m sure, I just can’t write in Ipswich again. So we’ll see what happens, maybe I’ll go to New York and make some music up there. I really want to work with Dave Sitek of TV On The Radio. He said he’s a fan of my music, so I think we’re going to do something in the future. Maybe he’ll be on my next album, who knows?” And on that tempting note, he leaves us with a hundred new questions, but we’ll have to await album number two. Until then, ‘GOB’ is going on repeat to tide us over.

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T H E

H I S T O R Y

A P P L E

O F

P I E

OPPOSITES ATTRACT PHOTOGRAPHER -

Somebody out there once said it: that opposites attract.

Sure, they were singing at a cartoon cat, but you can see that Paula Abdul was on the right track. Just look at Jerome Watson and Stephanie Min, a couple with four glorious years behind them and the founding members of The History of Apple Pie. On first meeting they seem anything but opposite, tripping over each other’s words and finishing sentences… but where they are worlds apart is their musical backgrounds.

Jerome is steeped in musical schooling; his instrument [the guitar] an extension of his upper arm. He even makes guitar pedals for fun. Stephanie, on the other hand, can’t play a thing, “but that was the best thing at the beginning,” explains Jerome. “Because Steph was totally underdeveloped musically we just did what we liked and each of us are coming from completely different angles. I really had no idea she could sing and we had been together a while!” he laughs.

Together in the band, the pair are riding a wave of good will that dates back to February 2010, when the couple’s early songs were first uploaded to the Web. Jerome just out of Hatcham Social, Steph sugar-rushed on a diet of pop, the two were about to write together for the first time.

“He’d always be writing stuff before and I’d try not to get involved,” says Steph. “Maybe I’d have a listen, but we just tried it one night and it worked really well. I had to reign him in a bit and I still do, ’cause I’m more vocals and the tune – I concentrate on the song while he goes off with his guitar making all sorts of noises, and I’m like, ‘how do I fit this in?!’”

With tracks like ‘You’re So Cool’ and paceier ‘Mallory’, Jerome and Steph’s early demos acted as a

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LEE GOLDUP

WRITER -

IAN ROEBUCK

refreshing antidote to the omnipresent chillwave movement of the time.They were straight up and down songs; a throwback to teenage times, all slacker rock and dripping in a juicy, jangly way. Straight away the band sat alongside bands likeYuck and the ever-youthful, sweeter Veronica Falls, resembling Teenage Fanclub and the doe-eyed Lush. A fuzzy warmth that emanated from early ’90s grunge filled their songs too.

“We put the tracks on the Internet straight away, as a sort of, ‘ooh look what we’ve done, we’ve just made a song!’ I was totally freaked out that anyone would listen or I would end up on stage.” Steph cracks up at her naivety but later admits she still gets scared stiff, although maybe you would too if your first gig was at the Hippodrome in Kingston, the crowd 500 strong. “That was pretty fear,” says Steph.

“It kind of helped that it looks like a giant pinball machine,” says Jerome.

Racing into the limelight though is not THOAPs style. (They turned down our first two interview requests, come to think of it).

“It’s fine now,” says Jerome.“but we were thrown into really big shows at first as the Internet went mad. Now we have a handle on it and are pretty selective. We do have our freakouts though. Every so often we don’t have any gigs, but then all of a sudden a few come at once and we’re like, oh dear we can’t take time off work!”

Drummer James and bassist Kelly (both “hilarious”, says Steph) were soon added to the bands lineup, along with second guitarist Aslam who “acts really surprised all the time and doesn’t drink, but he has addictions like energy drinks and Coca Cola.”

The five of them spend a lot of time laughing, even if

Jerome is a little more jaded than the others due to his past experiences as a jobbing musician. Steph is more energised by it all, and neither of them can wait for their first release: a limited 7-inch of ‘You’re so Cool’ on a new label called Roundtable.“Yeah, it’s Joe from Angular helping out his cousin Kate,” says Steph. “It’s pretty exciting really and the song was chosen by popular demand!”

So is it about Jerome then, Steph – all lovey dovey lyrics and longing gazes across the living room?

“Nope! It’s actually about my best friend from back home in Coventry. She knew all of the script to True Romance off by heart, so it’s a bit lovey in the lyrics but the actual song is about Alabama’s speech at the end – ‘you’re so cool, you’re so cool’.”And once again THOAP prove that they really are band awash with early 90’s pop culture influences.

On top of the Oliver Stone cult classic, Pulp’s ‘Different Class’ is a favourite album, Placebo’s ‘Nancy Boy’ a favourite song and Jerome fondly remembers his father’s job as manager of a Soho record store on Berwick Street called Reckless Records.“He used to bring me all the promos,” he says, “you know ‘Parklife’ in both blue and green. I used to go in the shop and draw on all the record store sleeves, just the paper bit inside.”

Steph’s family also played a part in her musical education. Her parents listened to The Beatles and Elvis on loop, but she says:“it was my sister who turned me on to music really, stuff in ’94, like Placebo.”

So maybe this couple aren’t that different after all.

Steph looks unconviced. “I listen to so much pop music I can make up melodies instantly in my head,” she says, “Jerome’s more of a guitar nerd!”

C H A D

V A N G A A L E N

THE RELUCTANT ROCK STAR PHOTOGRAPHER -

Musician, illustrator, animator, instrument inventor, producer and father of two, Canadian Chad VanGaalen is not only a very busy man, but also a very talented one.

He has not always been as relentlessly productive, though.

“Before I became a dad I used to be a real hobo, stoner dude,” he says. “I’d wake up and take a big dump and have a bowl of cereal and a cup of coffee, and that would take an hour in itself.”

Chad’s recent bouts of productivity have led to a vast body of work that spans a series of musical genre’s and side projects and has also spawned animations for music videos for the likes of J Masics and Holy Fuck!. A brief tour of his Canadian home studio (as seen on a VBS video) will see a series of bizarre concoctions and inventions (the homemade drum that uses a Lego ramp as a means for rhythmic percussion is particularly endearing).The scenes give off a sense of a lonely hermit, sat up all hours building, scheming and plotting, which as I soon find out, isn’t far off how Chad would like to end up.

About his new record, ‘Diaper Island’, he says: “It sounds boring to talk about because it’s just a rock record,” adding:“After making the Women record [Chad produced ‘Public Strain’], I wanted to make guitars the focus, which I’d never really done before. It might sound boring to everybody else, as it’s like,‘yeah the Stones did that forty years ago.’ I work on ambient drone recordings that are like twenty minutes long, and if it were up to me that’s what I’d be focusing on” So is the album a result of you label’s wishes?

“Sub Pop are the best label in the world for putting up with me being a complete idiot most of the time, and I’m sure they would put out whatever I want. However,

JEFF THORBURN

WRITER -

DANIEL DYLAN WRAY

to tell you the truth, I think they wanted a little more out of it than what it is right now. I’m excited to get working on something else right now. One day I’ll make them happy!”

While Chad’s modesty may label his new album as merely a ‘rock record’, in actual fact, it’s far from the primitive image he sculpts. Since the rise of Fleet Foxes, this album may suffer from undue comparisons, as the vocal similarities are irrefutable, and the lingering songs often evoke a similar sensation. However, the record weaves between a series of genres from the gorgeous, lamenting, country-tinged ‘Sara’, to the tropical punkpop of ‘Burning Photographs’. It seems for Chad this record is him performing at his least experimental, odd and uncompromising, which paradoxically he finds more uncomfortable, artistically.“It sounds silly,” he says, “but to make a rock record is pretty abstract for me. I’ve never really been comfortable being a songwriter.” I sheepishly enquire, is this a record that he doesn’t particularly like? “Errrrm…” comes the elongated response. “I dunno, I mean, I like it – there is definitely a flow to it. But erm…yeah, there are parts that are a little ill conceived, but I’m probably the wrong person to ask anyway…I’m the worst judge of my own music. I definitely don’t want to get pigeonholed as a rock guitar player, though.”

It soon becomes apparent that music is perhaps not Chad’s primary focus and means of artistic expression.“I like working with sound,” he tells me,“but it’s definitely the most clumsy rendition of myself. I have been drawing my whole life and it’s still the thing I enjoy most about life. Like, I wasn’t really intending on ever playing anything live, it was just an art project…now I have to

play this for people! I tried a few things as a one-man band, as I didn’t want to put anyone through the pain of having to learn my songs. Then somewhere along the lines I got over myself and realised I was being pretty pretentious and found a good group of friends who are willing to do it, but it started off pretty painfully.”

So how does the idea of touring fit into it all?

“I’ve never really enjoyed touring that much. It whisks me away and now it takes me away from my family, which is even worse.You miss a lot, kids grow up quick and you don’t want to miss that.”

It sounds like the ideal scenario is one that keeps you working full time at home. “Yeah, exactly. That’s why I’ve been focusing on producing bands and in a perfect world I’d only like to tour maybe four weeks of the year.”

Chad even recorded every single aspect of his new record, no other person was involved at any point. “It was just me, and at the end of the day it’s a lot of work,” he says.“It sounds horrible, but I really enjoy it, although it is wearing a little bit thin. It would maybe be nice to have an engineer there, or at least someone to press record for me. But, then, I can’t imagine singing in front of somebody else in a studio – that just seems ridiculous to me.”

While Chad may struggle to come to terms with himself and his music both literally and existentially, the results are nevertheless a captivating insight into the workings of a frantic and restless artistic mind, furthermore one that operates on a multitude of artistic platforms and endeavours. Predicating what is next would be impossible, which is what makes Chad so exciting and endearing.

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BEEN A

AFTER FIVE YEARS OF THE QUIET LIFE W E F I N A L LY G E T TO I N T E R V I E W TO M V E K : A M A N W H O D E F I N E S T H E T E R M ‘ L E AV E T H E M W A N T I N G M O R E ’ PHOTOGRAPHER -

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GABRIEL GREEN

WRITER -

STUART STUBBS

WHILE

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ell, this is the thing…”Tom Vek inhales, and soon you’ll know why.

It’s been six years, one month and two days since he released debut album ‘We Have Sound’; half a decade since he ducked out of the limelight and became experimental pop music’s yeti – a near myth; a figment of our imaginations; a bespeckled cult figure who vanished from the grid completely. By rights – and all probability – we should all be thinking ‘Tom who?’. In his absence we’ve been given Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, Bandcamp and Soundcloud, all of which have duly plied us with tomorrow’s stars yesterday.

We’ve been fed Rhianna, Leona Lewis, Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons,The xx, Adele, Amy Winehouse. It goes on and on. But we’ve never forgotten about Tom Vek. We still listen to ‘We Have Sound’.

Last we saw him he didn’t look like a 1960s advertising executive, but, then, Mad Men is another phenomenon that’s come our way since Vek went rouge; the whole HBO Revolution is. It was a glossy US TV show that gave him his curtain call though – he performed – rather ironically – ‘I Ain’ t Saying My Goodbyes’ on the original indie-astute teen soap The OC, in front of impossibly good looking people like Mischa Barton and Adam Brody.

Today he arrives like Jon Hamm on dress-downFriday – Brylcreem’d and clean-shaven, in brown brogue boots, turned up semi-jeans and a plain white T-shirt.

Fittingly, it is the final day of the working week, and the high apartment where we meet happens to also peer into London’s executive core:The City.

Tom is alone, although that’s not something that we should be too surprised about. He is, after all, a solo artist, and one that relishes being just that, performing under his own name rather than a moniker that sounds decidedly like a collective, like, say,The Streets or tUnEyArDs or Blank Dogs. The buck stops with him, and that’s just how he likes it. It’s why he continues to be involved in every single aspect of his career, designing his record sleeves and website himself (he’s a graduate of the prestigious Saint Martins College of Art and Design), and even sourcing exact T-shirts for his next batch of merchandise – “I’ve been trying to get in touch with Uniqlo,” he tells us as he poses in front of a cardboard terrier, “because they’ re the shirts I want. I wear them myself and they’ re pretty good quality. American Apparel’s are too tight on your tits.” (Other stories of Vek’s precise manner include him insisting that ‘We Have Sound’’s CD stickers go on cellophane rather than the casing, and that the plastic moulded bumps on the inside of the lid be a certain shape to keep creasing to a minimum when fans slide out the sleeve notes). Such attention to detail largely explains his absence, and why he carefully considers every position our photographer puts him in. It’ s the “design Nazi” in him.

“Well, this is the thing,” he says.“I’ve been on a break from being a public, entertaining persona, but I haven’t been on a break. I have just been completely immersed in this idea of what I wanted it to be – the whole point of becoming a recording artist and getting a record deal, and trying to work out how I can get into a position where I feel like I’ve achieved something from it. It was initially exciting with the first album, but after that you don’t want to feel like you’ve gone back to where you were before…” Tom pauses for a second. “Well, it’ s not even that, actually. You get in a different place. The

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goalposts change and so does the way you treat your work, and I wanted to have something to show for it, so I put a lot of emphasis on my creative space. I would probably contextualise it in a highbrow way by saying it’s like the Warhol Factory scenario. Y’know, I’m a big fan of building something that might work for itself…

“Sorry,” he says, “this is a really convoluted answer to your question, but I was just wrapped up in all of that really, and not being able to let it go. I mean, ultimately, until it became possible to not think about it, I was just trying to feel right about that, and having a few creative spaces that didn’t work out, that took time.”

Put plainly, since ‘We Have Sound’ wrapped at the end of 2005, Tom Vek has been building a suitable workspace and recording studio, it just so happens that he’s had to do it several times over. And new album ‘Leisure Seizure’ [out June 6th] has also been tirelessly made and remade over the course of five years.

“In terms of the artistic principle of it, without sounding too pretentious, I think it’s actually older than that,” says Tom. And presumably there’s been a fair amount of tracks written and discarded in that time?

“Yeah yeah yeah.They’re on hard drives and things.”

And how many albums worth do you think there is?

“Well, this is the thing,” he says again. “It’s all about the standard. Like, what is good enough. In terms of recorded audio, there’s a chronic amount. But it’s a weird thing because it became to be a trait of mine that the production is so involved in the writing that it’s not like there’s loads of completely finished songs – they’re just ideas that don’t get elaborated on. But there was also this frame of mind where I was at this point quite quickly where there was an album worth of ideas there, but I didn’t feel happy in my environment. You need to be confident. It needs to be a complete package. I was a bratty art school kid on that first record, and that worked, and like any unsigned band it was like, ‘we’ re brilliant, this is excellent’, to an extent, and success effects people differently – for some people it inflates their ego enormously, for me I felt so humbled by it that it made me very, very anxious and I took it very seriously.”

Tom maintains that, against all odds, his record label (not some frail indie but the major-owned Island) never pressured him to deliver his second album. Perhaps Amy Winehouse’s surreal and manic rise and fall acted as a distraction – while Wino had label heads looking one way in shock and awe, Vek was left to his own devises, quietly filling up hard drives with half ideas in an untold number of creative spaces.

He says that, especially as ‘We Have Sound’ started to twitch ears across the Atlantic, “‘momentum’ was the word that kept coming up.” But when his US label asked

him to tour the States once he’d made it as far as the set of The OC he simply said no. He’d set up the first of his studios by then, had quit his job and “had enough money to eat for a couple of years.”

“I was like, ‘let’ s go for it!’,” he remembers. “‘I want to do some more music now. I’m ready!’ So my manager and I sat down and we made this ridiculous plan that even had on it when we’d need the first video made by.

It’d be hilarious to read it back now, but it was also me thinking it’d be good if I worked to a deadline. We handed that in and… it didn’t really work,” he laughs.

Tom was adamant that he wasn’t going to play anyone anything until he was completely happy with it, though.

“And that just lasted up to about two months ago.”

“It’ s a weird old thing,” he ponders, “but there’s no point in… particularly in music… Like, I’m a trained designer, and you work with a client and say,‘do you like this? I can do this or this or whatever’, but music, for me, it had always been my own thing that I am the artist, and the artist doesn’t need to ask other people what they think. And I’ve been thinking about that a lot recently, and that you don’t get that a lot. I mean, a lot of people I admire are very open and like bouncing their ideas off of people, and it’s a lot more pleasant to work in an environment where you get that feedback, but particularly for the first few years I was like, ‘I shouldn’t have to ask anybody what they think,’ and I knew that ultimately I will find it more rewarding if I get there in the end on my own.”

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pril 11 2011: Tom Vek’s eventual return is announced out of the blue on Zane Lowe’s BBC Radio 1 show. It comes seven days earlier than planned, although you can’t blame Lowe for letting his excitement get the better of him. Between some new nonsense and a reminder of ‘Nothing But Green Lights’ he plays forty seconds of new album track ‘We Do Nothing’ and lets us know that Vek’s first single in almost 6 years, ‘A Chore’, will be premiered on his show the following Monday.Twitter especially goes nuts, and over the course of the next seven days the fact that Tom Vek is alive and has a new record to release becomes smart indie’s lead story.At 7:30pm, on April 18, it feels like the only people that have gone out are those who still have portable radios.

“I’m glad that we’re where we are now,” says Tom, three weeks later, “because between the period of delivering the album to the label, them accepting it and us having a marketing meeting discussing when we were

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going to announce it and now, it was the most stressful time of my life, because we needed to make sure that it was kept under the radar, because we wanted to have this big announcement. And to be honest, that first announcement was not meant to happen at all. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to have so much support from Zane, and I wouldn’t change anything now, but I was driving my manager mad saying that we should just announce it out of the blue, and he was like, ‘but I don’t know if anyone is going to care’. And I was like, ‘well, neither do I’, but I thought it was worth a try. If it’s going to work it’ll be really cool, and if it doesn’t work it wouldn’t have fucking worked anyway. I’d been building up to this big reveal, where you open the curtains and there’s either no one there or there is.”

While ‘A Chore’ was being premiered on primetime national radio, Vek launched his new website and uploaded the track’s video – an ode to 1960s pop television, in which he, the host, introduces the single with a knowing grin. “Hi, this is Tom Vek’s Island,” he winks down the lens without actually winking. “Desert Island Discs after five long years.” Live dates were announced and the track was instantly made available to buy on iTunes, all before Zane Lowe started speaking again. Even with the grand surprise blown a week previously it was a masterfully savvy unveiling; exactly what we’ d hoped for from a conspirator like Vek. Tom says he’s always been aware of the dangers of hype, so what better way to quash expectation than by delivering a long-awaited comeback single unannounced? “It won’ t be for everyone,” he tells me, “and that’ s fine, but there can’t be hype around what something will sound like if everyone can hear it.”

It partly explains why he chose mainstream radio to do the job, rather than the less archaic – and far more hip

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– medium of blogs and Tweets. Radio shouts where the Internet still whispers. More important, though, is that TomVek has never been a punk. He’s incapable of artistic compromise, but he freely admits that he’s always wanted his music to be hi-fi and for his appeal to be broad. “I don’t really come from that world of lo-fi or being from the streets,” he says, even if his studio is these days shared with producer Rory Brattwell – punk producer to every British DIY band you care to mention.“I always wanted to be part of the establishment, which is why I was so profoundly excited when a label like Island got involved.”

Other things that have excited Tom over the years include that OC performance (“Getting the call to do that was amazing and kinda crazy”), ‘We Have Sound’ selling tens of thousands of copies (“You can’t even imagine that amount of people!”) and... barcodes. “It represents so much and how official it all is, having a barcode on your record,” he nods.“That’s what I held so much in my mind when I was younger – I was obsessed with the whole nature of everything that surrounded being a signed artist, and what even got me interested in design was album covers and all the facets of it, like the logos and where the barcode is and the small print and who the band have thanked. People say they’ve had these wonderful experiences with vinyl but the CD was that for me.”

P

allet Studio is a small, detached building just off Kingsland Road in Dalston, east London. A lot of the time it’s occupied by new guitar bands recording their

first demos and early releases: bands like Male Bonding, Fair Ohs, Not Cool and a load of others that we like and have featured before now. It’s also Tom Vek’s creative lab, and quite possibly a ton of bricks that have saved his recording career, and even his sanity. “I found it in early 2009 and I was really like, ‘right, if the album doesn’t come from here, it’s not coming at all,’” he remembers, adding: “I’d put so much pressure on the space, or not being happy here, or blah blah, so when I found that space I knew there wasn’t any more excuses, so there was a skewed optimism there.”

A decidedly post-dubstep track called ‘Close Mic’ed’ (“kind of the record’s curveball,” says Tom, before informing me that that sound is called ‘night bus’ now) soon provedVek right as it became the first song to make the ‘Leisure Seizure’ cut. It was followed shortly by ‘A Chore’, or its chopped, ’90s piano riff at least,“because I knew if I could listen to that looping for four minutes it must be a song,” he reasons. And with those two tracks, Tom Vek’s illusive second album snowballed to completion. The thing is, it’s not out until June 6th, which leaves plenty of time for hype to do its danger thing.

What people will no doubt say is that ‘Leisure Seizure’ is astounding, and precisely because it’s neither a grand, panicked departure from Vek’s cut’n’paste dance loops of ‘We Have Sound’ nor a twelve-song rehash of ‘I Ain’t Saying My Goodbyes’. And it’s true. Think of how lazy new Strokes albums seem – like they’ve been written in a week regardless of how long the band has been gone; ‘Leisure Seizure’ is basically the opposite of that. Five years is excessive by any nutcase standard, but if Tom Vek hasn’t been solidly working on these songs for half a decade, he should probably be burned as a witch, because each one hums of perfectionism.

‘Close Mic’ed’ acts like a neo-soul, James Blake intervention, while ‘Seizemic’ is a far woozier breather, of which Tom says: “I can’t describe what that song is at all. I just know that it feels chronically right.” Then there’s a whole bunch of more upbeat tracks like the opening ‘Hold Your Hand’ and ‘A Chore’ that a) remind us how skilledVek is as a drummer who loves syncopated beats, and b) pick up where ‘C-C (You Set The Fire In Me)’ left off. “ That and ‘The Lower The Sun’ were the more unique moments on that first record,” says Tom, “they’re what’s been elaborated on. I feel like that was my duty.” ‘Aroused’ is almost tropical (in the way that Yeasayer’s ‘Odd Blood’ could be) and it’s definitely Tom’s most pop-sensical song yet; ‘World of Doubt’ is reminiscent of semi-spoken Beck; ‘Someone Loves You’ begins with Rhianna bass. ‘We Do Nothing’, with its creaky ice-cream truck sample and carefree swing, is either the record’s best track or is only beaten by ‘On A Plate’ – a murky piece of slow motion dubstep that’s about writer’s block, and is the song that Tom says has the most literal lyrics.

Of his other words, he says “the more I write lyrics the worst they get”, which may or may not be true. If it is, a lot of those found on ‘Leisure Seizure’ read like a train of thought. Their constant is, after all, that they are playfully clever, if not always profound (see the “A P O L O G Why?” chorus of ‘A.P.O.L.O.G.Y.’, and the song’s opening line of, “It’s only fair to say that it wasn’t fair, what you said to me”). Many seem to be self-referencing also, occasionally talking of the wilderness years, like on ‘We Do Nothing’, where Vek cries “You’ll have to listen now/This is all that I can do”, as if he’s spent his recent past trying his hand at alternative careers, only to discover that music really is for him. Interpretation has always been a big part of Tom’s songs though; his insistant use of

“I” and “you”, over “he” and “she”, has long muddied just how much of what he sings is directly linked to his personal life.

Musically, Tom talks about how he remains most influenced by “chopped up bass and alternative music from the ’90s”, and how even though some industry insiders have thanked him for not coming back with a dubstep record he has been influenced by the underground genre that’s now not so underground. A friend took him to London dubstep club night FWD (“an insane evening”), which ultimately spawned the drum beat of ‘A Chore’ – “a dubstep drumbeat played on a drum kit.”

Tom could talk about sound for hours, and in the three that I spend with him he’s stumped for something to say just once. It’s when I ask him how he feels ‘Leisure Seizure’ differs from his previous work.

“I kinda feel like… hmmmm… Yeah it’s a tricky one actually,” he says.“I’m going to seize up on that because…

Well, it’s less guitar based, which I think is quite exciting, because I’m not a very good guitarist anyway – like, back to basics; me and a guitar, that would never work – I mean, all of the tracks have to start with an interesting noise, which you can’t categorise, hopefully.”

Easier to get his head around is how he now feels about ‘We Have Sound’ – the album that set the standard he’s spent so long trying to match.

“I’m enormously proud of it,” he says without thought. “Y’know, the thing with that record is, I was really quite impressed with myself when that was finished, which I know is an arrogant thing to say, but I mean the opposite to that, in that I was like,‘wow that’s a lot better than I thought it would be.’ And I’m enormously proud,

in a mischievous way, that a major label released an album that sounded like that – I think that’s brilliant – and I love the artwork. And it did set the standard – and I mean personal standard – for the next stuff. I made no compromise on that record at all, to the extent where you have to think if maybe a minor bit of compromise might have made it a bit more accessible.”

Earlier on, as we sat down for this interview with one eye on the clock, because dress-down-Friday is still a Friday nonetheless, and Tom is finishing his week with a business meeting later that no other musician would bother attending, he told me that, “all of my favourite albums are second albums.” And now, finally, Tom Vek has a second album of his own. And while the wait has been excruciatingly long, it really has been worth it.

‘Leisure Seizure’ is an outstanding record.

“I’ve been feeling like [I need to complete this record] from the first day I started working, quite honestly,” says Tom, “because I wanted to have it out there. And I’m not going to say that this is different to how anybody feels who creates stuff, but you do sit there and think, if my standard was lower I could just get this stuff out there, even though I’m not happy with it. But you don’t even want to think that. I cast away that thought, of course I do. But then you’re thinking, what am I looking out for here? What am I meant to be reacting to? Because there’s an element of music where it’s like, ‘this is going to give me a cool life’, or, ‘this would be fun to play live’, and I disallowed myself a few of those things. It was as if it had to be some kind of challenge and endurance. I think this is something that I only have to go through once. I’m pleased that I’ve come to terms with myself as someone with previous work and future work, and everything is set up now.

There’s going to be more music soon, I hope.”

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S A R A B E T H T U C E K HER SECOND ALBUM OF POIGNANT FOLK SONGS, IT TURNS OUT, IS CALLED ‘GET WELL SOON’ FOR MORE REASONS THAN WE FIRST THOUGHT PHOTOGRAPHER -

Twenty-one years ago, Sarabeth Tucek stopped talking to her father. She was 17. She’d had enough of him being aloof and vague, and this was her way of calling his bluff.

“I tried to have a connection with him, but it always felt like he was a distant relative,” she explains. “And every time I tried, it left me feeling terrible. So one day I just thought, okay that’s it, I’m not going to see him anymore.” And with that, she cut him off. “But really,” she confesses, “I was testing him: I wanted to see if he would miss me if I went quiet. The problem was that while I was testing him, he died.”

She wasn’t invited to his funeral. Mr Tucek’s new wife – her parents separated when she was two – excluded her from everything. From Sarabeth’s point of view, he “just kinda died,” she reports, still sounding slightly confused about the specifics, as if describing an old family pet. Her father was cremated privately, and no one was told where his ashes were scattered. There was no finality. Afterwards, Tucek’s step-mum sent her a bin bag containing her father’s old shoes, a broken digital watch and an empty cologne bottle, and that was that.

“She was pretty sick,”Tucek concludes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the whole episode stuck with her. “At 17 I couldn’t deal with it – I didn’t have the psychological resources,” she admits. “I felt derailed, I had enormous guilt because I hadn’t spoken to him, and my mum wasn’t any help because she couldn’t bear to see me so upset. It needled away at me for twenty years until finally a friend said that I needed to do something about it – every drunken conversation kept on going back to the death of my father – so I wrote a song called ‘The Doctor’ and realised that this was something I wanted to do.”

That “something” became ‘Get Well Soon’, Tucek’s second album and an attempt, twenty-one years on, to resolve her feelings about her estranged, deceased father.

A light-hearted knock around it ain’t, but as an exercise in deeply cathartic songwriting, it’s a winner. “As I arranged and rearranged those songs, I was actually rearranging my feelings bit by bit and finding their place inside of me, like tidying up the mess in a room,” she explains, talking like the psychiatrist’s daughter that she is. Uncomfortably candid at times, delicately beautiful at others, Tucek says her album is “about my father, about how he made me feel, and about the things he did that made me react around other people,” but in reality it’s not as painfully self-aware or indulgent as that description might suggest. Yes, it’s an undeniably solemn affair – a

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SUZIE BLAKE

WRITER -

SAM WALTON

small-hours classic rather than summer barbecue music – but as with other great monothematic albums (Nick Cave & the Bad Seed’s ‘Boatman’s Call’ and Nick Drake’s ‘Pink Moon’ both feel like distant cousins) there’s a tenderness and contemplation that offsets the oppressive subject matter. Musically it’s in thrall to the grand guitars and simple melodies of Neil Young and Big Star, which leaves it more with a feeling of melancholia than dourness, and it’s sung with a beautifully ageing voice full of aural wrinkles. Although the whole record hints at a life lived with the occasional low point, it also carries a stoic optimism that prevents it becoming too overbearing.

While still a relative unknown, Tucek’s been on the fringes of various music scenes for ten years. Indeed, keen-eyed readers might recognise her.At the end of the legendary 2004 rockumentary Dig!, which chronicles the rollercoaster career of celebrated smack-addled troublemakers The Brian Jonestown Massacre (and the relatively tame corporate rise of their friends-turnedrivals the Dandy Warhols), she’s the girl with the guitar, softly singing around the swollen fists, broken amps and used needles. But far from being some angelic musician offering calm amid the storm,Tucek was just another of the Massacre’s fucked-up team of self-destructives, and only actually started playing guitar after she began hanging out with them.

As Dig! attests, it wasn’t a pretty time: “When I was about 30 I met Anton [Newcombe, lead singer, chief pugilist and head merrymaker with the BJM] and I immediately saw an opportunity to completely selfdestruct,” she explains, apologetically. Up until then, Tucek had been trying to make it as an actress, but not much was biting. “I’d been dancing around the idea of just giving up for a while, and then I went nuts – lots of drugs, lots of drinking. Lots of traffic accidents. I gave myself permission to just check out, and that house was the perfect place to do it.” There’s a pause as she retells the tale, not for any dramatic effect but simply because it seems that every one of Tucek’s memories is painful to her in some way.

“But that was also where I learned how to play music,” she says, as if remembering the point of the story, “and I couldn’t believe how much better it made me feel – how much better it made me feel to sit in a room and sing to myself.”

Tucek discovered quickly that playing music helped her “feel better” – a phrase she comes back to again and

again in our hour together – and eventually she left the carnage of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and returned to New York, partly a result of a driving ban – the public transport is better there than in LA – and partly because she felt like a fraud being a solo degenerate. “Ultimately, I wasn’t very good at being self-destructive,” she admits.

“I didn’t try drugs until I was 30, and I felt like a bit of an imposter when I did. But I think I needed to touch bottom just so I could bring myself back up again.”

Back in New York, the memory of her father was unavoidable – “It was no longer a problem of geography, but one of death,” she assesses, disconnected and eerily objective – and the thought processes behind the writing of ‘Get Well Soon’ began to germinate. “I was in my thirties and suddenly alone, with all sorts of feelings coming to me. It was that feeling of being alone that inspired me, and a compulsion to, well, feel better.”

There’s that phrase again, like a self-help mantra.

“I’m all about finding a way out,” she continues.

“The number-one reason why I write music is to make myself feel better. I can’t stand to feel uncomfortable.

I’m constantly trying to make myself feel better and mentally more stable.”

As the interview draws to a close, Tucek takes on a look of resignation.“I know I’ve sounded like a complete lunatic,” she says, smiling, or maybe wincing. She hasn’t, I reassure her, but she continues. “The problem is I feel nervous during interviews because suddenly I have no idea who I am. I feel like I can go in a million different directions, and I’ve got to choose one, and the one that I choose is the one other people are going to read, and then they’re going to see me as that forever, and I feel my blood pulse through me and I’m like ‘stop! I don’t know who I am!’”

For the record, and anti-interview diatribes notwithstanding, she doesn’t sound like a lunatic.

However, she does sound like someone whose selfconsciousness is sometimes paralysing, the kind of person who has to frequently tell themselves to relax, and then can’t. Listening to Tucek speak, it seems like it’s not much fun being her – but then again, who said musicians weren’t allowed to be tortured souls? “Most people make art because they’re trying to feel better, like they’re cutting something out of themselves to make their lives more pleasant,” she suggests.

Based on her life so far and the music she makes, one can only expect more therapeutic musical amputations to come.

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T I M B E R T I M B R E SOMETIMES SOMBRE MUSICIANS TURN OUT TO BE THE MOST CHATTY. ONLY SOMETIMES, THOUGH WRITER -

POLLY RAPPAPORT

Ever had that dream where you show up for school late, naked, and without your homework? And you realise that, on top of all that, everyone hates you. Everyone.

Feel queasy yet? Well, I’ve just been left alone in a room with three people, only one of whom I’ve been properly introduced to – Taylor Kirk, founding member, and now one third of,Timber Timbre.

There is a long, vaguely nauseous silence while I retrieve my Dictaphone.The band all look at me. I look at the plate of half-eaten fruit and pastries on their side of the room and briefly consider burying my face in it and crying as a sort of impromptu icebreaker. Instead I ask sheepishly to be re-introduced and am met with looks of bewildered semi-annoyance. Naked… no homework… yeah, there you go. It’s a queasiness bonanza in here.

The other two thirds of Timber Timbre are Mika Posen and SimonTrottier, both relatively recent additions to the lineup. “This is the first time we’ve ever done something together, as a group,” explains Kirk, referring to the new album,‘Creep On Creepin’ On’,“and it’s also the first time we’ve had resources behind the recording – time to use a proper studio. So, yeah, we got space to try things and to bring other people out and stuff.”

How many more people are we talking?

“Well, outside of the group – which was already new, the three of us as a collaboration – we brought two other people in, Mathieu Charbonneau, a pianist who Simon is working with on another project, and Colin Stetson, who’s playing saxophone.”

And how did this trio collaboration come about?

There’s a peculiar pause as Kirk looks at the other two, hoping they’ll contribute to the proceedings, although I gather that they don’t particularly feel like getting involved – it would seem that this is still ultimately Kirk’s project and these two are only slightly more comfortable with this conversation than I am. Perhaps we should all sit on spikes to make things a bit more relaxed. Eventually,

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Posen quietly answers, “I guess Taylor used to live in Toronto, I live in Toronto and it’s a small music scene so we just met, and he asked me to play on the last record.

We met Simon on the inter-city music scene, I guess he was living in Montréal, and we started playing as a live band and it kind of evolved from there.”

So is there a difference between what they do as a live band and what we hear on the record?

“The live performance is a lot different from the recording,” says Trottier. “We’re still trying to play the songs the way they are on the record, but live it’s more like we’re trying to make layers of sounds, like the way we’re doing it on the record but… differently.” He looks around.“Does that make sense?” About as much sense as I seem to be making.

I tell them the new record, while maintaining the Timber Timbre standard for bleakness, seems to be a bit more plugged-in – a bit ‘rockier’ – with a significant amount of bright, doo-wop-ish piano tinkling thrown in. Is this shift in direction, from total gloom to a sort of grim strain of glee, a side effect of the collaboration?

Kirk looks like I’m about to punch him.

“Like, it’s more upbeat?” he asks. I agree that’s a much better way of putting it. “Yeah, I guess…” he studies the floor for a moment,“A lot of the writing happened over the course of the last two years, which has been us touring, and a lot of exciting things have happened around the project and, yeah, it’s been fun. I’d just come out of a very hard personal time, and this was something more light, definitely there’s more exuberance and joy and humour in the music.”

I wouldn’t go that far, but at least I’m not crazy for finding a murky blues album strangely perky.

“Not a lot of people have mentioned that,” Kirk frowns. “Most people fail to notice that even the title itself is meant to be ironic; the music is dark, and we know that, but it’s not just dark.”

Well, the lyrics are certainly dark, the record is

basically a series of twisted ghost stories – not always literally, but each song is deeply haunted. I think about ‘Dark Water’ – a deranged grin of a song, woozily waxing lyrical about sunshine while recounting strange midnight rituals involving burials and ponds of dead fish, and ask Kirk about his eerie, surreal style of storytelling.

“It’s a broken, fragmented, non-linear style of storytelling,” he says, “but I think I’m getting better at that – better writing, better lyrics. Mostly I’m just writing about my life,” he murmurs, and I am reminded of the obvious pain and peculiarity of his fractured tales.

“And the way I try to disguise that is… stylistic.”

Here, there is a peculiar silence and it seems that’s as far as we’re going to go with that. Back to the exuberance: What were the exciting things Kirk eluded to earlier?

He looks to his bandmates again, they look back at him, askance. Clearly they weren’t as excited about whatever it was.They’ve been playing all over the place in a variety of venues, ranging from dives with football games being broadcast during their set, to large, impersonal spaces – they share a preference for the more intimate venues,

“The title ‘Creep On Creepin’ On’ is meant to be ironic; the music is dark, and we know that, but it’s not just dark.”

particularly ones without sports on telly.And what about recording; does Kirk not miss the simple tape recorder in a bedroom technique he used to profess such a penchant for? Trottier describes constantly tripping on cables and knocking mics over and not being able to find anything and the others agree that a nice, clean studio is the way forward. Kirk has an interesting take on it: “As much as I’d like to still make something that’s just for myself, which is how I’ve always approached writing and making recordings, it was impossible to do that this time around, having gone out into the world and having to live with the same eight songs for a year or two… It was impossible to make something that I didn’t know people were going to consume on some bigger level.”

What a distressing thought, no wonder this man views a bit of saxophone wonk as blindingly joyful. I suspect this is a deeply personal process for Kirk, who says he still does all of the writing by himself, Posen and Trottier’s contributions being the composition of a handful of haunting instrumentals that evolved out of the live sets. They were initially improvised pockets of

music between songs, to help hold the otherwise (according to Kirk) somewhat disparate collection of tracks together. I ask if they have any plans to collaborate on the writing as well in future. The reaction is not unlike asking a newlywed couple when they plan to start churning out offspring. It’s either a stupid question, a sore subject, or they’ve just never discussed it in the years they’ve been on the road together. Kirk quietly tells the carpet that he still prefers to write alone. Well this isn’t awkward… At least we’re all as weirded out as each other now. There’s a nice, long, squirm-worthy pause. Have they got many more journalists to talk to?

No, apparently I’m the last for the day.Well, that explains why they seem so shattered. Blank looks. Knackered – tired, yes? Nothing. I am fidgeting with my bag and dithering like an idiot, is someone coming to collect me or…? (I notice that the window is ajar and am briefly tempted.)

“Okay, I’ll let you go,” says Kirk, opening the door.

I’m a few blocks away before the queasiness subsides.

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Amelia Sparks is on death row. She might live to have her eyes stung by sunshine, have her lungs fill with city air and taste adventure once again. She might not. Her quest might end with her slumped in the executioner’s chair, twitching. We don’t know how this story finishes.

If it finishes. But we do know how it begins. It begins with a lonely woman feeling angry with life, lusting for some kind of purpose and quitting her job. She’s also hearing voices. Drinking with her woes in a bar, she instinctively follows a young couple out of the door and witnesses a murder in a car park. It’s the event that ignites her own bloodthirsty revenge mission, which parachutes her into a disturbing web of cryptic messages, savagery

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and revenge. It’s dark and gripping, dripping with violence and depravity. In our mind, if the story were on screen, it’d be somewhere between Leon and From Dusk Til Dawn illustrated by Allan Moore’s inner demon and directed by Christopher Nolan.

So, let us explain. The Bullitts are not a band. The journey of Amelia Sparks is the story they tell. They’re more than one artist but all conducted by one man: Londoner, Jeymes Samuel.There’s a lot to take in, and in his own words: “The Bullitts are a 5D movie.”

“Amelia Sparks is the story of a woman who felt like she was in chains and she wanted to be free of the constraints of your mundane, everyday adult experience,”

says Samuel.“The older we get, the more boring and less daring we get. Amelia Sparks was a person who was in search of adventure. She’s searching for something else.

She’s trying to find the reason for her existence. She falls deeper and deeper into this underworld of murder, terror and mayhem as she uncovers this conspiracy.”

You may only have been alerted to The Bullitts’ existence by the two officially released pieces of music so far, ‘Close Your Eyes’ (featuring Hollywood actress Lucy Liu and Jay-Z’s latest signing Jay Electronica) and ‘Landspeeder’. But that’s merely the tip of the pen.

Forget the music for a second.You can enter The Bullitts’ house through many different doors.There’s the day-to-

T H E B U L L I T T S OMAR TAANTI DELVES INTO THE MURDEROUS, CINEMATIC WORLD OF THE BULLITTS WITH PROJECT CREATOR JEYMES SAMUEL. PHOTOGRAPHER -

day storyboard diary of Amelia’s murderous investigation unravelling on Twitter (which includes Twitpics and film scenes made on an iPhone).There are ‘Flicks Tapes’ – scenes from classics like The Prisoner re-edited with a fresh soundtrack – on The Bullitts website featuring the likes of Wretch 32, Paloma Faith and Roisin Murphy.

There’s the live aspect due to hit the stage this summer – less of a gig, it’ll be more of a cinematic, theatrical death-obsessed musical with scenes from Amelia’s story acted out between tracks. Far from conventional, the whole picture around this project continues to emerge as you read this.

However, right at the nucleus of it all is the

GABRIEL GREEN

forthcoming debut album entitled ‘They Die By Dawn & Other Short Stories’ – a quite stunning piece of visionary hip-hop-wired pop.

Tonight,we are sat in the wood-panelled surroundings of a rented studio in Elephant and Castle. Around us, a late night picnic is scattered (grapes, humus, sandwiches, kettle chips) and drinks (ginger ale and cranberry juice – “the drink of champions”). Jeymes Samuels links his laptop to a pair of speakers taller than he is and plays us half of the album. In front of us the air ripples as tracks like ‘They Die By Dawn’, ‘Wait Until Tomorrow’, ‘Murder Death Kill’, ‘Strange Days’ and ‘Supercool’ snake from the sound-system. The music, in truth, is

astonishing. It’s a sound that melds the best of Outkast, TV On The Radio and Prince. Samuel and his manager air-play every instrument as we listen, from the Spanish spaghetti-western riffs to the punky stabs of Clash-esque guitars, to the warm soft brass and the meandering folk.

As the dust settles, we sit for a chat. “It’s the cloak under which I make music and explore every last corner of my imagination,” begins Samuel, attempting to explain The Bullitts on its base level.

As a child growing up on Harrow Road in north west London he got tagged with the nickname of ‘Bullitt’ or ‘The Bullitts’ because of his obsession with Steve McQueen’s 1968 film of the same name. Having

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et’s take Lucy first – since an email arrives in Jeymes’ inbox from the Hollywood actress as we speak.

Liu plays Amelia Sparks and narrates the story throughout the album. As on the introduction to first single ‘Close Your Eyes’ she breathlessly punctuates each moment in the tale with menacing detail. Investigate the Twitter diary and you’ll soon discover the character Liu plays isn’t some doe-eyed heroine by any means. After

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witnessing a killing, it doesn’t frighten her, but sets her off on her own killing spree. Her character is dark, disturbing and funny. Sample quote: “That was the first time I have genuinely laughed since my high school principal died.” See, twisted puppy.

“I can never explain how exciting it is to record a new song and play it to Lucy for the first time and watch her reaction,” smiles Samuel. “Lucy is just a really likeminded creative individual. I think she’s a genius. She’s an actress, painter, drawer, sculptor... she is an amazing individual and a joy to be around.”

Someone else Samuel has spent a lot of time around is Jay Electronica (he’s also producing the rapper’s forthcoming debut album ‘ActTwo: Patients Of Nobility’ due out on Jay-Z’s label later this year).

“Jay Electronica and The Bullitts is like Scorsese and De Niro,” he says snapping a carrot between his teeth.“I don’t know who is who – me and Jay always argue. I’d rather be De Niro than Scorsese. Scorsese has made some classics, but every one of his classics has DeNiro in.

Not everyone of De Niro’s have Scorsese.

“With me and Jay it’s the idea that every great person has a counterpart. To every Sapphire there’s a Steel; to every Starsky there’s a Hutch. Sherlock Holmes has Moriarty. Jay-Z... Nas... Biggie Smalls... Tupac. There’s always a counterpart. Our creative relationship was forged through The Bullitts.”

Hearing about Samuel’s multi-dimensional approach, Mos Def (“a genius”) and Idris Alba (“a behemoth of entertainment”) soon came on board too. Alba plays detective Saul Emmanuel (Jeymes plays his driver) who closely tracks the headstrong Amelia as she flirts with danger. The only artist not immediately spellbound by the producer’s charms was Tori Amos – one of Samuel’s all-time favourites – and a notoriously private,introverted character.

“Tori Amos was hard,” says Samuel, nodding slowly.

“At first she was like, ‘No, I’m not doing any collaborations.’” Instead of retreating defeated, he wrote her a letter. He told her about how, when he was a young boy running around with the other “runts” on his housing estate, he was the only one of his friends into her music.“They’d look at me as a weirdo for being into Tori Amos,” he says, shrugging. “I explained that to Tori and asked her to let me be that bridge between her world and the Harrow Road. She totally understood it.

Obviously it was music contingent as well but she understood where I was coming from.”

A

fter all we’ve heard it’s no wonder then that Samuel refers to the project he’s given birth to as “action/adventure”. It would be remiss to see it as just another collaborative pop album. “There are six and a half billion people on the planet and there are six different types of music,” he froths. “If you average that it’s like one genre per billion. When I go into a studio and make music I hear something more than just the genres that are given to me. I hear action/adventure. So now we have seven.”

This summer Samuel will get this ‘action/adventure’ on stage for the first time. An appearance at The Big Chill festival is confirmed, with others set to confirm soon.

“For the live aspect I’m bringing out every gun in the arsenal,” he says, “even if I have to handcuff them myself. Tori Amos, Mos Def, Jay Electronica, Lucy Liu, Idris Alba – I’m bringing out everyone, but I’m going to take it further. I’m also bringing scenes to the streets.

There will be little codes where I’ll say,‘Amelia Sparks is going to be meeting Mos Def at this particular place’.

I’m going to bring that live aspect to life so that people experience The Bullitts.”

That means the final scenes of the story – timed to coincide with the release of the album – may take place on the streets of London and New York (where it’s set).

The only hint into the future of all this is that we know by the time ‘They Die By Dawn & Other Short Stories’ arrives this autumn (its release is pencilled for October), Amelia Sparks will be on death row. So, does The Bullitts project end with her meeting her own gruesome destiny?

“Lucy and I are in debate at the moment as to whether Amelia Sparks lives,” says Samuel. “Lucy votes kill her. I vote keep her alive.”

We leave him with a look as if to say, ‘don’t leave us with a cliff hanger...’

“I have a trilogy to make,” he says, losing a battle to fight off a broad smile. “I see a trilogy so I don’t know how it ends. It’s whoever wins that debate.”

With special thanks to Cosmo at De Rien

found his way into music (he’s also related to soul singer Seal) and balanced his intense passion for film and sound, he’s since then worked with Gorillaz and produced albums for the likes of KT Tunstall and Emilíana Torrini.

Much more than a sonic sniffer dog for other artists, though, he’s a multi-skilled musician, filmmaker, screenwriter, author and, most importantly, a total dreamer. Eventually his rich imagination demanded that he now goes it alone and stands centre-stage.

“There are too many song subject matters and presentational ideas to give to someone else,” he booms, “that I can’t align with another artist. In my head music and film are exactly the same. I just geek-out on both of them.”

Indeed, once he had the ‘idea’ of The Bullitts – Amelia’s story and his plan of communicating it through all the different mediums – he wanted to assemble a cast around him to fulfil his panoramic ambition. Enter Lucy Lui (yes, the machete-wielding femme fatale who starred in Kill Bill and Charlie’s Angels), Jay Electronica (heralded by many as the most exciting new talent in hip-hop), Idris Alba (the brooding English actor-turnedmegastar thanks to The Wire and American Gangster),Tori Amos (the 90s warped-pop banshee who does not do collaborations), Roisin Murphy (from post Brit Pop nu disco types Moloko) and Mos Def (we all know Mos Def).There’s even speculative murmurs of Jay-Z singing, yes singing(!), on the album.

Something different is happening here, though.These artists are not ringers in the same way a Mark Ronson or Dangermouse might round up an album of cold-call collaborations. These are fully paid-up, active members of The Bullitts ‘concept’. Jeymes Samuels’ Fantastic Seven.

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Antietam Arctic Monkeys Art Brut Battles Boris CocknBullKid Cults Danananakroyd Fair Ohs Herman Dune Is Tropical Juffage My Morning Jacket Patrick Wolf SebastiAn She’s Hit Sons and Daughters The Antlers The Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club Three Trapped Tigers Thurston Moore Underground Railroad White Denim Woods Wu Lyf

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Deerhoof Death From Above 1979 EMA Idiot Glee Katy B Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds Mazes Perfume Genius Quadron Rolo Tomassi Vessels Wild Beasts Young Legionnaire

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Fair Ohs Everything Is Dancing (Honey High)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores June 1

09/10

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Once upon a time, London trio Fair Ohs were called Big Fucking Deal.They were playing hardcore thrash like the three members had done in numerous other bands before.They carried on mimicking Black Flag when they were called Thee Fair Ohs too, only to one day realise how bored they were and that they all secretly liked Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ as much as ‘Damaged’, so they started making the kind of island melodies and tropical afro-punk that makes up this, their debut album.

It makes for a deadly cocktail of criticism, turning your back on the hardcore punk scene and doing so for a cluster of genres that are supposed victims of cruel Westernisation. But while “white appropriation of African music” is an easy (and semi-justified) sneer – that’s been levelled at everyone from Vampire Weekend to The Very Best and Simon himself – it’d be

foolish to let it stand in the way of enjoying a record as knowingly influenced and celebratory as ‘Everything Is Dancing’.

Key to the album’s success is that the band haven’t shed their DIY punk skin altogether.

They’re not barking anymore (singer Eddy delivers an almost nasal-like tone these days), nor are they playing at a hundred miles per hour, but the reverberating arpeggios, the rumbling drums, the major-key bass hooks, they’re all played loosely and with a feeling of bubbly, slapdash rhythm rather than Brit School musicianship – not unlike pre-electronic Abe Vigoda. It’s prevalent from the opening ‘Baldessari’ that slips and slides between childlike verses that are nothing if not naively very, very happy.

It’s summer music, ultimately, which, again, is more easily dismissed than something that gets you through an endless winter of heartbreaks.

But anyone with a working ear will tell you that it’s far harder to pull off joyous without it leaving behind vomit stains, and on ‘Colours’, particularly, Fair Ohs muster bittersweet

euphoria like few others. It’s a track that sees them leave behind the over-excited pace they often share with friends Male Bonding (which they pursue to perfectly dappy effect on ‘Eden Rock’ and the more-punk-less-tropical ‘Katasraj’), dipping into African psych and a groove where the band usually bounce.The chorus itself is full of doubt and despair, but you won’t notice that. ‘Everything Is Dancing’ then flourishes with Indian string work; ‘Helio’ could be Arabic in its main riff, and is most probably influenced by Syrian superstar Omar Souleyman. Previous singles ‘Almost Island’ and ‘Summer Lake’ are both here too, the latter closing the record and the former now with an ambient wash of noise in tow by means of a two-minute outro, which would be completely pointless if it didn’t act as a trippy interlude between all of the dizzy sway. And most impressive of all: for a beach album, ‘Everything Is Dancing’ manages to sound nothing like any of those bands imploring us to go surf. It’s an exotically playful, rather innovative, completely addictive punk record.

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White Denim

My Morning Jacket

Battles

Cults

WU LYF

D

Circuital

Gloss Drop

Cults

(Downtown)

By Nathan Westley. In stores June 6

(V2)

By Luke Winkie. In stores June 6

(Warp)

By Sam Walton. In stores June 6

(Columbia/In The Name Of)

By Tom Goodwyn. In stores May 30

Go Tell Fire To The Mountain (LYF Recordings)

White Denim’s rip-roaring debut album, ‘Work Out Holiday’, may have propelled them out of the American wilderness in 2008, but it also saw them firmly set out their stall as being avant-gardeembracing rockers unafraid to break away from using tired templates.Three years down the line and now restfully adjusted to striding through life as a quartet, they have seen no real reasons to make dramatic changes to their highly praised oeuvre, and so ‘D’ stands as little more than another comfortable step along a now familiar path – one where psychedelically coloured, countrytinged, schizophrenically jammedout rock progressively passes, whilst remaining open to throwing in the occasional odd tailed curveball, such as the flirtation with Afro-Cuban rhythms and flute solo on ‘River To Consider’.

Steady and reliable enough.

If My Morning Jacket were out to shock you, it probably would’ve come about five years ago – album number six, ‘Circuital’, is coalesced into a firm groove. Burgundy southland Goth opens ‘Victory Dance’, which dissolves into the feathered, seven-minute psych folk jam of the title track. A few warm, light-beam acoustic ballads and window-smashed sing-a-longs later you’ve got yourself a record that sounds a lot like My Morning Jacket are supposed to. Maybe a little bit further down the acidwarbled rabbit hole than usual, but still intrinsically twanged – Jim James would owe Robin Pecknold back-payment if he weren’t already a veteran. As usual they could use a few more great songs and it’s impossible to shake the feeling that a pretty-okay release every three years has eroded any hopes of repeated greatness. Still, it’s one way to make a career last.

When Bill Berry left REM in 1997, Michael Stipe insisted that, “a three-legged dog is still a dog – it just has to learn to walk differently.”The Stipean epigram could just as easily apply to Battles – one man down after Tyondai Braxton’s departure last year (now concentrating on his solo, classical scores), ‘Gloss Drop’ is undeniably a Battles record, but with an altered stride. And if the remaining three feared Braxton’s absence, they’ve made a feature out of a potential bug – the hole he left behind is not papered over but embraced, an effect that offers a deeper, more undulating record than ‘Mirrored’, with more air and intrigue.While there’s no ‘Atlas’ here to hum in the shower, this remains the sound of three brains pulsating in absolute union; a master class in rhythm and texture. ‘Gloss Drop’ is not only a triumph over adversity but also one in its own right.

You’d expect the first signing to Lily Allen’s newly founded record imprint In The Name Of to be someone suitably gobby and selfconfident, but with New York boyfriend/girlfriend duo Cults you’d be very wrong indeed.The band’s self-titled debut album is a shy, retiring type that sounds like a slimmed down and fuzzed up descendent of Motown, full of rhythms and melodies that hark back to Martha Reeves and Dusty Springfield. ‘You Know What I Mean’ sounds a lot like The Supremes’ ‘Where Did Our Love Go’ being covered by The White Stripes, for example, while ‘Oh My God’ is like The Ronettes after some Portishead meddling. On the first few spins, it appear to lack the true heart of such girl group greats though, like all the heart and warmth has been ripped out, but it’s got staying power and a lot more depth than you’ll first think.

By Sam Walton. In stores June 13 How exciting, in an age of internet ubiquity in which no conversation ends with “I don’t know”, to find a band that’s genuinely mysterious; a band whose two official photographs depict different numbers of people emerging from clouds of tear gas, and whose website buzzes with apocalyptic portents, misspelt manifesto sloganeering and nothing about themselves that isn’t contradicted elsewhere. How disappointing, then, to finally hear them play.

While WU LYF’s PR skills may be refreshingly belligerent, their music is ploddingly familiar – the sound of four Mancunian teenagers with youthful earnestness playing quasispiritual chiming guitars behind a singer from a Kings of Leon tribute act. Even the most fervent of cult followings need something of substance at its centre, but ‘Go Tell Fire’ is lightweight, unremarkable nonsense.

Woods Sun & Shade (Woodsists)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores June 13

08/10

Woods last two albums (2009’s ‘Songs of Shame’ and last year’s ‘At Echo Lake’) weren’t so much worlds as drugs apart – the former full of sprawling psychedelic hallucinations and far out jams that sometimes failed to get going, the latter a perfect collection of campfire whimsy, Neil Young vocals and classic Americana melodies. ‘Sun & Shade’ goes some way to bridge the gap between acid and pot, and does so with more of a definite nod to the 1970s than before. ‘Any Other Day’ proves the point best – a gently stoned stadium folk song full of optimism and ripe for the Almost Famous 2 soundtrack. The opening ‘Pushing Onlys’ preys on those coming-of-age too, although so nostalgic is it in its sombre back-porch prophesies, it’ll also have the oldies doing the Wonder Years bit. ‘Out of The Eye’ is where the Brooklyn band then venture off piste, for a seven-minute homage to Neu! that sounds exactly like the Krautrock duo, which, along with Woods’ rustic ways, makes this their best album yet.

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Three Trapped Tigers

SebastiAn

Antietam

Total

Strange Moosic

Tenth Life

(Blood & Biscuits)

Bag of Meat (This is Fake DIY)

By Tom Goodwyn. In stores June 13

(Fortuna Pop)

By Matthias Scherer. In stores May 30

(Ed Banger/Because)

By Reef Younis. In stores June 6

The Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club

Herman Dune

Route One or Die

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Apr 6

(Carrot Top)

By Tom Pinnock. In stores now

It would be interesting to know whether Three Trapped Tigers are fans of Sam Allardyce’s work.Their album title certainly comes close to describing Big Sam’s football philosophy, but the music is of an intricacy and imagination unlikely to be matched on a training ground run by the famously thinskinned West Midlands man.

‘Route One or Die’ contains eight pieces of music that are melodic and thunderously fun. It’s the latter quality that is often hard to pull off in instrumental music, but Three Trapped Tigers combine electronic influences (the almost dubstep-like drum pattern at the beginning of ‘Magne’, or the spacious new wave synths in ‘Noise Trade’) with riffs Mastodon could do worse than rip off (‘Creepies’) and prog pomp and song structures to such exciting effect that only the most miserable of indie kids will fail to indulge in a bit of air drumming.

If you’ve frequented any halfdecent electro night over the last few years, odds are SebastiAn would have been played out to an already rabid, day-glowing dancefloor with the sole intent of catapulting it into a heaving, mangled mass. One part of the Ed Banger wrecking ball, his trademark gear-grinding, abrasive metal-on-metal sound tows the line between an industrial cut and thrust, and abstract flashes of classic French electro. Alongside his Gallic contemporaries, he’s been a staple of the electro resurgence and ‘Total’, as a debut album, serves as both a reflection and progression of his work to date. Cherry picking tracks from a raft of his earlier EPs, the mad science of ‘Ross Ross Ross’ is nervous and volcanic, ‘Embody’ is a guilty, unashamedly funky pleasure and the chainsaw aggression of ‘Motor’ is the touchpaper for any set.

Three albums into their career, Cardiff ’s The Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club show no signs of embracing song writing that’s the least bit lucid or uplifting. ‘Bag Of Meat’ is wall to wall vaudeville indie horror – demented guitars wail away and drums crash an almighty din, amid which vocalist Adam Taylor bellows wholeheartedly, creating the kind of soundtrack you’d imagine David Lynch would commission if he were asked to direct Cirque Du Soleil. ‘Lost My Face In A Fast Car Race’ sounds like an unhinged version of The Horrors, while ‘Richer Than My Tribe’ is like The Cramps at their most psychedelic.

“I live in a different world to you,” Taylor hollers on ‘My Imagination Can’t Save Me Now’, and he’s probably right. It’s not a world you’d like to inhabit, but dipping into it is one hell of an experience that’s worth trying.

There’s a slick yet rootsy groove to Herman Dune’s tenth album that seeps through it from the start, like tuning into a classic American FM station in the seventies, even though it’s 2011 and the band are French. However, instead of being awash with sickly nostalgia and derivativeness, it instead exudes a warm, breezy charm, the likeability of which is inescapable.There is a plaintive sense of straightforwardness here – the songs are primitive compositions, often nothing more than acoustic guitar and drums – but it doesn’t feel lacking or vacant, simply unadorned and inviting.

And there’s a country twang that rings loud through its core of, giving it a further sense of ease and honesty.There’s nothing ‘strange’ about this moosic at all, but while often restrained, Herman Dune have created a record that is sincere in its affability, and rewarding in its endeavours.

Despite performing together for over 25 years and regularly collaborating with Yo La Tengo and Eleventh Dream Day, majestic guitar-slashing, feedback-grooving, New York three-piece Antietam still haven’t had an album released over here in the UK.Taking the blueprint straight from Neil Young and The Velvet Underground’s fuzzed-up guitar wranglings, singer and lead guitarist Tara Key, bassist Tim Harris and drummer Josh Madell have constructed a sonic world submerged in classic US cool, but free from the vagaries of today. ‘Tenth Life’, the band’s eighth album, follows their sprawling three-LP ‘Opus Mixtum’ collection with a much more manageable ten tracks of spiralling drums, gut-punching bass, hiccupping Patti Smith-esque vocals and ragged flickers of distorted guitar. It’s not just wine that gets better with age, you know.

The Antlers Burst Apart (Transgressive)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores June 13

07/10

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To little fanfare, Brooklyn trio The Antlers released one of the best records of 2009, in their third album ‘Hospice’. Great as that record was, it’s reassuring to know that new LP ‘Burst Apart’ isn’t more of the same.

Like The National,The Antlers are an intelligent, emotionally driven indie band, who impress more and more with each album. Stylistically, this is a more varied effort than their last – from ‘I Don’t Want Love’, which is like Jeff Buckley for a new millennium (frontman Peter Silberman’s falsetto feels like a tidal wave restrained, floodgates only just held shut), to the taut, highly strung feel and brittle beats of ‘Parenthesis’.

Some albums ooze class, and this is one of them.While far from a neon-bright collection of indie-pop hooks, it’s something that feels more substantial; a slowburning and ultimately highly rewarding piece of music.What the album lacks in a standout ‘pop’ moment, it more than makes up for with heavyweight songwriting and lyrical finesse.

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Underground Railroad

Is Tropical

Juffage

Native To

Semicircles

(Kitsune Maison)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores June 13

(Function)

By Kate Parkin. In stores June 6

Label-mates to the likes of Digitalism on French label Kitsune, Londoners Is Tropical wield a dimly related brand of shiny indie-dance. Opener ‘South Pacific’ is, appropriately enough, a sunshine slice of upbeat electro, while the pounding, house-tinged ‘Lies’ could induce a frozen corpse to get up and dance. But where the tunes aren’t so strong, as in ‘Land Of The Nod’, the kiddie-sweet construction loses its allure and instead takes on a mildly irritating nature.Then there’s the single ‘The Greeks’, which sounds like a hyperactive Klaxons who’ve had all their guitars stolen and replaced with sequencers, and elsewhere the headlong rattle of Foals makes itself felt. Slickly produced and full-on enough to keep you interested, there’s also a faint and discomforting whiff of nu-rave hanging around that makes ‘Native To’ already sounds dated.

Giving an air of hollowed-out simplicity sometimes missing from his chaotic live shows, Juffage’s songs in their recorded form are allowed to expand and breathe.

Exploring the boundaries of electronica here with ‘Small Fires’, the Leeds-based, Chicago-born Jeff T Smith clashes the bleeps and glitches of early Battles with freeform drumming that could put the most dexterous jazz musician to shame. ‘Semicircles’ then goes on adding endless layers of loops and noise until they collapse in self-destructive chaos.They’re equally as compelling when slowed down too, like on ‘Under Fanblades’, which shows a more considered, reflective side to Smith, with the addition of guest trumpets creating an atmosphere of melodic melancholy. ‘My Weakness’ blossoms with flurries of synths and scurrying beats, again to make this a truly remarkable debut.

She’s Hit

CocknBullKid

Pleasure

Adulthood

(Re: Peater)

By Polly Rappaport. In stores May 23

(Island)

By Reef Younis. In stores May 30

A word of advice: skip the first track. If you don’t, you might not want to listen to the rest of the record, and the rest of the record is okay. Just... that first track, skip it!

As for the rest of ‘Pleasure’ – the debut album by Glaswegian Cramp-a-likes She’s Hit – it sounds a bit like S.C.U.M. (minus the bowl-rattling vocal reverb), doing a series of Black Lips covers, occasionally in the style of My Bloody Valentine (particularly ‘Lustless’, which is all fuzz and bass drone). It’s vaguely post punk and slathered in garage, with a bit of something scuzzy and surfy thrown in; a combination of styles that are all too familiar at this point. It’s almost unremarkable, really, but then there’s the vocals.This guy has a mumbling groan not unlike the dude from Kings of Leon, and that’s the factor that could make or break this record for you – if you avoid that awful first track.

Sometimes you’re caught in between desperately wanting to like something and feeling like you should. It’s a conundrum Anita Blay, aka CocknBullKid, frustratingly poses. Possessing a voice as clean, sweet and wonderfully supple as hers, you just want to let the soulful, saccharine pop soak in, but it never quite sits. Full of vibrancy and melody, ‘Adulthood’ is extremely wholesome listening but unashamedly and detrimentally preened, polished and glossed to the point it feels like Cowell’s got his filthy fingerprints all over it. It’s Girls Aloud attempting credible indie pop; Madonna without the sultry sexuality; Enya choking on her panpipes; an upbeat and breezy Kate Bush. It’s a credible list in terms of popular influences but as an album, it lacks the hooks that induce the mindless humming all good pop songs should.

White Night Stand (One Little Indian)

By Tom Pinnock In stores June 13 It’s hard to respect a band who sail with the prevailing trends. So it’s lucky this London-based Parisian trio have drifted into more experimental waters now slackerrock is so depressingly au fait, following their dreams rather than the zeitgeist on ‘White Night Stand’ – a dark, woozy opus inspired by a Lynch psycho-drama.

Guitarist and vocalist Marion Andrau’s songs bring the twilight menace, weaving echoey blues into organ-laced psychedelia on ‘Traces To Nowhere’ and ‘The Orchid’s Curse’. Meanwhile, singing drummer Raphael Mura’s songs supply the record’s thundering energy, with ‘Russian Doll’ – a ghost train ride that takes in krautrock,The Who and Tangerine Dream – and the nine-minute Stuka dive of ‘Seagull Attack’, which would obliterate a room full of slackers with its sheer power.

08/10

Thurston Moore Demolished Thoughts (Matador)

By Tom Pinnock. In stores May 23

08/10

Considering they look so alike that Thurston Moore once took to wearing a T-shirt proclaiming ‘I AM NOT BECK’, it was practically written in the stars that the Sonic Youth man and our favourite Scientologist would collaborate properly one day.

Where Moore’s previous solo albums were stylistic, if stunning, mish-mashes, Beck seems to have steered this one towards a more singular vision – the album sustains an exquisitely tender and dreamy mood, sending the listener floating on a 12-string pillow while an out-of-character Thurston whispers sweet nothings in their ears. Practically devoid of bass or drums, the nine songs are highlighted by lush violin and psychedelic harp, which lifts Thurston’s lethargically intoned paens towards the cosmos. And even though pulsating tracks like ‘Circulation’ and ‘Blood Never Lies’ can’t top some of the darker, more varied material on ’07’s ‘Trees Outside The Academy’, as a whole ‘Demolished Thoughts’, Moore’s tenderest, most surprising and unified album, is a sugary delight.

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Dananananakroyd

Art Brut

Boris

Patrick Wolf

Sons And Daughters

There Is A Way

Brilliant! Tragic!

Heavy Rocks

Lupercalia

Mirror Mirror

(Pizza College)

By Chal Ravens. In stores June 13

(Cooking Vinyl)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores May 23

(Sargent House)

By Sean Denning. In stores May 30

(Hideout/Mercury)

By Matthias Scherer. In stores May 30

(Domino)

By Polly Rappaport. In stores June 13

Likely to be the only “fight-pop Glasgow six-piece” in history, Dananananaykroyd have roped in Slipknot producer Ross Robinson for knob-twiddling duties on their follow-up to ’09’s ‘Hey Everyone!’

– not an obvious choice, you’d think, but the breakneck thrashiness and razor-sharp clarity of these 11 tracks recall none other than hardcore squealers The Blood Brothers, another Robinsonproduced band. Danana carefully pair that heaviness with contagious melodies and arch lyricisms (“A spider’s corpse is carried away by ants/Like voluntary coroners”) for regionally accented anti-pop, much in the vein of Future of the Left.

Standout tracks include ‘Think and Feel’ (a ridiculous slice of accelerated punk funk with a dash of B-52’s oddballs-ness) and the super-bouncy would-be radio hit ‘Muscle Memory’. ‘There Is A Way’ is a total summer-gasm of a record.

Have a guess how long it takes Eddie Argos to self-deprecate his and his band’s efforts as a group who have managed to – rather impressively – wing it to album number four. One minute twenty.

It’s 4:32 before he’s desperately remembering some girl through a Jarvis Cocker whisper on ‘Lost Weekend’ and a full 9:24 until the real hilarity ensues with ‘Bad Comedian’, through which Argos says of his old love’s new love, “He dresses like he came free with the NME.” It is the usual heavyhanded urban commentary from this modest, completely English DIY band then; rough, silly and inarticulate where the likes of Arctic Monkeys have always been clever beyond their years. And yet while Art Brut still teeter on the brink of being a comedy band (there’s a song here about and called Axl Rose), they somehow remain fun not funny. Just.

Tell your local record store that you’re after the new record by Japanese noise band Boris and you might get something very different to ‘Heavy Rocks’.They’re releasing two albums on the same day, see?

And ‘Attention Please’ (the other one) is an uncharacteristically ethereal shoegaze record, which is also a bit crap. Don’t just ask for ‘Heavy Rocks’ either, or describe the artwork – the band released an album of the same name in 2002, with a sleeve that would be identical if this one was orange too.

Ask for ‘Heavy Rocks’ 2011, and check it’s purple.Then take it home to see if it “redefines ‘heavy’ music”, as the band hope it does. It doesn’t. ‘Heavy Rocks’ remains a hard record though, and one that is far from mindless. It’s clever, stringently controlled psychedelic noise when the band are in full flight. It’s just that they aren’t often enough.

Who would not wish Patrick Wolf well? Eloquent and eccentric, as well as talented, it would be great if ‘Lupercalia’ were to propel him into the line of sight of people so far unaware of his grandiose, deeply touching brand of pop. But if that doesn’t happen, don’t say we didn’t warn you. Apart from lacking the dark intensity of ‘Wind in the Wires’ and the fragmented beauty of 2009’s ‘The Bachelor’, there are few genuine hits here.

Wolf sounds content and settled rather than haunted and hungry, and only on the barnstorming, autotune-tastic opener ‘The City’ and ‘Together’ – a pumping homage to The Cure about drunkenly calling someone from a Berlin rooftop – do we get Wolf ’s sense of optimism and fatalism, respectively. It’s always good to hear new Patrick Wolf songs, though, and there are no downright stinkers on here.

Sons and Daughters are one of those bands who have been AWOL, record-wise, since roughly 2008.The other bands in this category came out of their LP hibernation in much better moods than they went in, while these guys seem to have woken up on the wrong side of the rock’n’roll bed, which is not a slight on the quality of ‘Mirror, Mirror’, but where previous album ‘The Gift’ was all about angry guitars and punky grrrl vocals, this album is plainly dark – here be synths, and they are so pissed off they can barely look at you. Perhaps it’s a Scottish thing.

There’s a depth to the new music too though, an element of brooding under the shouts and growls (which are much more boy/girl than before), and a distinct chill to the melodies. It’s indie rock gone sinister and we’re glad Sons and Daughters have returned in a bad mood.

Arctic Monkeys Suck It And See (Domino)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores June 6

05/10

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One question surrounds Arctic Monkey’s fourth album: was the sluggish, indulgent ‘Humbug’ a mere pimple on the band’s previously flawless complexion, or something far more lasting – a cancerous growth that has since spread to slowly kill off the band’s legacy? The simple answer is... well, neither. ‘Suck It And See’ is no worse than ‘Humbug’, nor is it any better. It’s simply different.With the exception of the previously leaked pub rock bollocks of ‘Brick By Brick’, it makes for Arctic Monkey’s slowest album yet – mid-paced when at its speediest, without the jubilant hooks of old nor the hunter/gatherer balls of the band’s desert record. It is, ultimately, a nice indie record, and what that leaves us with is something far more distressing – the fact that Artic Monkeys, like the rest of us, are growing old.The ‘Mardy Bum’ days are over – the band are ok with that, even if we’re not.The effort, then, is applauded loudly, while the result receives a polite two-finger clap.

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LIVE

The Nearly Wild Show

WILD BEASTS Wilton’s Music Hall 11.05.2011

By Olly Parker ▼

Photography by Pavla Kopecna

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Wilton Music Hall is a special venue. Built in 1836, it has preserved its aura while aging gracefully – it looks fragile but feels safe and is located on a backstreet opposite one of London’s “most notorious shelters”. In short, it’s your classic hidden gem; a graceful reminder of a lost east London that’s been gradually swallowed by urban decay, now resurrected by gentrification, but still somehow removed from it.When the bankers move in and out again, Wilton will remain as a testimony to times gone by. I can recommend no venue in London higher.

As for Wild Beasts, I first saw them at The Windmill, Brixton, back in a year I can’t even remember.The Windmill is, in its own dishevelled, scout-hut way, completely unique, and this remains one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to. As someone who used to watch average bands for a living, anything with the smallest hint of originality is never forgotten and something with as many standout elements as Wild Beasts becomes one you always look for in the listings and record racks.

The first thing I noticed this time around is how much Wild Beats have changed on stage.

They have more toys, more members and more sounds.Tom Fleming, who used to sing a bit and play bass, was always the centre point that the band revolved around, and so it remains, but now it seems more obviously so. He steps from bass to guitar, to keyboards, to synth and back to lead vocals in between and during songs.

It’s a natural step, and one that shows why Wild Beats “work”, but it also has the unfortunate effect of side-lining some of the more unique aspects of the band. A bit like asking Puyol to play behind the front two while sticking Messi at left-back, it’s a move that works just because everyone involved is so damn good, but you’d rather have it the other way round.

After gnawing away at such a small detail, however, it’s time to take a step-back and look at the big picture. I’m watching one of the most unique bands in the world play in London’s best venue.Wild Beasts are a perfect mirror for their surroundings; a recently discovered and restored archive that reminds you of a different time, but is definitely a product of the here and now.

Tonight the crowd greet new single ‘Albatross’ with the same fervour that welcomes

old favourite ‘Hooting and Howling’, and the band seem relieved to be on home-turf and playing to an audience that has found them and holds them dear.This is probably why it all seems a little too comfortable.There has been development, sure, but yet they’ve somehow managed to stand still. But, then, if you’ve had crowds shout “weird” at you for nearly ten years and now you’ve got hundreds in the palm of your hand, it’s tempting to plough the same turf and provide an easy slam-dunk as Wild Beasts do tonight.

In future though, if this band really wants to push on creatively, now is the time to do so. It may require musical shifts that their newfound audience of Mercury panellists and broadsheet readers shun, but they’ll soon come running back.

Wilton Music Hall can survive a hundred and fifty years and take on a new resonance, a band cannot.They are slowly shifting creative creatures that ebb, flow and need constant regeneration with new horizons to conquer.

Wild Beasts have climbed a mountain and deserve their acclaim, but now it’s time to setup a new base-camp.

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ROLO TOMASSI The Well, Leeds 11.05.2011

By Kate Parkin Photography by Lee Goldup ▼

Over a year ago, I squeezed into to the dark confines of The Well to see Rolo Tomassi.

Surprised to see them again in such familiar surroundings, I turn out with the faithful for another crack, the band having just released a double LP of old tracks and rarities.

Barely visible above the heads of the crowd, diminutive singer Eva Spence writhes, screeching with a voice that could flay skin from bone.Taking a new direction, the raw crunching metal of ‘French Motel’ has less of the frantic twists and turns of old, but then, as a reminder that she can sing, as well as roar like a gutted pig, Eva whispers and swoons over the whistling synths of

‘Tongue in Chic’.

An eerie red glow and bloodcurdling howls further set the scene of Hammer Horror murder.The crowd become a restless tangle of flying limbs: a tinderbox that explodes with the opening chords of ‘Abraxas’. Guitar James crashes into his front-woman sister, the pair like animals readying for battle, while bassist Joseph Thorpe shakes as if his limbs are about to break free from his body.

Debuting songs from that rare material album, ‘Eternal Youth’, the supernatural prog of ‘Mount Celestia’ is a serious highlight.

Building like the calm before a massive storm, guitarist Joe Nicholson hurls himself into the crowd, dragged down by a monstrous sea of hands.

The only misfire is the circle-pit action come ‘I Love Turbulence’, which turns into a conga line of giggling teenagers, providing a damp ending to a truly fiery rock show.

EMA The Macbeth, Hoxton, London 11.05.2011

By Chal Ravens ▼

Seventy-two inches of bleachedblonde, bourbon-soaked, stunglipped American Woman lopes on stage in hot-pants and grabs a starcovered guitar. Erika M. Anderson, wearing a necklace bearing her alias, EMA, ain’t too easily ignored.

Formerly of Gowns, the cult drone rock duo that imploded at the end of 2009, EMA tonight plays through most of ‘Past Life Martyred Saints’, a debut of deconstructed grunge that places her bold-but-fragile voice at the eye of the storm, circled by drawnout riffs and warped desert rock.

Stripped of the record’s extensive multi-tracking and distortion, that voice takes on a different character, somehow more vulnerable, like a runaway teen with too many tall tales and battle scars. Between songs she jokes with us, slurring her words as she snaps on her “show-time suspenders” (patterned with piano keys), but it’s a clownish façade that slips once the guitar kicks in and she’s spitting her stories of high school and violence and bluebirds and the Viking funeral ships that bear her ancestors. Closing with ‘California’, an astonishing ode to the state that “made me boring”, she pulls the mic lead round her neck like a noose and raises two fingers on her right hand: the allAmerican ambassador, armed with religious blessings and a gun.We’re not so much her audience as her battle casualties, joyously martyred to serrated edge rock’n’roll.

PERFUME GENIUS Sheffield City Hall, Sheffield 14.05.2011

By Daniel Dylan Wray ▼

Perfume Genius is not a support act – that much becomes remarkably evident tonight.

Hearing the incessant chatter of some 600 people waiting for Wild Beasts to come on, merged with the stark piano chords and fragile whisper of Mike Hadreas is a rancid concoction. However, once positioned front row and away from the bulk of the crowd, what starts off with disaster written all

over it soon transforms into a remarkably intimate and sincerely poignant performance. His face convulses and contorts with unease and angst, as the words squeeze out the corners of his twisted, pursed lips. It’s almost as though he is fighting himself, such is the magnitude of the emotion on display. Performing with (presumably) his partner, there are moments shared between them, even sharing the same piano at times, which are endearing and moving, some of which are nothing short of breath-taking.

The emotional connection is almost tangible in his voice and yet simultaneously almost lost in the vast space of the venue.What may have been lost on ninety percent of the people there was extraordinary to us remaining ten.

IDIOT GLEE The Vortex Jazz Club, London 12.05.2011

By Edgar Smith ▼

Idiot Glee (22 year-old Kentuckian James Friley) makes ’50s-sounding vocal pop on synths and samplers, but it’s best when these elements just happen to meet and get on with each other. It’s like they were squeezed together by hateful, overbearing parents when the beat becomes too intrusive.Tonight is, from the start, a slow-burner, sounding at times like an old-time radio jingle looped sadly forever and played to a seated crowd which, judging from the suffocating atmosphere of boredom and smug, must have read Glee described as ‘piano-popwave’ in the Guardian. Once alight, he meanders into a great, dubbedout cover of ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ and an even better one of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Last Call’; audacious and strange choices even given the current appetite for sepia-toned retro pop vibes (we’re doffing large felt hats in the direction of Smith Westerns).That he manages to pull off these downtempo pop classics is a testament to his singing ability and the fact that he’s doing this with zero percent irony.That’s bad news if you like your geek to stay cosy with chic, but seeing past the fact that this is staunchly unsexy music, there are some spooked, progg-y moments to glaze-over too.

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LIVE ▼

QUADRON The Old Queen’s Head, Islington 12.05.2011

By Danny Canter ▼

Vessels. Pic: Giles Smith

Deerhoof. Pic: Lee Goldup

Rolo Tomassi. Pic: Lee Goldup

It’s Quadron’s first ever UK show and they’re needlessly late, keeping us waiting in a modest pub venue usually (including earlier) reserved for bushy-tailed indie pop dross.

Who on earth do they think they are? A smooth-edged neo lounge Danish duo whose every sound will be whistled and cheered by this full room, amongst it London rapper Ghost Poet,TV presenter Caroline Flack and Fair Ohs drummer Joe Ryan? Oh, they do.

Fine.With a singer (called Coco) who’s equal parts cutesy Lykke Li and madam power pipes Adele (also rumoured to be showing up this evening), Quadron play the kind of unprocessed RnB that Jools Holland would showcase between KT Tunstall and Arctic Monkeys. And you wouldn’t turn it off, not like you would the token boogie woogie number, but it’d hardly make the show either.We’re not on TV though, and Quadron live are a proud experience to behold, namely because everyone in The Old Queen’s Head are going nuts for this Scandinavian soul. “You’re the best crowd ever,” blushes Coco, almost between every song, and she really does believe it. “Can we take you all back with us?” People shout, ‘Yeah!

Wooo’, and ‘We love you!’, again.

The tight session drummer that uses brushes as well as sticks; Coco’s comrade Robin, who sings falsetto backing vocals like he could front the band; a sultry Michael Jackson cover on a nonhit – it all feels very VH1 Sessions, and thus ends up being one of those evenings that, “wasn’t really my thing, but I’m glad I saw it.”

KID KONGO & THE PINK MONKEY BIRDS 100 Club, London 20.04.2011

By Stuart Stubbs ▼

Before now, Kid Congo Powers has been a member of The Cramps, has founded The Gun Club and has played with Nick Cave. He should have his own cartoon show.

It should make The Magic Roundabout appear grey, straight

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and prudish to a good time. If you ever see him play his camp, faux gothic surf rock live, his saucer eyes spinning around his head and his grin bananaing under his pencil moustache, you’ll know what I mean. His band – called what else but The Pink Monkey Birds? – are something to hear rather than look at, but it just makes Powers more magnetic in a social club venue like The 100 Club. “You’re going to all sing the words to this one,” he insists in his nerdy Los Angeles whine. “I know this because I know you know the words, because they were told to you buy a man called Lux.” He then races off revisiting The Cramp’s ‘I’m Cramped’, and the 100 fans in The 100 Club go a little more crazy than they have done or do for the rest of the evening’s set, which is filled largely with new material from his forthcoming third album ‘Gorilla Rose’ (most of it sounding like ‘The Time Warp’ in some way).

In tone, it’s all reminiscent of ‘Rock Lobster’-era B52s, and while nothing quite grooves like the closing ‘LSDC’,The Kid Congo Show is one well worth watching.

DEERHOOF The Garage, Islington, London 04.05.2011

By Sam Ballard ▼

Deerhoof are one of the most uncategorisable bands around.

Formed in 1994 from a noise duo in San Francisco, they now stand on stage at the Garage ten albums down, two members up and as excitingly erratic as ever.

Constantly moving and shifting focus, the band have managed to evade monotony while bringing in a base of loyal supporters that are amongst the most intelligent fans you’re likely to meet. Name the cleverest, most clued up person you know, musically. Chances are that they will be a Deerhoof fan.

With the arrival of second guitarist Ed Rodriguez in 2008 resulting in murmurs of guitar-centric output, there has been a clear deviation away from strings, and the resultant, ‘Deerhoof Vs Evil’, is far free-er than anything the band have produced before.You could almost move to it.Tonight the foursome are on top form – as tight as one of Greg Saunier’s

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abused snares, yet, while the lanky linchpin holds things together brilliantly, there is something missing from the performance. It’s down to the lack of interaction with the audience, and the method in which they play means that while they straddle the divide between art project and rock band, they somehow stand with a foot in neither camp: almost a rock group, almost an experimental one, yet oddly neither. So they just play away, almost as if we’re not there.

DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979 Kentish Town Forum, London 05.05.2011

By Austin Laike ▼

Death From Above 1979 are an extremely rare prospect: a band that have formed and reformed this early in our lifetimes, having only released one album, as recently as 2004. California’s Coachella festival is what’s brought Sebastian Grainger and Jesse F. Keeler back together. A lot of money will do that.The point, though, is that DFA’s reunion is impressively considered a sound investment – such is their status as cult punk heroes.What’s odd at tonight’s second sold out Forum show, is that we’re all pretty sure the pair still hate each other before they even appear, and when they do show up little is done to prove otherwise. It’s five songs – played as precisely and fuzzily as you’d expect, although with no real sense of conviction – before either member speaks, and I can’t be sure that they looked at each other more than twice for the whole hour-long set, which at one point threatens to be over in half that time.The tracks that make up ‘You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine’ fly out of the duo, with five second pauses separating them, until Keeler decides to pad time by talking nonsense, which none of us can hear. ‘Black History Month’ is more heartfelt though, as is Grainger’s thank you before a four track encore of everything else the band have ever written, which few fans recognise. Not even an annoyingly quiet PA can make DFA 1979 look bad tonight, but, like Pixies, the reasons for this show has them looking like the machines they claimed to be.

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VESSELS The Library, Leeds 06.05.2011

By Kate Parkin ▼

KATY B Koko, Camden, London 12.05.2011

By Chal Ravens Photography by Cochi Esse ▼

There was a time in Pop World when a silk bomber jacket and a pasting of Juicy Tubes lip gloss counted as ‘making an effort’ – think back to that classic wave of early noughties combat-trousered lady-pop: the am-Ibothered cool of Miss Dynamite, All Saints and early Sugababes. Fast forward 10 years and prosthetic face humps and a foghorn voice are just the start of a very, very long checklist for the new breed of starlets who think Gaga was the first person to draw a bloody lightning bolt on her face.

Sigh. And yet here we have Katy B, a pop star who clearly did not receive the memo.

And here we are at her first headline tour of the UK, squeezed into a sold-out Koko crowd (about 50/50 male to female) who can only be described as ‘up for it’, watching her bounce around on stage in silk bomber jacket and curls, effortlessly trailing dust in Jessie J’s airbrushed-to-all-hell face. And

effortless is the operative word with the Princess of Rinse and her youthful pop swagger. Her voice – so girlish, so untroubled – nails every note with unforced finesse while she slides stage right to stage left, serving up her already-formidable back catalogue of hits: ‘Perfect Stranger’, ‘Broken Record’, ‘Lights On’, ‘Katy On A Mission’.

Saxophone and trumpet provide jazzy punctuation to one side while a drummer and DJ provide the beats – it’s such a basic set-up you could barely call it a stage show.

No smoke or mirrors, no wigs or pyrotechnic corsetry, no self-help “love yourself ” bullshit or patronising motivational pep-talks. Just that effervescent voice trilling about boys she wants to dance with and beats she wants to dance to.

And it just works. Ignoring that checklist; Katy B has hewn together her own authentic pop formula from the echoes of the club, fragments of UK funky rhythms and big fat dubstep, touting chart-ready bangers to poppickers who just want the songs and not the rest of the wannabe crap and the autotune and meat dresses and crocodile tears. I wish her Gagazillions of global mega-stardom, sure, but for now, can we keep her? Can we?

Vessels have become something of a Leeds indie institution, and as word spreads, the queue is soon snaking out the door.Wedging myself in-between the sweaty bodies, tension builds with the hiss of cymbals filling the air. On stage the three guitar players shift and sway back and forth until the sound sweeps over them like a tidal wave. Beating contemporaries like Explosions in the Sky for atmosphere,Vessels are constantly shifting styles and instruments, skittering from post rock gloom to dexterous Battles-style electro.

Moving with the swell of the crowd, the click of drum sticks ricochets against discordant keyboards in stuttering rhythmic bursts as ‘The Trap’ builds to its restless conclusion. Changing with the swift of a chord from utterly joyful to heart-bustlingly heavy, Vessels are a band who like to play with your emotions. Painstakingly, they twist the delicate swirling keyboards of ‘Later Than You Think’ into dense layers that encircle everything in its path.

Showcasing older songs like ‘Yuki’ alongside material from new album ‘Helioscope’ they show the subtle mix of light and shade that draws this crowd back to Vessels time and again.This is a band that just keeps getting better.

MAZES Queen’s Social Club, Sheffield 28.05.2011

By Daniel Dylan Wray ▼

Mazes debut record is an album that bubbles with youthful spunk and is riddled with infectious hooks.Tonight, thankfully the band exude gusto and snarl to match the output of that record, ‘A Thousand Heys’. There is a loose, rickety exuberance to the band that keeps things exciting tonight, as though they are playing with a sense of spontaneity that could lead them anywhere. However, underneath the apparent impulsiveness lies some pretty tight compositions and flush musicianship that give the band an attractive balance of ramshackle charm and precision

pop. As a three piece they concoct a racket that would normally be more associated with five people playing together, and because ‘A Thousand Heys’ is an album rammed with pop-smattered songs, tonight’s set feels like a greatest hits of sorts; as though we are witnessing a band playing over a series of records, not just the one.

The infective nature of their debut seems to have spread too, as about three hours later I encounter a drunken man walking home alone mumbling something about “Beatles and JFK” (lyrics from ‘Surf & Turf ’). He looks at me, “Hey mate, what was the name of the first band on tonight?” “Mazes” I reply, as he falls into the gutter and off into the night with a slurred “Cheers”.

YOUNG LEGIONNAIRE Barfly, Camden, London 05.05.2011

By Matthias Scherer ▼

Is the grunge revival officially on?

We’re only asking because the Barfly sound guy is playing the (Dinosaur-Jr-worshipping) Yuck album in full, and with other bands like Tribes busting out existential guitar music with a poppy edge, we are tempted to go home and watch Kurt Cobain: About a Son again.That would be a foolish move, though, since tonight, indie supergroup Young Legionnaire are serving up their own take on ’90s angst rock, which is a bit more sophisticated and comes with more false leads than a hide-and-go-seek game with Osama Bin Laden.

There are rhythmic tricks aplenty, such as the 5/8 beat in ‘Black Lions’ and even an arms-wideopen ballad (‘A Hole in the World’). Paul Mullen (exyourcodenameis:milo) is still, it turns out, a guitarist more than worth his salt – he eases off biting riffs as well as crunching out the big, devastating chords with equal panache. His stage presence might be limited, but his vocals are clear, controlled and distinctive, while Gordon Moakes gets to play some of those leftfield, angular bass lines we used to love in early Bloc Party.

The Young Legionnaire sound owes more to early Mudhoney and Soundgarden records than Pearl Jam, and is all the more aggressive and brainy for it.

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CINEMA REVIEW

FILM

By IAN ROEBUCK

HANNA Starring: Saoirse Ronan, Eric Bana Cate Blanchett,Tom Hollander Director: Joe Wright

7/10

Sean Penn in Terrence Malik’s, The Tree of Life

Cinema Preview Remind me, what are we all doing here?

---Many directors aim to address the big question of existence, whether it’s through adolescent eyes like Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko or wizened weariness like Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York; they all love to ask, ‘Why the hell are we here?’.The memorable God-botherers, though, tend to have jogged the block a fair bit – think Stanley Kubrick or Wim Wenders, who suggest that if you’re musing existence in the medium of cinema, a beard and slippers seem to help.This year’s Cannes Film Festival sees two of cinemas finest square up like philosophical prize-fighters.The gloves are off, just don’t touch the face, I’m meditating.

Some 38 years after shaping the barbed world of Kit Carruthers and Holly Sargis,Terrence Malick is back at the forefront of World Cinema with the Cannes screening of The Tree of Life. Four films on from Badlands, the enigmatic director makes the Palme d’Or grade as a possible favourite.The heavyweight auteur might even turn up. (Averaging a film every seven and a half years there’s certainly room in his schedule).

Cannes will no doubt be weak at the knees for The Tree of Life’s heady mixture of Hollywood celebrity and existential wallop. Starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn, it’s billed as a departure for Malick, his renowned visual beauty taking on a surrealist almost sci-fi edge.Very little has been leaked on the project, a tantalising web site offering brief clips, the ‘mothers way’ and ‘fathers way’ baffles the brain and the official trailer supplies

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more questions than answers.What hit planet earth?

Why are all those people in suits on the beach? Is it really possible to miss Brad Pitt’s preposterous moustache?

Trading punches with Malick in the ring of righteousness is Lars Von Trier. No stranger to rueing life, death and talking foxes, the Danish director brings us his “beautiful movie about the end of the world”.

Also playing in Cannes, the trailer makes out as a menacing melodrama, but if you scratch under the surface you’re bound to find more. After all, nothing’s ever simple with Lars Von Trier.

Starring Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kirsten Dunst and Kiefer Sutherland, Melancholia threatens an undercurrent of violence and mystery. In the trailer this is mostly pulled off via stargazing and thunderstorms, which strangely reminded me of Caddyshack. Maybe it’s all the greenery? Maybe, if anyone can explain the meaning of life, it’s Chevy Chase’s Ty Webb?

Lars Von Trier has gone on record to say this one’s got an unhappy ending, and he considers all his other movies to end happily. So, considering this one is about the end of the world, he’s only gone and ruined it already, hasn’t he.

Two films designed to make you think is surely a good thing though, suggesting once again that signal that Hollywood’s outlook is turning cerebral.

Examining trends tells us so, particularly in the world of 3D. Not just a boy’s toy, we’ve had Pina and the Cave of Forgotten Dreams pulling in the punters and proving that the medium isn’t just for slashers and silliness.

Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before the big bang is tackled James Cameron style.

From the whirring throb of a helicopter blade to a whispered goodbye in a crowded street, sound design is integral to our interpretation and enjoyment of film. It can take a movie to a whole other level, and this is almost the case with Hanna, Joe Wright’s fourth and arguably most enjoyable movie. For a young English director it’s a bold, esoteric feature with a European heart, which relies heavily on strong imagery and earshredding sound to carry a threadbare plot. From the very top, Wright stamps his stylish take on the girl assassin genre, as a piercing gun shot and painfully hip titles sequence files the film in line with Nikita, Leon and Kill Bill before five minutes is up. But this is no copycat killer. Hanna, played with a beguiling stillness by Wright regular Saoirse Ronan, rips through this revenge story with such grace and humour that through sheer force of personality the film separates itself from its peers.

The real beauty though comes alive through the speakers, with a soundtrack from the Chemical Brothers that is both understated and fitting, almost every scene excites on more than one level.

Indebted to such films as Run Lola Run and the Bourne trilogy, Ed and Tom demonstrate a subtle respect to the medium of film that may surprise some – ‘Hey Boy, Hey Girl’ this is not.

This pulsating undercurrent takes us from the desert to the Ubahn as we follow Hanna’s character in relentless pursuit of revenge. Standing in her way are two unashamedly pantomimeesque villain’s in Cate Blanchett’s Marissa and Tom Hollander’s Isaacs (what’s with the shorts), but their b-movie badness manage to create the right tone rather than detract from an otherwise convincing effort from Wright’s cast. Perhaps more screen time should have been given to the wonderful Olivia Williams and Jason Flemying, but all in all this absurd plot is brought to the screen with aplomb. Sure, some of the fight scenes are a little hammy, but a brave man follows Atonement and the lesser known The Soloist with an eccentric, freewheeling action movie.

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PARTY WOLF PHOTO CASEBOOK “The Persistent World of Ian Beale”

I’ve done loads of birds, actually.

LOADS!

GET THE LOOK

Naah!

Hur Hur! He hasn’t, has he, John!?

Tell you what, I’ve worn some mad shit in my time!

Remember that time I played the piano dressed as Donald Duck for a laugh? Yeah y’do. And when I went to a party as Marie Antoinette? You dooo! And when I dressed like an egg at the Royal Wedding last month?

You DO! I’m mad, me – from my hair plugs down to my size 4s. I have calmed down a lot since the gak days, though. A certain someone who shall remain nameless made me bin the Donald Duck get up recently, actually – he said that it had started to smell like desperation, whatever that means, David. I still wear this little look though.The gold rings are neither here nor there, really (I’ve got tons of gold) and I’ve been through more fucia silk shirts than I have flowers (remember that advert I did for Royal Mail with flowers? Yeah?), but those specs! Fuck me, they’re sick!

Firstly, they’ve got reading lights on, which is a bonus for a book fiend like me (The Bitch Is Back is a real page-turner), they’re bi-focal, shaped like hearts and look, they’ve got little window wipers on! There’s only one pair in the world though.Wrestle for em?

POLI-TWIT Ooof!

Even PMs have computers, y’know?

Don’t forget to add me on myspace people. :p Well, how comes I’ve just managed to punched your jacket off then, love?

about 20 minutes ago from device

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Urgh. Just saw Made In Chelsea. It’s just full of poshos. Yuck. #sipsbeerandchills about 6 hours ago from device

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@CleggM You’re not either mate... prick! about 6 hours ago from device

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What is ‘ream’, and am I it? about 7 hours ago from device

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Catching up on loads of TV tonight. You gotta love Sky+ @TheRealRupertMurdoch about 8 hours ago from device

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Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious.

DaveyC