Artrocker Magazine’s Single Reviews for the week commencing April 19th

Good Shoes
The Way My Heart Beats EP
(Brille)

Without meaning to sound like we're plugging anything, we recently had the fortune to have Good Shoes record a live session for http://www.artrocker.tv, and 'The Way My Heart Beats' sounded damn fantastic. Oh yes. It's online early April. Cough cough. Check it out. Ooo yeah.
The song, as we will henceforth call it, is also cheerleading a great new EP. So I'd better describe the song or I will be fired. It kicks off quite deceptively with a summer surfin' guitar line, before Rhys' vocal pulls out the rug to deliver a rave-worthy vocal, expressing both a drugged up abyss and a sharply focused urgency within its two minutes thirty. It's a playful monkey of a tune, evoking everything from generational alienation to the Imperial March from Star Wars within its frisky two minutes thirty - but I'll be damned if it doesn't all work marvellously.
Anyone who found the album 'No Hope No Future' a touch too contemplative will be up for a quick shag with this EP, which is far more carefree; 'Standby' takes the spirit of 1950s puppy love and whisks it into a fruit blender with some sneaky basslines. Naturally, Rhys is still worrying about everything, but this time the causes of his concern are deemed to be "kind of funny, kind of fucked up" - and the skip in his step allows him to hurdle them. Go Rhys go!
'Run Away With Me' could almost be played with a 1920s piano, feeling as it does like a silent movie about a young couple fleeing down the train tracks. Of course, it's not played by a 1920s piano, but it still sounds delicious.
That beautiful tropical guitar is back for EP closer 'Easier Easier', which dances round Rhys as he discovers that ignorance is bliss, then falls asleep to the transcendent music - content, dreamy, serene. I'm sure there's a graph to be drawn tracing the correlation between Rhys' happiness and the brilliance of Good Shoes' music - but for now, I'm not drawing it; I'm far too busy with this wonderful EP...
Ric Rawlins


These New Puritans
Attack Music
(Angular Recordings)

It'd be lovely if the afterlife was life Halloween Town from The Nightmare Before Christmas - all twinkling stars, pumpkin monsters and Halloween parties. But it probably won't be. Oh no. It'll be more like TNP's new single: lurching and morbid, with a faint whiff of the plague.
Still, it all makes for a good record - and this strange combination of grime, accordions, school choirs, backwards guitar solos and steel drums will at least ensure that the question 'jest what in God's name are These New Puritans exactly?!' keeps getting asked for many moons to come.
Ric Rawlins


The Pipettes
Stop The Music
(Fortuna POP!)

I'm not sure how my brain was wired this way, but I felt strangely unenthusiastic about hearing the Pipettes comeback choon. Yet I can think of no crimes against music they've committed in the past. How very weird.
Whether it's the line up change or the transition to (almighty indie label) Fortuna POP!, the band sound in dangerously good health. 'Stop The Music' is a subtly funky disco number which slides into the room, captures your hips, then prizes open your heart with some great ABBA-style melodies. It doesn't quite explode all the cylinders, but certainly puts the band up there with decorated newcomers Music Go Music.
Cindy Suzuki


The Fall
Bury
(Domino)

The Fall return for the ten millionth time, and it's still not getting boring: this new single is a slightly evil feeling stomp-along, with Mark E Smith ranting something about a "Spanish King with a council of bad knaves" over a bouncy glam beat. The melody is simple, the guitars detuned, and the overall feeling of an ominously sinister event approaching is one that you won't shake off for some time after.
Cindy Suzuki


The Golden Filter
Hide Me
(Brille)

Electropop has gone a bit weird recently; it seems to have lost its soul, dyed its hair, bought a house on Coke Mountain and put killer poodles out to patrol. Which is all perfectly fine if you want to be 'elite!' and 'exclusive!' but perhaps not so fine if you want to feel something in your soooul.
This is why 'Hide Me' is slightly awesome. It's basically a bit like the Twin Peaks melody filtered through thick disco beats and with a breathless and intimate female vocal haunting the spaces between the grooves. What is the meaning of this? Beats me, but it's a strangely sad and moving record.
Ric Rawlins


Fenech Solar
Stop and Stare
(Moda Music)

Funnily enough, I was just saying to another staff member that "If I hear one more god-damn synth tune which pitches itself between melancholy and ultracool I'm gonna shoot someone!" So... eh... pass me the shotgun, Viv. I'm serious! Who's first! Eh? You want it?! You want it?!
Ric Rawlins


The Deer Tracks
Eggegrund EP
(Despotz Records/RSK Entertainment)
This EP grabs you from the offset, with the tight electronic beat, folky vocals and gentle melody of ‘Bless The Waves’. This trait of mixing the electronic with the romantic continues throughout, with The Deer Tracks developing the formula a little further each time, pushing you into a slightly dreamlike state of mind. Reminiscent of The Postal Service or more recently Owl City, The Deer Tracks have figured out a unique sound which works - even if it can feel overdone and washed out very quickly.
Emily Warner


Wild Palms
Deep Dive
(One Little Indian)

'80s nostalgia is both advancing and killing new music. The lyric “Facing away/away from today” is a curious snapshot of this song: are Wild Palms looking forwards or backwards?
The answer is both. In the opening instances, the guitars here match Nick Zinner or Interpol’s Daniel Kessler, the drawn-out vibrations shuddering as the drummer hammers away. It’s evocative stuff. Then the edgy post-punk guitars jump in and the track is shattered.
The sound that was constructed to signify the dissemination of society is now being used to signify the death of ideas; it seems the '80s nurtured teenage angst so well that nowadays sounds from the era are employed as signposts for frustration.
The track’s nadir comes when the lyrics turn to read the plot summery of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. It’s understandable for a band to critique modern society but how can anyone find life in 2010 more boring than the current 80’s revivalism? The idea that a band has returned back from a mammoth task in order to provide “something new’ is so vile and arrogant that it detracts from Gareth Jones’ meticulous production.
Samuel Breen


Villagers
Becoming a Jackal
(Domino)

This is so good that there's no reason why 6 Music shouldn’t use their (potentially) dying moments to solely plug this record. And nothing else.
Take the line, “Every implement was leading to you”; the elocution and emphasis are so perfectly on-target that Lee Hazelwood would cut a wry smile (were he not so very dead).
The lyrics breakdown into beguiling cyclical couplets that paint a mysterious picture for the listener to envelop themselves within. The group: bass, guitar, drums, piano perform a polite dance. But there’s nothing reserved or cautious in their parts, which roll back and forth mirroring the lyrical loops.
Impossibly digestible, this brand of psychedelia has not only the power to help people escape the drudgery of everyday life but the simplicity to reach a wide audience. This is an instant hit.
Samuel Breen


Sweet Sweet Lies
Overrated Girlfriend
(Dumb Angel)

It’s easy to imagine Sweet Sweet Lies being an appealing festival draw with their dastardly and dramatic inclinations, while the transition to record is one that suits them well.
The succinct, darkly humorous wordplay on offer here is backed by frantic Mariachi folk on ‘Overrated Girlfriend’ (which comes complete with trumpet bursts and strong group harmonies) and subdued tragi-comedy on 'The Day I Change'.
Recalling the narrative-based likes of Murder By Death and Nick Cave, you'd do well to investigate Sweet Sweet Lies' live show over the summer months.
Lewis Hingston


Hot Chip
I Feel Better
(Parlophone)

On the basis of this slightly meek classical-influenced fitness workout tune, I gotta say I’m finding it hard to join the Hot Chip Club. It’s smooth and summery as a fruit smoothie fer sure, and its sudden burst into samba drums is smile-teasingly welcome. But it’s a brief audio massage – and not the full body treatment.
Cindy Suzuki


The Brute Chorus
Could This Be Love
(Tape)

I’m of the opinion that lo-fi recordings can sometimes put you off half decent songs. This new single from Brute Chorus is a case in point; ‘Could This Be Love’ has a pretty slim rockabilly tune, but the production is so rudimentary that it has the effect of taking you further out of the song.
The quavering, curled lip vocal is followable enough, but the drums sound like they were recorded in a neighbouring school gym. Meanwhile, the bass and guitar feel like bacteria slithering down a septic tank.
Of course, this could all have been done for artistic reasons, to give a Suicide-like sense of menace - but it just ends up sounding ineffectual.
Stuart Gadd


O Children
Ruins
(Deadly People/Universal)

O Children. Ruins. I really shouldn’t have expected anything other than gloom-laden doom-pop. They wear their influences on their sleeves (and their record sleeves, which feature towering mountains, foreboding seas and apocalyptic rays of light) and they do what they want to do well.
Frontman Tobi O’Kandi’s voice slides from semi-fraught Jarvis Cocker-esque emotiveness to an (overly) grandiose bass and back again with control and panache. This is a stylish and slick song, harnessing the darker side of the Eighties, and with more than a hint of Echo & the Bunnymen’s 'The Killing Moon'. A fine single – but let’s hope they’ve got more than one string to their bow, as I doubt I could sit through an entire album of this.
Shan Vahidy