Indie track
Track: Kaktus Einarsson – ‘Kick The Ladder’; Fufanu frontman steps out with intelligent, post-rock pop
YES, THERE are glacial guitars; deep, granular textures, broad-spectrum instrumental effects that see you soaring over the landscape in your mind’s eye; it would be all too easy to stop here and reference back to fellow countrymen Sigur Rós. But then the sweet male vocal makes itself known and the dramatic scenery of the song …
Track: Little Arrow – ‘Poetically Diseased’ (Live at Four Bars, Cardiff, 2014): potent live take heralds the tenth anniversary rerelease of ‘Music, Masks & Poems’
HAILING from far out west in deepest Pembrokeshire, Little Arrow began making waves on the Welsh scene a decade back with a fully musically and emotionally realised debut album, Music, Masks & Poems. Tragically, Little Arrow’s frontman William Hughes died of cancer in December 2018, cutting short the career of a band with real depth …
Track: Tarragon – ‘Follow The Sign’: Coventry songwriter calls on a host of greats for his shimmering debut
YOU’VE got a musical vision, a wish to create, that keeps you going through the grind of the everyday but which you can’t ever quite shift off the back burner? Focus on it, bend your will to it, make it happen: that’s a lesson we can all take from Coventry’s Callum Pickard, the man behind …
See: The lyric video for the tumbling odd-folk of Yves Jarvis’ ‘Body Of Work’
YVES JARVIS is the artist and autodidact Jean-Sébastien Audet who, in a pseudo-Bill Callahanesque move, came out from behind his Un Blonde facemask after 2016’s excellent Good Will Come To You (according to his personal colour palette, it was bathed in yellow, for optimism), reborn with a new name. Over here at Backseat Mafia we adored his …
Album review: New Bums – ‘Last Time I Saw Grace’: Ben and Donovan reveal an unexpected treat
Last Time I Saw I Grace reveals more depth than the two single drops really hinted it contained; yeah sure, there’s cracking moments of that raggedy-assness, but the run of wider-screen psych-country and other tracks are deft and prettily arranged, less … excellently thrown down than you might expect. It probably isn’t the kind of album that throws you back against the wall at some party downtown for a ruby-red lipped snog; but it very much is the kind of album you end up on a spontaneous road trip with, or hanging with on a rainy Sunday, and realised you had deep feelings for all along.
Premiere: Ted Barnes feat. Kristin McClement – ‘Metal Man’: a dusky tale of yearning from Clayhill’s quiet genius
WE’VE been quietly adoring the erm, quietly very adorable work which Ted Barnes, the one-time Clayhill singer, who literally did run away and join the circus after that band broke up a decade and half ago now, has been dropping over past weeks in the run-up to the release of his first album in too …
Track: LENU – ‘Vulnerable’: an emotional synthpop rush from Come Play With Me’s singles club
COME PLAY WITH ME, the excellent grassroots label, magazine, festival organiser and all-round good eggs doing the right work in keeping the Yorkshire music scene vibrant, runs a singles club, CPWM. Its first release of the year is a split 7″ featuring Sunflower Thieves, whose side of the vinyl “Don’t Mind The Weather” we looked …
Track: Home Counties – ‘White Shirt / Clean Shirt’: another punk-funk capitalist critique from brilliant Bristolians
FRESHLY pressed and starched, collars buttoned just so, Home Counties are back pursuing an ever more addictive, spasming line in capitalist critique encapsulated in wiry, fractured punk-funk. It’s like The Fire Engines were back among us, and hell we needed this. “White Shirt / Clean Shirt” continues their Beckettian lyrical railing against the rat race, …
Track: Mint Julep’s ‘Pulse’ is a drop of electro-shoegaze brilliance
MINT JULEP, the halcyon, dreamy musical confection of Hollie and Keith Kenniff (aka Goldmind), are to release a new album, In a Deep & Dreamless Sleep, on Western Vinyl on March 19th; and one listen to the gorgeous “Pulse”, the new single, and you’ll see how deliciously apt a title they’ve picked. Beginning in clicky …
Track: Bleach Lab – ‘Flood’; a final shoegaze shimmer ahead of their debut EP
FIRST things first: we’ve got a bit of a crush on Bleach Lab. The Buckinghamshire dreampop outfit fronted by Jenna Kyle who now call South London home have just dropped one final single ahead of their debut EP, A Calm Sense of Surrounding, out in just ten days; it’s called “Flood”, it’s a heavier confection …