video
TRACK: Emmy the Great’s ‘Dandelions/Liminal’ is intelligent and breezy
BELLA UNION’S Emmy the Great has had a major shift in consciousness and the place she calls home since her last album, Second Love, back in 2016. Born in Hong Kong, Emma Lee-Moss (for it is she) moved to London with her parents at the end of the city’s loaned colonial status; more recently she …
See: Wye Oak’s ‘AEIOU’ spells out the inadequacy of language
BALTIMORE’S Wye Oak are on a real creative roll. The stylistically free-grazing duo of Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack have released a video for “AEIOU”, a taster for their new EP for Merge, No Horizon, which is due out on July 31st. It’s composed of a beautiful animated line drawing to convey the lyrics, put …
SEE: Guided by Voices’ ‘Haircut Sphinx’
THERE’S every chance that by the time you’ve finished reading this sentence Guided By Voices will have recorded and released their next three albums, such is their legendary work ethic and productivity. I don’t recall reading a single feature on Robert Pollard which hasn’t focused on this incredible feat of industriousness (107 albums and counting); …
SEE: Ditz’s ‘Role Model’ is righteously noisy
BRIGHTON noiseniks Ditz have finally come down from the world of download-only and brought us five tracks of guitar-killin’ wax, in the shape of the 5 Songs EP. They’ve released a video for “Role Model”, taken from the EP, and it’s a very fine 129 seconds of towering guitar abuse. The track sneaks on a …
SEE: Martha – ‘Her Name’s December’: a singer to watch
UP AND coming British singer-songwriter Martha cut her musical teeth singing out from the depth of her heart in church, aged just 9. She began writing her own material at just 13 and, drawing on a love of acts such as Florence and the Machine and Aurora, brings the big-horizon emotion to her debut EP, …
SEE: Ganser’s ‘Emergency Equipment & Exits’ explores just walking away
ILLINOIS quartet Ganser have just released their second single of 2020, “Emergency Equipment & Exits”, an exploration of that universal human experience, the sudden, instinctual urge to just up and leave; and what would happen if you gave into that urge? The video to the song, beautifully self-directed by the band, finds the quartet in …
See: The Institutes release video for ‘Heal In Time’
If it wasn’t enough that The Institutes released one of the singles of the year so far – a jingle jangly hyper-delight of of a tune – they have added a suitably effervescent video for it. ‘Heal In Time’ (reviewed by me earlier this month) gets me feeling all nostalgic for a certain guitar-based buzz …
SEE: Fenne Lily -‘To Be A Woman Pt. 2’: whispered caution, guitars fizzing
BRISTOL is a city that has really pulled its weight in modern musical culture; there’s no need to list all those paradigm-shifters that have come from the Avon Valley. One of the rising stars of the Bristol scene, 2020 vintage, is the Dorset-born singer-songwriter Fenne Lily, who has shared the video for “To Be A …
SEE: The Illness – ‘Phrases Redacted’: Silver Jews’ Bob lets the free association flow
THE ILLNESS are a collective of musicians who have been seeping towards our consciousness for a while. The band is drawn from musicians from the stable of York’s Sea Music label. Based at various location along that English longitudinal arc, down the years they have played with psych-pop cultist Kelley Stoltz, among many others. We …
TRACK: Sing Leaf – ‘Sunshine’: let the leftfield psych-pop rays in
CANADIAN artist David Como has a real outsider charm. No: not outsider in the sense of coming from a place of jagged, idiolectal compulsion; more an arrival in a glade of musical prettiness with an absolute, naive joy of discovery. With one album under his belt for Tin Angel, 2018’s Shu Ra, David is ready …