Artrocker Magazine’s Single Reviews for the week commencing February 7th

Toro Y Moi
Still Sound
(Car Park)

The ‘90s: Four Weddings was in cinemas. Britpop was kicking off. So was Acid Jazz. And I was actually alive to experience it! Not in a proper way, just buying CDs and that. I was too young to go to pop concerts. Still, I hear it was fun.
Toro Y Moi are brand spanking new, yet hark back to sunny stoner days of yore. Their infectious bass lines and funky percussion layered with rhythmic and softly psychedelic vocals make you feel like dabbling with dance in an embarrassingly experimental way.
Picture yourself at a rooftop party in Brooklyn with lots of trendy, sexy types who think you are Super Fly and you all move in slow motion and laugh in slow motion while smoking jazz cigarettes in slow motion. Yup, it feels just like I imagined Acid Jazz was in the ‘90s. Except without that twat in the Adidas trainers and silly hat.
Dave Depares


Young Magic
You With Air/Sparkly
(Carpark Records)

It takes a special talent to produce a record that best resembles a stroll through a slightly muggy field. We certainly wouldn’t know where to start, but it seems the best way of describing Young Magic’s opening gambit. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that stroll, you see, but it’s definitely uninspiring, and a little sunshine or some better scenery would improve the experience no end.
Second A-side ‘Sparkly’ is better, and the atmosphere that Young Magic are shooting for on both songs is better realised here. The backing vocals that feel whiny and repetitive on ‘You With Air’ become genuinely atmospheric here, as they’re joined intermittently with a cacophony of percussion that is a pleasure.
Simon Sandison


Fenech Soler
Demons
(B Unique Records)

At first glance my brain tells me this is an album. There’s eleven tracks. It has to be. But strangely, it isn’t; this record contains one tune, remixed ad nauseam.
Now, it would be unfair to say that you can’t polish a turd, but that phrase is far more appropriate than Feneche Soler’s apparent strategy, which is that there are ‘many ways to skin a cat’.
‘Demons’ has something going for it: the contemporary take on Art Deco on the front cover is genuinely enjoyable. But really when it comes to the music you’ve just got to ask… why?!
A lot of this stuff (and by ‘stuff’ I mean electropop) just gets flimsier and more pointless as the record unwinds. Here’s hoping that as the new decade kicks in, we’ll stop flogging the horse of the floaty-vocalled ‘80s.
Ed Spencer


Evryone
Flamingos
(Feraltone)

Wibbling about with vocal acrobatics is only a viable career choice, let’s face it, if you are an octogenarian diva. But then again, so is ingesting so much crack your face falls off or hiring a producer who will pimp you out sooner than lay down a single track. All the more reason, then, to leave it to the Faustian troglodytes on the X Factor.
It hasn’t stopped Evryone though. ‘Flamingo’ opens with lead singer Tom Andrews giving about thirty notes some welly, all the while sounding like a rapper trying to sing the chorus of one of his own songs, the life and soul fucked clean out by an autotune machine jammed on the Optimus Prime setting.
It gets no better with ‘Thrill Seeking’, which sounds like an oompah band covering Vampire Weekend, featuring a chorus as wafer thin as the vacuous dormitory-types it pitches itself to.
Dai Howells


Drugg
Shackled EP
(Less Music)

Hypnotic and euphoric, the fuzzy electronica of Drugg is as captivating as it comes. With vocals that are barely audible beneath the hazy reverb and some truly haunting samples, a spine tingling atmosphere is created that's both warm and comforting.
The stand out track is a minimal piece of post-rock genius called 'Crooks' - rarely has music sounded so epic and huge.
This isn't to say that Drugg have created something especially original, but they have created something that’s boundaries lies way beyond the horizon.
Lee Puddefoot


Turbogeist
Alien Girl
(Big Meanie)

“Met a girl from outer space. She had a shiny nipple in the middle of her face.” And so begins Alien Girl, the tawdriest tale of intergalactic lust ever shat onto a compact disk.
Linking lyrics that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Busted album, or even just a busted album, with loud-louder-shout song setup, the record sounds like it was plucked clean up from an early noughties bargain bin. There is, however, some solace in the bands true punk ethic, in that the song is under two and a half minutes.
Vitriolic B-Side ‘Rats’, however, thankfully justifies the Misfits and Replacements comparisons, being a brilliantly violent outburst that all but dispels the aural gonorrhoea that is its predecessor.
Dai Howells


Innerpartysystem
American Trash
(Red Bull Records)

There is a certain strain of fantastically filthy electronica that has stubbornly refused to go away for the best part of five years. Equal parts drum and base and garage rock, with ‘American Trash’ Innerpartysystem have turned out the kind of record bound to draw the too-trendy onto the dancefloor now that the Klaxons aren’t cool anymore. It plays like an electro shopping list: beats dropping all over the show and synths whistling in and out like an army of casios. Unfortunately the overly earnest interlude in which lead singer Patrick Nissley does his best boyband impersonation threatens to derail the whole enterprise, but the shuddering and jerking beats return soon enough to let us forget the oversight.
Simon Sandison