Track of the Week – 17/04/2014 – Stranger in Moscow – Tame Impala

Slightly slow on the uploading of this week’s track of the week but it has materialised nonetheless. This week’s song once again comes courtesy of those incredible Aussie’s from Tame Impala and their latest offering is a cover of Michael Jackson’s Stranger in Moscow. An absolutely brilliant cover with Tame’s signature stamp, it mostly makes me wish for more original stuff! Despite the release of a live EP for Record Store Day and two upcoming albums from Pond men Jay Watson and Joe Ryan things on the Tame side seem relatively quiet on the new material front.

Over the last few weeks the band’s lead singer Kevin Parker has been showing more and more of his disco and hip hop affiliations, with hints from fellow Aussie pysch god Jay Watson that he has enough material to release a disco album. From the snippets that I have heard I can only imagine that this would be incredible!

Track of the Week – 03/03/2014 – Waterloo Sunset – Temples

This week’s track of the week is Temples’ cover of Waterloo Sunset by The Kinks, recorded for OuiFM. As the sun has been shining in Paris over the last few days it seems only right that Waterloo Sunset be my track of the week. It always reminds me of hazy spring and summer evenings and although it still may be slightly early in the year for sitting in the sun drinking until nearly 10pm, I will take all the feelings of summer that I can get.

Suiting Temples’ lead singer, James Bagshaw’s  voice down to the ground, despite the fact this cover doesn’t really do anything strikingly new with the song it is very good nonetheless.  Yet another sign that this band are ever growing and heading in an excellent direction this cover shows their talents brilliantly.

More to come.

Track of the Week – 17/02/2013 – Damon Albarn – Everyday Robots

After this week’s Culture show special, I have chosen Damon Albarn’s title track of his debut solo album, Everyday Robots, as my track of the week.

Described as the first truly personal album he’s written, it is set for release this April. Albarn expertly blends a skilled piano part with electronic synths to create a kind of ethereal, eerie sound; a theme which is allegedly carried through the rest of the album.

The video for Everyday Robots is also partly why I have chosen this song. A digital portrait of Damon by artist Aitor Throup forms over the course of the video and even uses scans to map and create his brain on screen.

This song and the glimses of others I have heard, along with the prospect of collaborations with Brian Eno and Natasha Khan, fill me with great hope for how much I am going to enjoy the album as a whole.

More to come.

Track of the Week – 10/02/2014 – Retrograde -Lorde

In addition to the odd music reviews I’ve decided that I will also add a ‘Track of the Week’ feature in an attempt to even out the film to music ratio.

So the first track of the week is Lorde’s cover of James Blake’s Retrograde, recorded for triple j’s Like A Version. Previously producing one of my favourite covers of all time, Tame Impala’s Prototype (originally by Outkast), Like A Version has yet again struck cover version gold. The arguably slightly left-field choice of a cover is one of my favourite tracks from last year, along with pretty much everything else James Blake did. I think it is perfectly suited to Lorde’s style and her voice shines through to produce this haunting version of the song.

In recent weeks Lorde has obviously been the centre of much media attention from tweeting about paparazzi to her bizarre performance at the Grammys and her celebrity seems to be ever-increasing. Despite criticism she has received for her awkwardness and also that it’s potentially forced and self-designed, it is hard to deny the fact that Lorde is fast becoming a star. With this excellent choice of a cover I think it is going to be interesting to see where she goes next.

More to come.

Sun Structures – Temples

In an attempt to keep up with the latter half of the name of this blog, I have decided it’s time I wrote something about music.

And what better to start with than the debut album from Temples released today on Heavenly Recordings (boasting other psychedelic offerings, Toy and Stealing Sheep). In recent years most will have seen the psych revival fast approaching. When it first started seeping back into the mainstream a few years ago the big guns came from down under. Thanks largely to Kevin Parker et al with Tame Impala and to a lesser extent Pond, psychedelia has been firmly cemented back in our consciousness. Some may say it’s cashing in on their successes, others might think it has something to do with not wanting to be out done by the Aussies after a dismal ashes performance, but it can’t be denied that we Brits are hitting back with our own brand of psych coming out, of all places, the Midlands.

With their debut single, Shelter Song, realised in November 2012 they have since attracted the attention of Noel Gallagher and Johnny Marr. After several festival and supporting slots, the Kettering boys first LP is without a doubt a very mixed bag, although definitely listenable. Shelter Song and The Golden Throne stand out as being well written and there is a colourful quality to the album which makes me feel like it would be better listened to outside in the blazing sunshine rather than in bed on a cold, grey Parisian day. However, I felt the second half of the album lagged slightly and lost some energy along the way. It kind of feels like they are sticking too much to the format of what is deemed to be ‘psychedelic’ and ignoring where the music is organically going. Having said this, all in all I very much enjoyed the album and having not given them much time prior to this I can say I could well be turned into a Temples fan yet.

More to come.