Imagine Our Love (Matador/Remote Control) The outright appropriation of Lee and Nancy’s trademark sound for ‘Mexico’ takes it a bit far, but that aside the overly lovely indie sounds that jaunt and prance around are easy to like and enjoy – and could eventually get under you skin and into your blanket-stitched heart. Why does everything on Half A Cow have to sound like everything… on Half A Cow? Don’t necessarily count this as a drawback seeing as at least it means you probably know what you’re getting.īased in Melbourne, this predominately New Zealand four-piece keep their role models close to their heart and just below the surface of these 12 songs – just take the jingle jangle of ‘Getting Young’ or the Mod British tone that flavours ‘Something Monstrous’. New Pants prove that the culture you’re steeped in counts just as much as the Moogs you use. The title track though is a pearler, sounding like an updated soundtrack to Monkey Magic. In fact, the further you delve into this 10-track excursion, the more it turns into a trip back to the early 80s heyday of electronic pop. These three Chinese fellows could easily be Asia’s answer to our own Sekiden! Well, at least that’s the vibe that comes from ‘Everybody’ and ‘You’re My Superstar’ – especially with it’s “gabba gabba hey!” catch-cry over layers of synths and moog.Īpparently, they were a garage punk band a decade ago, but you’d never know it from the hypnotic New Order-sounding ‘Bye Bye Disco’ or the Roxy Music-esque ‘T-B’. ![]() There are moments when the discourse rises in volume to an all-consuming level (‘Handsome Furs Hate This City’ and ‘Dead + Rural’) and it’s in these moments when all bets are off and redemption for our couple is very much possible. In the end, the refrain repeated over and over again from ‘Hearts Of Iron’ – “nothing matters at all” – is the most telling of this album’s desolation. The same kind of melancholic desperation lingers in the air here as on albums like Springsteen’s Nebraska – full of characters who wish to escape if only they knew how. Consisting of Dan Boeckner from Wolf Parade and his fiancée Alexei Perry, Handsome Furs is very much a bedroom-sounding creation that pulses with personal secrets, hidden dreams and shattered hopes. This duo could well be Americana if it wasn’t for the veins of avant pop and bedroom beats that ripple just below the surface of these 11 songs. Some of the impenetrable layers of Maps’ predecessors have been wiped away, a more gleaming and futuristic child continuing the bloodline. ‘So Low, So High’, ‘Elouise’ and ‘It Will Find You’ stand out for not only their enveloping sound but their innocence, a hopeful and angelic innocence that maybe has something to do with this debut being created and produced in the belly of Sigur Ros’s studio home. The variety of sounds, humming guitars and in particular Chapman’s hollow and haunting vocals find these 11 songs recalling the ghosts of Spiritualized and My Bloody Valentine as well as the lonely, overcast streets of Chapman’s British homeland. Never overly electronic, but structured with precision, these songs are anything but cold. The hum of beats is an undercurrent upon which our central architect James Chapman wonderfully executes his layers of sonic bliss. ![]() Maps shimmers with the bright lights of a big city. The Used – rebellion’s latest homogenised commodity! So grandad here thinks Lies For The Liars is more like Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American, just not as catchy or digestible. ![]() All this isn’t necessarily something to turn your nose up at it’s just that it’s all as plastic as the caricatures that adorned the album’s artwork. The mood here mainly comes from atmospheric electronics that sit on the edges of these ‘mature’ songs – the perfectly orchestrated dissonance so smoothed off that even the rousing breakdown and resurgence in ‘Bird And The Worm’ is all Pro-tools and not one ounce of the gristle this band possesses. ![]() These four fellows from Utah were apparently ‘hardcore’ for their first two albums… this one though is overblown L.A.-styled rock! I really wanted this to be rousing, heavy, music’s latest saviour or something, but the band’s third is basically big rock chords (‘Pretty Handsome Awkward’, ‘Paralyzed’ and ‘With Me Tonight’) and melodic catch-cries. I’ll level with you, I read that shitty live review in last week’s issue and thought ‘That dude in the picture looks like Kurt Cobain… and he’s in a Kurt shirt, I wonder what they sound like? I think I’ll check ’em out.’
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