TRACKS

Image: Cat Ryan by Kristoff Photography

WORDS: ELODIE A. ROY

This month’s new tracks seem to stir uneasily and undecidedly in and out of time – torn between the alluring realm of retro sounds and the trappings of digital immediacy. It is hard to fully place them.

Holiday In Tokyo’s anachronistic Drift Away carries within it something of the sparse intensity of early Everything But The Girl (but was most likely inspired by Mac DeMarco), thanks to its drum machine, space and jazz guitar chords. This delicately hesitant song is about distance and solitude in the computer age. Cat Ryan’s sleek new pop track, Blessed Through The TV, is a glossy number – a tale of unrequited love, robotic voices and synthetic keyboards, with a distantly new wave mood. Teesside songwriter J. P. Riggall’s The Vagrant is an elusive, translucent guitar song, with washed out touches of early REM. This gently escapist tune bears an intriguing West Coast feel, and Riggall appears to be singing from and of another place. Also in the lo-fi, on H.I.W.T.H.I (Home Is Where The Heart Is) Scrannabis delivers a humble, open and very personal hip-hop confession – an emotional letter home.

With Screensaver, ironic punk tricksters Swine Tax unsentimentally explore the absorbing vacuum of the digital present (one of their most treasured topics). Though this largely sounds like a cynical joke song, I can hear a real heart beating too. I wish they showed their soul a bit more, somehow. New four-piece Class Gymnast, with members of Ghost Signals and The Union Choir, have recorded a more idiosyncratic punk lullaby. The surreal despair and tender, talkative irreverence of Worry Creeps (their debut track) brings to mind the brilliant Newcastle trio Les Cox (Sportifs). The seasonally-named Indoor Kids play tamed ‘adult rock’ anthems. Down, the second track from their first self-titled EP, brims with contentedly clean guitars, bombastic choruses and an undercurrent of suitably grim lyrics. In Big Pharma, Sly Hands casually scream about self-medication and dead ends – a fiercely dissonant, pained post-grunge track. Also from Sunderland, metal quartet Karnayn erratically wander through wasted lands; Hex, their debut single, features some ominous vocals hovering above noisy layers of guitar like toxic cumulus clouds. I cannot make out any of the lyrics; this must be the sound of impending planetary disaster.

Conrad Ashton’s raucous voice seems infinitely older than he is and confidently drowns nearly everything else on his new single. A real sense of urgency and despair races through this cavernous, doomed pub-rock number, aptly entitled Time. Eco-folk singer-songwriter Laurie Shepherd candidly tells us it is not too late on Sparks; a neat, dramatic and vocally flawless plea laced with a sophisticated arrangement of live strings. This first extract from her forthcoming debut album should appeal to inveterate idealists and fans of contemporary folk group The Unthanks. Luke Rv feat. Nifty Struggle’s Ends Meet is a hyper-polished, dancey modern pop track sketching out the ordinary tragedy of zero-hour contracts, skipped breakfasts and unpaid wages – unwittingly documenting working conditions in late capitalism. In an ideal world, this deceptively radio-friendly (and formidably realistic) track would be played on every radio station in the country – or, better still, would not need to have been written. In the current time, though, the sentiment appears to be necessary.

Laurie Shepherd by Ben Holden