Category Archives: VPME Track Of The Week
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Jupiter –C – A musical duo hailing from Manchester and Liverpool respectively, Ashiya Eastwood and David Kane arrive in the nick of time to sooth our fevered brow with their spooky, spaced out dead of night beauty. ‘Birdsong’ seeps into the corners of the brain that remain untouched by sleep like slivers of bright moonlight slicing through the night’s inky blanket. Dreamlike and full of transcendent beauty, it manages to capture the hallucinatory beauty of insomnia, whilst conveying contrasting emotions of loneliness and companionship, anxiety and comfort. Which is pretty fucking profound considering it only lasts for two minutes and three seconds.
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Well it’s been a long time coming but finally VPME fave’s The Good Natured’s début album is set to drop. It’s called ‘Prisim’ and is apparently “based around the idea of the prism being my heart; each emotion I feel makes up a different colour in the prism” explains vocalist Sarah McIntosh. A rather lovely poetic idea but one that perhaps wouldn’t perhaps work for us, after all the only colour you’d be able to perceive is BLACK! The band are offering live favourite ‘Lovers’ as a free download, and yes it seems to be centered around the bands favourite subject -’sex’ ! Continue reading →
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We’ve been fans of the best thing to come out of New Jersey since Springsteen and Paulie Walnuts, acclaimed singer songwriter Nicole Atkins, for quite some time! We’ve followed her in a none stalky way ever since her ‘Blood Diamonds’ EP introuduced us to a vocal and song writing talent that left us in awe. A voice that can send shivers down your spine, illuminate the bleakest of days and generally make the world seem a better place.
Since then she ‘s performed on ‘Letterman,’ ‘Conan,’ ‘Later With Jools Holland,’ released two critically acclaimed albums, collaborated with David Byrne, toured with The Black Keys, hung out with Springsteen fell out with her record company, and generally experienced the often bumpy but nevertheless exciting ride that only venturing out on the rock n roll highway can offer. Some people are, as they say , born to do it !
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We bring news of a fantastic free download from hypnotic London electronic duo Death Rattle. ‘The Blows’ sounds like Kate Bush running up that hill to escape Dave Gahan who’s intent on indulging in a quick game of master and servant. It certainly has a killer chorus and is rather less dystopian than their previous work but still has that relentless, dark, driving undercurrent. The only thing pear-shaped about this track is the ‘oud’ played by Kareem Samara, which is described by the band as as a warm up to their second EP release due out in April
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Our contacts in Manchester, England have been talking in revered tones about Findlay for quite some time now insisting we simply must catch her live. Therefore, we goggled we listened and we loved! I mean this is proper visceral, rock n roll, full of edgy primal sexuality mixed with the sort of ferociously brilliant melodies that make The Dead Weather and The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s sound about as edgy as the cast of Glee singing f**king ‘Do Re Mi”
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Sadly, we missed London sextet Lola Colt’s appearance at last year’s Liverpool Psychfest,due in no small part to the fact that we didn’t actually go. We’ll chalk that one up to another victim of the recession, but it’s a shame we didn’t catch them because not only is their music a magisterial mix of dark seductive psychegaze illuminated by a gorgeous iridescent guitar glow, they’ve also listed ‘Pyschocandy as being amongst their favourite albums of all time! These kids clearly have style and taste and know their musical onions!
The band (named after a female spaghetti western hero played by singer/dancer Lola Falana) was formed after founding members Gun and Matt L spent time writing, refining and sculpting their sound until they felt ready to unleash their oeuvre on the world! Their first gig involved supporting L.A. neo-psyche legends the Warlocks no less.
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At the end of 2010 we listed who we hoped would be big in 2011, and top of the pile was the wonderful The Good Natured . They’ve since signed a major label deal and then went to ground spending much of the last year or so working on songs for their début, emerging only to work with electro-pop legend Vince Clark from Depeche Mode for the throbbing collaboration that was ‘Ghost Train’ Now after what seems like an eternity we can finally hear at least one of the tracks from their much anticipated début album!
Sex, love, fantasy, sex, dark places, pain, heartbreak, sex, obsession and a bit more sex are topics fans of The Good Natured’s oeuvre will be familiar with and their new single ’5-HT’ explores similar themes as singer songwriter Sarah McIntosh explains “5-HT is a chemical within the human body which helps to release serotonin in our brains. The song explores the contrast between love and pain, and the notion that love is a drug.”
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Oh, do f**k off Manchester (UK), with your achingly cool bands, amazing musical diversity, friendly eateries, and ample free street parking (after 8pm) stop being so darn bloody good and give the rest of the country a chance! Yup, yet another amazing band emerges from the city in the form of electronic duo (or possibly a trio) NO CEREMONY, who are turning the waves they have been making this year into a veritable tsunami with their latest release. Emerging in late 2011 and shrouded in a mystery that didn’t really come across as contrived they gave no interviews, didn’t play live, nor were any press photos available. In the words of Kelly – NOC,” “all we want to concentrate on is making music, that’s what comes first” and this does appear to be a genuine statement of intent rather than artful PR; forget personalities because this band is all about music, and what wonderful music it is.
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We’ve been fans of Blindness since 2010′s “Confessions” EP cleaved our skull asunder and bathed our ears in glorious noise via their intoxicating blend of raw power and dark brooding melodies. This is what guitar music should sound like – dangerous, swaggering, dramatic, and of course sexy. Blindness have also been gaining something of a reputation on the live circuit, sadly we’ve yet to experience Blindness in the flesh but many people whose taste we implicitly trust have regaled us with enthusiastic tales of their awesomeness. Their début single ‘Glamourama’ released via the much-loved and respected AC30 label demonstrates exactly what this band us all about.
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The mighty PINS will soon unleash their new much anticipated “LuvU4Ly EP” via one of our favourite record labels, Bella Union and if this track is anything to go by it looks set to be a marriage made in heaven. ‘LuvU4Lyf’ is a menacing visceral slice of garage goth replete with Siouxsie howls, creepy spidering guitars which build slowly to erupt in a slashing Banshee-esque frenzy and is held together by sinister throbbing bass lines and ominous tribal drumming that all play their part in making this a hugely seductive dark, sinister piece of aural ear sex. It’s everything we could of hoped for after we’d declared PINS to be one of the best new bands of 2012.
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Dum Dum Girls return with a superlative new EP, “End of Daze” which contains a collection of songs that any right thinking society would quite correctly revere as bona fide pop classics. Once again, Dum Dum Girls almost thaumaturgical gift for melody allied to their elegiac lyrical dexterity sees them distilling a wide variety of musical influences to produce an EP, which is quite simply, flawless.
Full of poetic lyrical observations, classical allusions, and religious imagery replete with gorgeous melodies “End of Daze” provides indisputable evidence that Dee Dee Penny is one of the most profoundly gifted songwriters of her, or indeed any other, generation. Despite the girl gang look Dum Dum Girls are not merely jejune revivalists, instead Dee Dee takes her musical influences, which range from obscure “Girls In The Garage” compilations, The Ramones, The Mary Chain through to Joy Division, The Smiths and The Cure, and melds them into something new, something exciting and beautiful and in the process produces something unique and distinctly all her own.
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It’s been on one those weeks, no matter how hard we try we just can’t seem to glean much info on some of the new music that’s reaching our ears. Take VYIE for example, we have managed ascertain only the bare bones of the band’s story. We discovered they are based in Atlanta and that they initially consisted of Janey Criss and Jessi Monroe who decided to write some songs together. It went well. They then recruited Alec Yeager, who on the evidence of the promo shots, looks like a rather stylish New Romantic refuge from the Baseball Furies – [See Warriors movie] You’ll also note the band look good, in fact the look very good, indeed, but before we get distracted and hot under the collar lets address their music, do they sound as good as they look? Well we’d suggest on the evidence of the songs the answer is an unequivocal YES! VYIE produce perfectly realised electronic pop, with a vaguely haunting melancholic edge. Sounding like a sexier more sinister, ethereal Warpaint, there’s something utterly beguiling about their sound which ebbs and flows with electronic pulses, echoing synths, sleazy bass lines and celestial harmonies.
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Our favourite south coast sextro-electro pop duo return with a new single, a dark spectral electronic monster entitled “Spectre”. No it’s not an ode to the gun totting maniac genius of the creator of the “Wall of Sound”, nor is it a homage to a somewhat bland indie band who had the audacity to take his name. How do we know this? Well the clues are in the spelling, see, although it could possibly be a thinly veiled tribute to SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) as featured in the James Bond movies. In fact we can imagine Curxes’ singer Roberta belting out a kind of dark gothic electro alternative Bond theme, such is the power of her formidable singing pipes.
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I Am Harlequin is musical alter ego of East German born, London based musician Anne Freier, and we here at the Von Pip Musical Express are convinced that in any reasonably sane world Anne would be a massive star admired for her talent and style where as Cheryl Cole would be..? Well let’s just say -rather less so. We’ve previously described her music as “a dash of Kate Bush – Bjork without the “bollocks du jour” and an” unusual and emotionally stirring hybrid of a kind of classical, choral electronic indie.”
Her forthcoming EP showcases her musical virtuosity and her ability to weave in and out of genres whilst taking the listener on a journey to unexpected and mysterious places. It’s a musical and emotional tour de force in which IAH produces a compelling synthesis of Baroque chamber pop, choral harmonies, Gothic theatrical flourishes all sprinkled with a light dusting of minimalist electronica.
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Some may have painted Two Wounded Birds into a corner as rock n roll revivalists, Ramones wannabes or even the UK’s answers to The Drums, and whilst there are germs of truth in such views, Two Wounded Birds eponymous début reveals there’s far more substance to them than merely a band blithely plundering rock n’ rolls illustrious history. To dismiss Two Wounded Birds as jejune revivalists is to miss the point, and to overlook the genuine depth of emotion and natural sense of melody that front dude, guitarist and songwriter Johnny Danger crams into his songs. Although they may resemble a psycho-billy biker gang from hell who have kidnapped a young Debbie Harry forcing her to play bass as if her life depended on it, they are actually all nice folks!
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