Loud And Quiet 49 – Solange

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 49 / the alternative music tabloid

L o u d A n d Q u i et at P r i m av e r a s o u n d w ith

S o l an g e Merchandise Th e H a x a n C l o a k Pa nth a D u P r i n c e Killer Mike M ETZ G o at Disclosure P l u s: Jon Hopkins Bishop Nehru Te r r o r B i r d

Contents June 2013

09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . One More Mime The knife pretending to play live is fine by austin laike

1 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . s i n g l e s & b oo k s the month’s single and book reviews, from sqürl, forrests, glass animals and more

12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . g etti ng to kno w you

cover photography Laura Coulson

9 artists from the primavera bill share their past holiday highs and lows Contact info@loudandquiet.com

Jon hop ki ns . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 sam walton lets jon hopkins, producer to coldplay and brian eno, do the talking in his hackney studio

te rror b i rd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Nikki Nevver makes beautifully austere post-pop with what she has - GarageBand and personal turmoil

b ishop n e h ru . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 Bishop Nehru is in love with the golden age of hip-hip

M e rchan dise . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Tampa ex-punks Merchandise discuss keeping their music free via a dodgy Russian website and turning away from hardcore

m e tz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 10 minutes with Canadian grunge punks METZ, as short and sharp as their vicious debut album

pantha du p ri nce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Chal Ravens and Hendrik Weber talk bells

disclosu re . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Between flights and sunrise live sets, they talk Sam Walton through their plan to imitate The Artful Dodger

Th e haxan cloak . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Sound Art graduate Bobby Krlic doesn’t care if you like his music

g o at . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 0

Loud And Quiet PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Editor - Stuart Stubbs Art Director - Lee Belcher Sub Editor - Alex Wilshire film editor - Ian roebuck Advertising advertise@loudandquiet.com Contributors Bart Pettman, Carl Partridge, Chal Ravens, Chris Watkeys, Cochi Esse, Daniel Dylan Wray, Danny Canter, DAVID Sutheran, DK Goldstien, Elinor Jones, elliot kennedy, Edgar Smith, Frankie Nazardo, Gareth Arrowsmith, Janine Bullman, LEE BULLMAN, Kate Parkin, Kelda Hole, Gabriel Green, Gemma Harris, Leon Diaper, Luke Winkie, Mandy Drake, Matthias Scherer, Nathan Westley, Owen Richards, Olly Parker, PAVLA KOPECNA, Polly Rappaport, Phil Dixon, Phil Sharp, Reef Younis, Samuel ballard, Sam Walton, Sonia Melot, sonny McCartney, Tim Cochrane This Month L&Q Loves Beba Naveira, Ben Ayres, ben harris, Beth drake, Ivano Maggiulli, Kathryne Chalker, Keong Woo, Liv Willars, Leah Wilson, Matt Hughes, Rachel Silver, Pablo Soler The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opini ons of the magazine or its staff.

All rights reserved 2013 Loud And Quiet.

ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Sharman & Company LTD.

Finally, we get to speak to Goat, moments before they deliver the most cosmic live show of the weekend

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ki lle r m i ke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Albums & Live . . . 44

A success 9 years in the making, Killer Mike has earned the right to be completely unapologetic

the month’s key releases, plus a report from primavera, porto

solang e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

party w olf . . . . . 50

10 years and 2 albums into her tricky career, Solange it doing everything by herself

Idiot Tennis, Thought sport, the drunk world of ian beale

www.loudandquiet.com

Right - disclosure Left - Solange below - killer mike

welcome Two years ago I met Pablo Soler, one third of the founding team behind Primavera Sound. We had lunch together on the second day of the festival, where he filled me in on how in 11 years Primavera had gone from an Armand Van Helden gig for 3000 people to the world’s most desirable alternative music event, which now spans a week in total.

At the tail end of last year, Pablo got back in touch to ask whether Loud And Quiet would be interested in being the UK media partner of Primavera 2013, which is a bit like asking Robbie Williams if he’d like to be popular again.

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This month’s issue is largely dedicated to the festival and its fledgling counterpart, Optimus Primavera Sound, Porto, because that’s where we put a fair whack of it together. Relocating to Barcelona – and then Portugal – and letting the bands come to you, it should be a walk in the park, but it’s their holiday, too, and confirming face time can be next to impossible when there’s a beach over there and a bunch of old friends in the bar. Our big catches include Killer Mike and Solange, both of which vetoed all other press engagements while in the Catalan capital. It’s hardly any wonder – Mike doesn’t even own a phone, so arranging a chat with him turned into a two-hour stakeout by the side of the stage he was playing on. Solange, on the other hand, was flying in the day of her show and out the following morning to play London’s own Field Day festival, a schedule bettered by one by Disclosure who bounced from Barcelona to London to Derry, Ireland, for Radio 1’s One Big Weekend over the bank holiday.

Bands make Primavera work. “The most important thing we’ve learned in ten years is that the bands you’re working with have to be happy,” Pablo had told me in 2011.

“If they have a good time they’ll want to come back and they’ll tell their friends to come and play Primavera.” James Blake proved the point with secret extravagance this year, when his and all other flights out of Heathrow were cancelled due to the emergency landing of a plane on the airport’s runway. Blake’s answer was to charter a private jet that cost him his Primavera fee, meaning he’d essentially chosen to play for free over missing the show altogether. There aren’t many musicians that would do that, and even fewer festivals worth doing it for.

Stuart Stubbs

The Beginning June 2013

Mime watch : our top 3 lip-syncing videos 01

R K e l ly p e r f or ming ‘ T r a p p e d in t he c l o s e t ’ ( M TV V M A s 2 0 0 5 )

One More Mime

Illustration by Jade Spranklen – www.spranklen.com

the knife pretending to play live is fine by austin laike Ever since it’s been laid to tape, people have mimed to music. I do it at weddings; mainstream pop stars become adept at it between dance class and promo boot camp; in no time at all Top Of The Pops insisted on it. In the world of drag acts, the best lip-sync artist is queen, but it’s not that way in alternative music, where ability to play live, or at least some concerted effort to, ensures realness.

12 May 2013: The Knife challenge this notion as they unveil their new conceptual show at The Roundhouse, Camden, London – a performance dubbed 40% live music, 60% interpretive dance by a generous few; an optimistic figure on the live side. It took just three songs for the Swedish duo to confirm the audience’s suspicions that they might not be doing too much playing up there, as instruments were cleared from the stage altogether but the music continued to play. Nine silhouetted figures danced around, presumably two of them Karin and Olof Dreijer, although this was never wholeheartedly confirmed. Feeling duped, a lot of the crowd were pretty pissed off; a large chunk left well before the end.

Two weeks later, the band repeated the trick at Primavera Sound, with one slight alteration – for one track Karin Dreijer would sit at a piano and play, clearly showing her face to assure us that The Knife were at least with us. Then more dancing. It worked for a part, although most things do at 4am in Barcelona, and that’s not to say that there weren’t plenty of detractors who still felt like the con was on.

Few people saw the humour in what The Knife were doing; fewer still appreciated the concept behind it of dethroning the popstar – the band’s refusal to step forward and have all eyes on them when their accompanying dancers could move just as well, or better, even. The routines themselves were, after all, group efforts. For the thought behind the performance, though, it was its clear sense of childish fun that challenged cries of fraud the most. It was a giddy show to dance to as much as it was one to ponder and

decode. It was a laugh. Where the music was coming from wasn’t really the point. In that sense, it reminded me of many other electronic shows I’ve been to, where the ‘live’ aspect of the routine is rarely pulled into question as thousands of people go mental to songs they love played on speakers that would destroy their houses. The Knife simply added an extra element to many other dance setups (an expressionistic one that is itself unquestionably live), which has ended up highlighting how synthetic the backing track is. Miming their instruments for the opening numbers hasn’t helped in that regard either, yet had they pressed play from behind a tabletop of wires and flashing LEDs – had they openly billed their new show as a serious, po-faced dance set – the authenticity and origin of the sound probably wouldn’t have been challenged at all.

Of course when you pay to see some live music, you expect just that, but it’s as if fans of The Knife forgot what band they’d invested in – a conscientious and political group, but an experimental, avant-garde one, too. Presumably, Bjork shows don’t usually end with people complaining that it was a bit weird. And while many believed to have been cheated

by The Knife, you’ve got to ask if a duo who’ve taken seven years to write a new album as progressive as ‘Shaking The Habitual’ would really be so careless when presenting that work to the world.

Miming is like autotune – inexcusable if it’s done on the sly. But just as Drake and T Pain robo-gurgle with audacious flare, The Knife’s current live show makes no real attempt to fool us. Rather it blatantly pokes fun at live music in general – the odd ritual of watching a band recreate our favourite records in the dark as accurately as possible – while concerning itself more with interpretive dance than the music soundtracking the twirling bodies onstage. That, it seems, is a hard sell for music fans, harder than The Knife could have expected, but it’s safe to say that the joke was never on us.

As if the plot of ‘Trapped In The Closet’ wasn’t hard enough to follow, R Kelly insisting on taking his mental breakdown to the live stage of the VMAs had him playing all the parts (gay lovers Rufus and Chuck, some cow called Cathy and the bloke in the cupboard) in a suit from Jacamo. Piling on the mad, the backing track frequently runs away from him as he throws pillows around the stage and eventually joins in miming again, straight-faced to his deranged credit.

Rufus goes back to Cathy in the end. I know, crazy, right?

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ASHLEE s imp s on perf orming ‘Autobiogr aphY ’ ( S at ur d ay Nigh t L i v e 2 0 0 4 ) You’re on prime time television with your band; Jude Law’s there and introduces you.

Your backing track plays but it’s the wrong song so it’s quickly dipped down again.

What do you do? What you don’t do is an Irish jig as your band style it out, wander off stage and marry Pete Wentz! That was a bad idea, Ashlee, but not as bad as blaming your band at the end of the show. Jude looked sad.

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Nir va n a p e r f or ming ‘ Sme l l s l ik e T e e n S p ir i t ’ ( t op of t he p op s 19 9 1) Dave Grohl took performing ‘Teen Spirit’ on TOTP very seriously indeed – it looks like he’s actually playing. Meanwhile, Kurt Cobain (providing the only live element of the performance) delivered his lyrics like a sleazy cruise ship compare, changing the opening line to “Load up on drugs/Kill your friends”. Best of all is Krist Novoselic’s take on mime – he just repeatedly throws his bass guitar in the air. Take that, The Man! (Nirvana went on to sell 10 billion records).

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The Beginning Singles & Books

by L ee B u l l m a n

EP#1

by SQüRL

( AT P )

Released now

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Wilder EP by forrests

Black mambo

by Glass Animals

( BLA S TFI R S T P ETITE ) Released June 17

( W o l f T o n e ) Released June 17

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The kind of electronic music that Irish duo Forrests make is best suited to headphones, piped deep into your grey matter as you sink into your carpet at home. Chances are it’d also take your breath away played at an ungodly volume in a field or club. Their trick is a neat one – to take the jittery field recording qualities of Sigur Ros, mash them with the warm static glow of Fuck Buttons and edit out the often arduous build up of each.

The best tracks on ‘Wilder’ jump straight into the drop, while songs like ‘Arterial’ and ‘Latitude’ act as soft beds of ambience. Luscious noisegaze spliced into its parts.

It’s difficult to tell if a Paul Epworth endorsement has ballooned or tanked in value since he won a million Grammy’s. I mean, does it matter if he now backs a lame horse – the guy wrote ‘Rolling In The Deep’. ‘Black Mambo’ is to be the very first release on his new Wolf Tone label, from brainy sounding indie band Glass Animals. Sonically, they’re not a million miles away from an Alt-J support act, in as much as they’re more about subtle details and steady pace than bombast and obvious flare. Vocally they’re smoother, and err more on the side of white soul. Nice one Epworth.

If I Was To by brtsh knights

(Technicolour) Released June 10

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Sink/Swim

by Elliott Power

Beehive Queen

by The wytches

( M a r a t h o n Ar t i s t s ) Released June 24

(hate hate hate) Released now

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On this, his debut single, west London artist Elliott Power sporadically drops in a dancehall verse from an unaccredited guest while he himself whisper-speaks like a sexed-up Justin Timberlake.

As something resembling a chorus bubbles up on such a soul-savvy track, Power is suddenly more Craig David than anyone else, making ‘Sink/Swim’ a curious R&B song that feels decidedly British but is clearly inspired by the sheen of the States. There’s a lot of this kind of thing going on right now – bedroom-produced, post-GarageBand soul-pop that could easily be a decent enough JT album track.

E ne r g y f l a s h B Y s imon r e y nol d s (faber & Faber)

‘EP #1’ is the 4-track debut release from SQüRL, a collaborative project from filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, movie producer Carter Logan and studio engineer Shane Stoneback, a man instrumental in giving us ‘Oops!... I Did It Again’. SQüRL are more Grinderman than Britney, playing broken guitars through broken amps for a cracked, thick, sludgy brand of country rock and, on ‘Pink Dust’, French movie samples. It’s a pleasingly grotty noise for three songs, clearly played by aging dudes, until the closer offers an odd curveball of ambient drones that ruins the fun.

Think of the most regressive, retrograde music you can. The type of music obsessed with the past, sick of all this new stuff that you can’t even whistle anymore. Got it?

You’re thinking of indie, right? Or rock, or whatever, but guitars basically? It’s a fair assumption, but dance music is just as prone to hankering for the good old days, it’s just that we still think of computerised music as inventive.

Well, not always. Here’s Brtsh Knights, a south London collective with a debut single so indebted to classic house and ’90s garage you’ll find it crawling the streets of Southend in a lowered Nova.

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The Wytches combine ’50s surf rock with doom rock and a very White Stripes vocal delivery.

‘Beehive Queen’ also sounds a bit like the Arctic Monkeys album that no one liked – the Josh Homme one.

They’re a trio from Peterborough who’ve moved to Brighton, minus their second guitarist and fourth member Mark Breed who’s a little agoraphobic so only rejoins his old pals when they’re playing a show back home.

It’s a point worth mentioning because it’s the most interesting thing about the band who do get a little better on ‘Crying Clown’, a heavy ballad for cartoon goths.

Energy Flash is an updated and muchimproved take on the Simon Reynolds’ indepth look at the ’90s dance music explosion and the effects its scenes had on wider popculture in general. As always with Reynolds, the research underpinning the book is second to none and his approach here, presenting the book as part memoir/part journalism, allows him to discuss his subject matter with humility, insider knowledge and what feels like sincere love. First published in 1998, it takes in all of the musical substrata you would expect, from Chicago House to Detroit Techno, right up to America’s new infatuation with EDM. A fascinating and in-depth look at how musical scenes can develop, sub-divide and take on a life of their own.

Wa i t s / C or bi jn ‘ 7 7- ’11 B Y a n t on c or bi jn a nd t om wa i t s (Schirmer/Mosel)

Tom Waits is the coolest man on earth and that’s a stone cold scientific fact. If you are not yet fully of this opinion then Anton Corbijn’s new book of photographs, produced in collaboration with Waits (who supplies the accompanying thoughts and musings) might go some way toward convincing you. Corbijn and Waits have been working together now for thirty five years and perusing the 200 plus portraits included in this beautiful linen-bound collection it is easy to see why. Both photographer and subject seem to bring out the best in each other and the occasionally unsettling but always compelling phantasmagorias they create together go way beyond the usual pop fare. There is dark humour and grit here, but beauty too. Quick though, there’s only 6,600 copies out there.

All single reviews by Danny Canter

The Beginning Getting To Know You

confettis floating everywhere around us, and the most colorful, trippiest and sexiest video projections were behind us. I think I’ll never do that drug again ‘cause it’ll never be as magical. We ended up at the house playing a new kind of avant garde Petanque, really loopy rules and we damaged quite a bit of the backyard throwing metals balls everywhere.

The holiday ended in the morning with us kind of sneaking out of the messed up house, a dive in the Indian Ocean, some shark fish and chips for breakie and a 5 hours drive back to Perth in a really calm, peaceful atmosphere.

Chris Slorach of METZ This is kind of the best and the worst because it was coming back from a really really great trip but when boarding the aeroplane climbing up the stairs to get onto the plane, this woman just collapsed and completely decked it in front of me. Crumpled on the floor she pissed herself. Obviously we tried to help her up but in picking her up and trying to help my hands were just covered piss. It was gross.

Nathan Hewitt of Cheatahs

Cayucus

The best holiday I went on was when I was 19 and left Canada for Europe with my cousin, Pete. We spend some time in Germany and after 3 weeks in Italy he went back home. I headed south to Sicily and climbed a volcano. A few weeks later I found myself in London looking for work. I found a job at a pub in Camden, which is where I met [Cheatahs guitarist] James and my now wife Jessica. That was 10 years ago. Longest holiday I’ve ever been on. Still feels like I left home yesterday. What a trip!

My best holiday experience was when I was around 10 years old. My family and I went to Sun River Oregon for a summer vacation. Sun River is beautiful – there are bike paths all throughout the town, inactive volcanoes you can walk through, and a chocolate candy shop in the middle of town.

Luckily for us, we brought our bikes, and when we arrived we signed up for a local bike race for kids ages 10-12, I think. My brother and I showed up for the race on our Huffy dirt bikes, wearing loose fitting helmets. We were surrounded by kids in spandex on european race bikes. I remember being really nervous, and feeling like I wanted to win. We lined up, I heard a whistle and began pedaling as fast as I possibly could. I was breathing so hard, I never looked back. I crossed the finish line and heard a guy on the loudspeaker announce first place. My brother was right behind me but I think he took third. I won a pair of sunglasses. That was my first blue ribbon as well as my last, thus making this my greatest vacation experience.

The Haxan Cloak

Killer Mike Best vacation I’ve ever had was going to Tampa, Florida, with my grandparents as a kid. That was an annual trip. I’d tie that with my wife taking me on my first cruise to Jamaica and the Bahamas. Probably the worst vacation I ever had was probably the first day of the Coachella Cruise when me and my wife were arguing all day. We argued like fuck all day. It was like, “fuck you”, “no, fuck you”, but the next three days were awesome. But that first day, we were just at each other.

My best and worst days have been with my wife.

Melody’s Echo Chamber Our Sweet Jodie [tour manager to Tame Impala] surprised us by renting a mini van and getting passes to go see the Flaming Lips play DownSouth (W. Australia). We got delicious snacks including smoked cheddar, crackers and ginger beers and everyone had prepared their best road trip playlist. Some classic autobahn tunes like Neu’s ‘Hallo Gallo’ and more epic ones like ‘In The Court of Crimson King’ were blasted. I also endured a couple of Australian ACDC hits.

We’re staying at a pretty holiday house where friends had already started to party. I’m usually not into drugs but I decided it was the perfect environment to experiment and I took acid for the first time in my life, right before heading to the Flips gig. We couldn’t drive the van and the gig’s place was a 30min walk via road, but only 10 minutes if we took a shortcut through an endless swamp. Me and two other Frenchy chickens started to freak out cause we know that the

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Pantha du Prince

Summer Lovin’ 9 Artists from The PRimavera Sound bill share their past holiday highs and lows most dangerous species live everywhere in Australia, but the confident Aussies convinced us somehow that it was totally fine. We had to take our shoes off and walk through the swamp’s dirty old waters and mud. I panicked half way through, realising how dangerous it probably was and my friend had to carry me on his back, and once we got on the normal road they finally admitted that it totally was the most dangerous snake-house ever and laughed at our French tight asses and shocked faces. We could not believe how casual they were about it. Nevertheless it ended up being hilarious as no one died. The real trip kicked in after members of The Flaming Lips asked us to wear ridiculous costumes and dance side of stage for their whole gig, which was totally unexpected. We obviously agreed and had 5 minutes to get a costume together but the crazy fans already got the best ones (the Sexy Bees outfit) – I only found some fluro hairy bits and pieces and a weird medieval dress (?). On stage, I realized my friend Joe was inside a hilarious giant inflated Sumo costume and the song ‘Race for the Prize’ was blasting out of the speaker right behind us. All of my best friends were dancing and endlessly laughing together with a bzillion

I don’t do much holidays. I try to be on holiday all the time. I really try to keep the balance so I don’t need a holiday. I mean, staying two weeks at the beach and reading a book?

I’m working every day, but when I don’t want to work anymore I stop. Sometimes it gets heavier and you see you’re in this circle of things and they’re eating you up, and you have to say stop, phone off, autoreply to emails. But it’s not that I’m then going on holiday, it’s more that I’m just off.

Hayden Menzies of METZ I’ve not really been on many vacations, but this one was a good one. I went on a survival holiday to the Amazon with my Dad. He’s really into that shit, you know building your own tents, eating ants and stuff. We had some brief preparation about the area and stuff, then got taken out on a boat and then it was like “fuck you”, they dropped you off and just left you for two days in the middle of nowhere. It was cool, but my Dad is kind of old so I had to take care of him a lot, but it was good to make him happy.

Solange I would have to say my best holiday was actually living in Paris for the summer with my son and my boyfriend. I’d travelled there tons of times but I’d never actually immersed myself in the culture, and that was just a really dreamy time. I was obsessed with Ella Fitzgerald and reading a couple of biographies about her, so I hit all of the landmarks that she did when she was there. My son also speaks French and there were some moments that I could never imagine happening, like I wanted to get my hair braided and he went into a salon and negotiated for me. All of those little moments were very simple but very special. As for my worst holiday, I feel so Disney being like, ‘I haven’t had a bad holiday’, but honestly, I’m trying to think of one. I’m sorry, I feel really wack for not being able to give one.

Illustration by Jade Spranklen – www.spranklen.com

My worst holiday experience would probably be going to Newquay with my friend after my GCSE’s and their A-Levels.

We went to this kind of 18-30’s surfing lodge and because we were the youngest there, I don’t think any of us were even 18, they kind of walked all over us and when we got there they said, ‘oh there’s been a problem with your room, but we’ve got this lovely caravan in the garden that you can all stay in’. Honest to God, man, it was like someone’s dead Granddad’s fucking caravan with mould everywhere and this really weird fucking odour in it. We slept in it for a couple of nights and then we said to them, ‘dude, it still smells really weird in here’, and they were like, ‘oh yeah there’s a gas leak’, so we’d just been sitting in a gas-filled caravan the whole time. Needless to say they upgraded us to some pretty sweet accommodation after that, so maybe that’s both the best and the worst.

Producer to Coldplay and Brian Eno, Jon Hopkins’ most beautiful and stunning work to date is his own ‘Immunity’ LP, released this month to the delight of IMD fans. Sam Walton met the one-time Imogen Heap keyboardist in his Hackney studio to let him do the talking

Jon Hopkins on...

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... experiencing music as a musician

...Brian Eno

...the writing process

“One thing about playing loads of gigs is that unfortunately it takes the fun out of going to them – it feels like work. I guess I’m just not as young as I used to be – I’m 33 – and the joys of spending three days at a festival is just not as appealing anymore. I get a huge amount of joy from writing music and performing it, but I don’t want to spend all my free time listening to it.

That’s why I’ve never been a DJ, because I don’t want to go out of my way to look for other people’s music.

“That said, in certain situations I’m capable of being totally transported – particularly when hungover or on a train journey, when you have a clear bit of time and you can’t do anything else.You just put the headphones on and enjoy the scenery.That’s a great thing to do. But to be honest, at home – my girlfriend’s a musician as well – we don’t tend to sit there listening to music. We watch films or, hey, maybe even have a chat, or a game of chess! The trouble is that, even when I’m not in the studio, whether I want it to or not, my brain will still be going over the same thing I’ve been listening to all day.

Brian Eno’s ambient records work as a sort of neutral mindspace to help stop that constant working: it gives my subconscious enough to chew over in the background without it getting in the way of my normal functioning.”

“It was 2003, and I was only 23, when I started working with him. It was scary walking into his studio, but then he shook my hand and went back to reading the paper, and I quickly realised there was no need to be worried.

Once we got into the actual music bit, too, I was even less worried because he’s all about improvisation, and I’ve been doing that all my life and it’s what I love doing.

He’s the opposite of that intimidating character that some people have him painted as; he’s got the filthiest sense of humour you’ll ever come across, swears his head off and gets up to ridiculous stuff. He’s about my dad’s age, and he’s got a pretty enviable life: he travels the world, writes music, does art installations, does whatever he wants. I wouldn’t say he’s a close personal friend but I’ve experienced enough time with him to realise he has a good time and he’s a pretty liberated man – it’d be nice to think that I could have that much time at that age.”

“I went to music college and was taught theory, but I discarded all of that when it came to writing because I always wanted to play by ear – for me it was about following instincts. I have perfect pitch – and I don’t understand the purpose of it, from an evolutionary point of view – which means if I have an idea I can just play it.

Then the sounds-making side is just self-taught anyway, and after 14 years of doing that I’ve generally got the gist. So those two things sort of combine and allow me to realise things very instinctively.”

www.loudandquiet.com

...starting afresh “I didn’t want to start making the new record from zero with the same studio that I had on my last album. I had to get new stuff, so I bought this old analogue synth, which was new territory for me. That was the biggest change, studio-wise. I really liked a lot of what people like James Holden and Luke Abbot were doing with their vintage equipment – the tempo and humansounding grooves, none of the one-dimensional cold flatness that you get if you use virtual instruments. So it was a case of really trying to learn from scratch how stuff like that works, try to make things that sound physical, and then obviously putting my own stamp on it – it has opened a new world.”

p h o t o g r a p h e r - L e e G o l dup

...albums

...track titles

“I don’t care if no-one in the world is left listening to full albums – I’m always going to do them because I just think it’s a great format, and the perfect length of time to get your full story across. I always love writing tracks bearing in mind specifically what’s gone before and what’s coming after.With each album, about two months before mastering, I decide the order and then after that point everything’s done with that order in mind, altering the dynamics of the tracks and what have you so that everything flows a little better.”

“Boards of Canada’s track titles are amazing – names like ‘Over The Horizon Radar’ are so poetic. It’s an area where I feel I’ve always let myself down and I really wanted to try harder this time. The thing is, I’m not a words person, so I invited a friend – a poet called Rick Holland – to come round, get drunk, listen to the tracks loads and just chat, and between us we came up with the titles. He’d note something I’d said, and I’d have no idea I’d said it, and he’d be like, ‘you said this earlier’ and I’d be like, ‘oh fuck that’s quite good!’. We adapted stuff from poems of his that I love too. I’ve liked about half of my previous titles before, but with this one, I love all eight titles, because they feel like they are the tracks.”

...shifting time “I’m really obsessed with the idea of time-shifting, and not really knowing where time has gone. I like the idea of having looping sections that add one or two extra bars each time it loops, so it lets you down very gradually, and before you know it the sun has come up.That’s what [‘Immunity’ album track] ‘Sun Harmonics’ is trying to do, but I had to wait until the ghost of Ibiza Chill Album Volume 94 had really departed before I gave it a go. I wanted to make a track like ‘Halcyon’ and ‘On & On’ by Orbital – it’s 12 minutes long, it’s very very druggy sounding stuff.”

...falling asleep to his records

... electronic music with flaws “My biggest aim with music is to keep it sounding human. I believe very strongly that technology, when used to enhance things that are naturally there, is amazing, and I love that combination of digital and analogue. But when you go purely digital, it’s just so binary sounding – over the years the sound quality capabilities have increased in the equipment but the emotional quality of the music hasn’t improved with it – in fact it’s lessened.

“I’m really drawn to imperfections. For example on [‘Immunity’ album track] ‘Collider’ – the beast of the album, the centre-piece track – there’s a kick-drum on every beat, but the third kick drum is really late, and that third beat is really disorientating, in a good way – like when something’s off and you don’t quite know why or how. I love that.

“The beats too are all humanly generated – most of them are me just hitting the studio desk or playing shakers, and then processed. Like, the beats on the track ‘Immunity’ is the pedals of my piano, which has this lovely creaking sound. My piano tuner guy is always offering to fix it, but I have to stop him.”

writer - Sam W a lton

“I really want people to fall asleep listening to ‘Immunity’ – that’s what’s supposed to happen! Before we went to master it, I just came in to the studio, put the album on and lay down with a blanket to test it out.The first four tracks you can’t turn off – you’re twitching and so awake – but then you’re destroyed after ‘Collider’ and have to be reawakened by that piano bit.Then ‘Sun Harmonics’ is supposed to be truly hypnotising and sending you under, almost in preparation for you to listen to the last track in your sleep.With any luck, by the end of the last track, you’re miles away and so slowed.”

...melancholy being medicinal “‘Immunity’ is a rather melancholic album, isn’t it?

Believe it or not, I set out to make the closest thing I could to a party record, and it still ended up a bit more brooding and pensive. I guess that’s just what happens – that’s what I do, and that’s what I love. It’s not my state of mind though, I’m generally a very optimistic person, and I absolutely love what I’m doing with my life – it’s a fun thing.

“Perhaps I medicate any melancholy I have in my life via the studio, which allows me to be happy elsewhere.

It’s hard to say. Like anyone, I’ve been through my fair share of shit, and when you’re well you feel better able to revisit those times in music without realising you’re doing it. But I don’t find melancholy music depressing at all – I find something soaring and euphoric about it.

I mean, I love ‘In Rainbows’ – it’s one of my favourite albums of all time – it’s just transcendently beautiful. I saw Radiohead in Sydney in November, and I’d never seen them before. It was profoundly beautiful.”

...perfectionism “Finishing ‘Immunity’ was a joy, because it came together exactly how I wanted. I’m very aware that no one else will think it’s perfect, but I’m relaxed about that because I know that if it makes me feel great then that’s all I can do. I’m sure it’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea at all, but you can’t worry about that – you just have to make what you love.”

...Coldplay “They are lovely guys, normal and down to earth.Their records are made like little micro-industries though: they have different rooms in their studio with people doing different things, so I would have a room where I would take files and mess around. Eno would come in and change something for a bit, and inject lots of new ideas, and then it all gets separated out again into overdubs and that kind of thing. But what I really love doing is adding the processed versions back on top of what they’ve done – so you take a guitar part and pitch it up an octave and put it through a crazy chain of effects so that it’s just a little bit more than a guitar part when you give it back.”

...collaborating “Collaboration just doesn’t really appeal to me.The times I’ve done it, it’s happened very organically – Coldplay was through Brian, and with King Creosote it was very much about making something new. But I’d rather be a performer on my own.

“Then again, I do love the improvisation side of things with Brian. We did this amazing thing with Karl Hyde and The Necks recently – three totally live, onehour sets of music – and that was one of the most mindblowing experiences I’ve ever had. But generally it’s nice when it’s just me because I get to do what I want.

“The solo work is the biggest high and the biggest rush, but it kills you really.You don’t sleep for weeks and it’s knackering.When you’re working on a record, you’re beyond obsessing over it – by the time I was finishing ‘Immunity’, there was really nothing else going on. But I wouldn’t have it any other way – it’s the only way you can get it to how you want it.”

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No Harm No Fowl Terror Bird makes beautifully retro goth-pop with what she has – GarageBand and personal turmoil. New album ‘All This Time’ features her most raw work yet p h o t o g r a p h e r - Lu c a Ma s s a r o

For those who are yet to be thrust into the stark, enchanting world of Terror Bird, it is the moniker under which the already wonderfully named,Vancouver native Nikki Nevver produces her brand of sultry post-punk.

Don’t be fooled by her own self-deprecatingly glib description of her work on her Bandcamp profile (“Terror Bird is the synth project of Canadian artist, Nikki Nevver. Nikki and her two bandmates will be touring Europe in the spring of 2013”), this is music that comes from that same wonderfully austere, futuristic space as Siouxsie, Suicide and Joy Division. Her latest LP, ‘All This Time’, has just been released via Night School Records and her star is well and truly in the ascendancy.

While the record has been born out of a period of personal flux and emotional upheaval, Nevver is captivatingly enthusiastic and disarmingly open about her own biography, the art she produces and the music that inspires it.

First of all, however, I want to get to the bottom of that name. One theme that seems to bind a lot of the bands that I speak to is a shared sheepishness about their choice of nom de plume. It’s often dreamt up during long, hazy teen days, etched onto imaginary album sleeves long before the possibility of the real thing rears its commercial head. By then, of course, it’s too late to change, however much they may want to select something a bit more grown up. I’m pleased to find out, though, that Terror Bird isn’t just some throwaway term.

“It came from three different ideas,” says Nevver.

“First, I saw these giant, flightless birds in a movie when I was eighteen. I thought it was interesting that at the time they were around, they were a top predator, but that currently, birds seem pretty harmless. I must have related to the terror bird back then, because at the time I thought of myself as a bit of a villain. I also thought the word ‘terror’ was a good word to describe the intense anxiety I was feeling.” Nevver is candid when it comes to her emotions and mental well-being. “I would say I had generalised anxiety disorder, if I was to self-diagnose.

Lastly, I was really into Neil Young at the time, and especially loved the song, ‘Danger Bird’.”

Nikki’s views on the issue of gender in music are similarly refreshing, as she chooses to concentrate on its positives rather than dwelling on any perceived drawbacks. It curtails our discussion on the standing of women in music, as Nevver clearly sees both genders as existing on a level playing field. “I find being female is a benefit for me, rather than a problem. I’m confident in my band, which is all female, and my songwriting. For me, it’s not a big problem right now.”When I ask which other female artists currently excite her, it results in a list.

“Sally Dige, Animal Bodies, //Zoo, Brit from Koban, the singer from Light Asylum,Vapid, Austra, Zola Jesus, and Molly Nillson.” She pauses. “A lot of the artists I mentioned are from Vancouver! I might like some of today’s pop stars a bit too.”

Collaborators have come and gone since Terror Bird

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w r i t e r - Da v id zammitt

was first coined, and Nikki has worked with a host of other musicians as she works towards perfecting her signature sound. The most notable departure, however, was that of her ex-husband, Jeremiah, and it’s clear that much of her recent work deals with the schism, directly addressing the fall-out in various states of pain, anger and fondness. “Terror Bird has always included myself, because I write all the songs. But my ex-husband drummed in the band for years, and sometimes played synth. Other than Jeremiah and myself, there’s been nine other members over the years.”

Regardless of the mood that she’s employing at any given time, the one thing that jumps out from Terror Bird’s oeuvre is just how starkly confessional her lyrics are, and the latest LP finds her at her most direct. “It’s normal for me to write about personal things,” she says.

“I’ve done this for years. But I guess it’s the least metaphorical record I’ve done. I suppose I was influenced heavily by personal events in my life, so it came naturally.

Lately, I usually just write lyrics by writing keyboard parts and then writing down the first things that come to mind. But I used to write in a more poetic, creative way when I was younger. Now I write more literally.”

That’s not to say that there isn’t poetry still, and Nevver’s knack for a rhyme remains wonderfully beguiling: “Back in the old days, we had our old days,” she sings on ‘Lust & Violence,’ capturing the lost intimacy of a relationship in a heartbeat.

However, while the album’s overarching theme is the protagonist’s grappling with loss, it is by no means a hopeless affair, and self-pity is something Nevver avoids with strength and integrity throughout. On ‘The Wrong Way’, one of the album’s angriest songs, a glimmer of hope shines through in the forceful assertion that she has used the experiences to move onwards and upwards from a personal standpoint, declaring, “That was the old me, that’s not me now.” Again, she is open about her emotional and mental outlook. “I used to have a lot more psychological problems and be a lot more angry, hurtful, careless, and selfish. I’m still obviously not perfect, but I think I’ve become more rational, stable, and happy.”

When I suggest that some of the album also sounds quite sweet, even leaning towards coquettishness in its vocals and wordplay, Nikki is at first surprised before conceding that there’s room for each and every inch of the kaleidoscope of human experience, both good and bad. Indeed, it seems that this is a product of an approach that is unashamedly pluralistic. She never rules anything out. “I never intended to do that, but I tend to see many sides of things, all at once, most of the time,” she says. “I can always see what I’ve done right and wrong at the same time.” She jokes, “I would make the worst politician.”

As I attempt to convey my thoughts on the dichotomies at work within her music, I use the words ‘haunting’ and ‘sinister’ interchangeably, and Nikki

brings me up on the casualness of my descriptions in a flash. “I find haunting and sinister to be two different things. But I do like the idea of music being ‘haunting’ and evoking emotion. I also have a ‘bad’ side, which I tend to over-exaggerate and make sexier in songs.” It seems, then, that she plays characters in her songs, teasing out the various psyches that exist within her at any given time. “I guess, for me, badness is really just socially unacceptable behaviour seen through a lens of Catholic guilt and Disney-style morals.”

In terms of sound, ‘All This Time’ feels like it stands on the cusp of post-punk, baroque, gothic and 80s pop.

Nevver’s voice soars, tumbles and cracks over menacing synths and shuffling, tinny drum machines, creating an intoxicating mix that simultaneously foregrounds pathos and yet oozes sexuality. “Not many people catch that I like post-punk,” she say. “It’s strange because I would never think normally about these things; they just do attract me. I guess the simplicity of the music, the imagery of the artists, and the fact that a lot of post-punk and 80s music was poppy but still rebellious and weird in some way attract me. I like the dance beats and great sound quality of ‘80s music, and the sadness, and the beautiful synth parts and tones.”

I tell Nikki that the delivery on her songs reminds me of Kate Bush in parts, but while it’s received as the compliment it’s intended to be (“Thanks! I love her.”), Nevver is keen to align herself with vocalists of both genders, drawing attention to the shortcomings of my description, and the temptation to pigeonhole her as a female artist.“I’ve also been influenced by David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Morrissey, Elliot Smith, Brian Eno, Brian Ferry, Laura Branigan (just the song ‘Gloria’!), Neil Young, Brian Molko – when I was younger – and Leonard Cohen.”

While Terror Bird’s previous work has seen her voice filtered through a digital labyrinth of computers and effects pedals, this new record (her third) is rawer, much truer to Nevver’s vocals and more up front than anything she has done before. Nikki, however, is characteristically self-effacing about any perceived leap in quality. She says: “The raw sound is really just me failing at trying to sound hi fi. I wanted to use less effects on my voice on this record. My voice still has a lot of reverb, though. As for the instruments, I wish they could sound even more polished to be honest!”

The production has been improved immeasurably on ‘All This Time’, though, and clearly Nevver’s DIY ethic is proving increasingly fruitful. “I just recorded everything myself on Garageband. I wrote the songs quickly. But the mixing took ages!”The Press release for the record suggests that it was shorn of live instruments, but I’m incredulous at the idea that this collection of ten beautifully crafted and intensely layered tracks was untouched by analogue, but it was, and Nikki confirms that each and every sound on Terror Bird’s luscious palette is manmade. She laughs. “It’s all synth!”

‘I used to have a lot more psychological problems and be a lot more angry, hurtful, careless, and selfish’

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Preach

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out Bishop Nehru is in love with the Golden Age of hip-hop

photo g r a p h e r - G a b r i e l G r e en wri t e r - S t u ar t S t u b b s

Two months ago Rockland County rapper Bishop Nehru stopped going to school. He was 16, still is.

‘Dropped out’ is too strong a term, and wholly inaccurate – Nehru switched to home tutoring so he could make time for studies and music and days like today.

In a few hours the boy from Upstate New York will perform his first show outside of the US, at London’s 100 Club at the behest of co-headliners and Nehru heroes MF Doom and Ghostface Killah. It’s pretty big deal for a kid who’s released one mixtape and has never left the States until 8pm last night.

We meet at Soho Hotel for the proud English tradition of afternoon tea – me, Bishop, his press officer, manager and father. Of course he’s chaperoned, yet I half expect him to arrive alone. The ‘Nehruvia’ mixtape has an affect of skewing how old he actually is – 13 tracks of mellow, story-telling hip-hop that harks back to the Golden Age of beats and rhymes, wisely told and deftly put together. In turn the tracks feature beats from Doom, J Dilla, Madlib and DJ Premier, and humid jazz samples – pianos, clarinets and warm brass that conjures images of kids playing double-dutch on a hot city night.There’s more of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest about Bishop Nehru than peers A$AP Rocky, Lil B and Tyler, The Creator. He’s the antidote to the shock and awe of Odd Future, in fact, rarely cursing, pro school, laidback yet decidedly un-sleazy. He’s a good kid and makes no bones about it. “The older records sound so much more complex,” he says.“I would rather sound intelligent than ignorant. In hip-hop now it’s cool to be dumb, but I don’t think that’s cool at all.

“To me, curses are emphasizers. Let’s say you call someone a bitch, if you put ‘fucking’ in front of it, it emphasizes it, but I don’t know why rappers cuss so much. It’s ignorant, but people like it, and that’s even more odd to me. To me, people are just trying to sound tough, which is why people in hip-hop say ‘fag’, because they see calling someone else feminine in some way makes them less feminine and more of a man.”

Nehru’s other concern with where rap has been heading is the genre’s thirst for image over content. He says that’s why he respects Doom so much, “because he just makes music”, even if Doom’s iron gladiator mask does attract more attention than it deflects. Regardless, it’s a spoken word passage from Doom that gets ‘Nehruvia’ going, explaining the concept of the mask as

a way to get hip-hop back to being about the music.

“Hip-hop has gone in a direction where it’s almost damn near 100% on everything besides the music,” says Doom. ‘The Music’ goes on to insist how it’s about “the way you spit and how the beats roll”. Nehru then drops his flow, reminiscent in most recent years of Lupe Fiasco, again sounding older than the young man sipping English breakfast blend from a teaspoon in front of me.

Bishop’s age is what it is – impossible to ignore, but not what makes him a gifted rapper.You wouldn’t know he was still in school until you see a photo of him or meet him in person. Face to face he’s refreshingly ok with being a borderline adult. He never takes off his backpack as we sit down, for example, as if we’re hanging out at the back of a bus. He got into Little Bow Wow before anyone else, shortly followed by Pharrell and Gwen Stefani’s almost hit ‘Can I Get It Like That’ and Nas’ 2002 single ‘One Mic’. That these are songs rather than albums perhaps points to Nehru’s generation most of all.

The best movie, according to Nehru, is Superbad, with Pineapple Express a close second. Suitably, his favourite actors are Will Smith, Martin Lawrence, Jonah Hill and Seth Rogen.“I want to get into acting,” he says, the man who took his name from Tupac Shakur’s character in 2002 crime drama Juice. (Nehru also styles his hair to replicate that of the role’s). “The first thing I want to do is be the bad guy, the villain. Orrrr, it would have to be comedy and I’d be one of the funny bad guys.”

After we finish our tea, Bishop’s father and manager will rib him about the recent rebranding of his crew back home, who used to go by the name Prime Society but now operate under The Suburban Showguns. We take a group vote and all but Nehru agree that the old name was better. Papa Nehru challenges his son to include Suburban Showguns in a freestyle, which Bishop does over the table of jam and scones. He then lets out a rasping “Aaaaahhhh!” of success, much to the amusement of his father and manager. Had he been just a few years older, chances are we wouldn’t have knocked his decision at all.

“It’s my age that’s got me where I am,” he admits,“but it’s bad because you don’t want to be compared only to other 16-year-olds, but to everyone else as well. I don’t want people to say, ‘because he’s only 16, he’s number 2,’ I want them to say,‘because he’s a rapper that’s good he’s

number 2 – he deserves it’.”

Nehru is often compared to Joey Bada$$, another teen rallying against obnoxious brat-rap in favour for a back-in-the-day, vintage hip-hop sound. Bada$$ currently has the lead on Nehru, by a year in age and more than that in blog frenzy, but if you like one you’ll definitely like the other; it’s just rotten timing for Bishop, who probably thought he was the only kid making these mellow tunes against the tide created by ‘Yonkers’ and the obscene likes of Azealia Banks.

Bada$$ – now two mixtapes in with a debut album ready to go – no doubt benefits from his Flatbush, Brooklyn, neighbourhood, but Nehru is happy Upstate.

He has no interest in dressing up Rockland County as the badlands it isn’t, or as the affluent area it’s not. His hometown is, “not bad, but not good”, simply ok, something that you rarely hear from young rappers who’ve learned that the Project is not where you want to be but it’s definitely where you want to be from.

Bishop Nehru is a bit too honest for all that, because it’s honesty that he takes most seriously of all. “Tyler, The Creator has the career I’d like,” he tells me. “He looks like he has a lot of fun, but he seems a bit depressed about people approaching him a lot, so that’s not so good. He’s the only one that’s himself, though, and that’s key, to stay yourself.”

Nehru manages this by staying in school, even when he’s flying across the world to support Doom and Ghostface Killer, by rejecting stereotype and, he says, by making music his personal shrink. “When I make a track, first I think of anything that has affected me, so it can’t hurt me anymore. Music is therapy. So I find something that is reoccurring in my mind and I expose it, because once something is exposed you can only heal after that. That’s my basic approach. I then make a beat, and that’s basically the Band Aid, which is going to help it heal, and after that the video would be… the scab,” he says after a pause. “Everything’s good, it’s all glued together.”

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Loud And Quiet at

PrimaverA A week of chasing musicians around the sandy beaches of Barcelona

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Qui nd A d Lou

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M e r c han d i s e

et

at

A r e v a m i r

A day after their biggest show to date, Tampa ex-punks Merchandise discuss keeping their music free via a dodgy Russian website, turning away from hardcore and being fully embraced by Europe p h o t o g r ap h er - o w e n r i c h ar d s

Last night Merchandise played to their largest crowd yet, on Primavera Sound’s modest ATP Stage, as the second band on. It was, they will tell me, not a means to an end, but the end itself.

They have no more planned for wider success than they have expected it, forged in the DIY punk scene of Tampa, Florida, where each member grew up playing in little known noise and hardcore bands Cult Ritual, Neon Blud, Divisions and Church Whip. In 2009 they changed tack and released their self-titled debut album.

Inspired by Royal Trux and Throbbing Gristle, Merchandise left the world of hardcore behind as they embraced gothic anti-pop melodies, tracks that bothered the 8-minute mark and nods to mid-80s British mope rock. It was a treacherous move in the eyes of many punks. Singer Carson Cox even abandoned straightedge for his new project.

Since then, the band have batted away sneers from purists as they’ve honed their swooning songs over a further three albums and a handful of tour tapes and singles.You can download them all, bar this year’s ‘Totale Nite’ LP, via the band’s tumblr, free of charge; another denouncement of hardcore punk’s righteous way of distributing music in physical form only.

Today, Merchandise sound more like Morrissey than Minutemen, which is perhaps why they’ve found more fans in the UK than anywhere else. It’s where a vast majority of label interest is coming from, too, but do the band really need to sign a deal having gotten this far alone? What would that mean for giving away their music? And just how smug do Carson Cox, David Vassalotti, Patrick Brady and Elsner Nino feel to be getting their just desserts?

We meet in the lobby of the hotel that both the band and I are staying in, where Merchandise, enthusiastic and humble, frequently laugh at the absurdity of being such a hot topic in certain parts of the indie world.

––– So it seems like 2013 is going extremely well for Merchandise.

Carson Cox [vocals]: “Ha ha.Well that’s because you’re from England, and you understand that it’s like living in a bubble, yeah? It’s like living in Brooklyn. It’s not how you think it is. It’s been a good year, but I would say it’s a little skewed in England. I mean, we still don’t have a record label.We put out our new record on Nite People, but in the eyes of the music industry that’s not a label – obviously we honour it and they’re our best friends, and I’d say it is the American underdog label, but no, we don’t have any real presence from the label side, or even press, really.”

“In fact, I feel like in America, magazines don’t really want to write about us because we don’t really have the infrastructure available – we don’t have the conveyorbelt thing, and it’s life-affirming because so much of

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writer - stuart stubbs

music is bogged down in, like, ‘I won’t write about it unless I get an email from this person’. People in the UK are more like, ‘well, I heard the record and I liked it, so let’s write about it.’ But that really is not that common.”

David Vassalotti [guitar]: “Magazines never write about us. SPIN only talk shit about us now.”

Cox: “They gave us ‘Worst New Music’, but from the same record they gave us ‘Best New Track’.”

Patrick Brady [bass]: “They thought three songs of the five were great, but the other two were clearly totally offensive to them. But they hired someone from outside, and when you go through the review this guy is obviously more angry at us as people than he is at our music.”

Vassalotti: “They referred to Pat as the minority shareholder of the band.”

Elsner Nino [drums]: “Hey! What does that make me?”

Brady: “He didn’t even know you were in the band.”

––– Last week you played your first UK show, at London’s 100 Club. How was it?

Cox: “It was crazy for us because it was our first gig in Europe, and it’s fucking London! We’ve been trying to do that for so long and it felt like it was something that would never happen.”

––– I heard it was full of record label A&Rs seeing what all the fuss is about. Has that attention changed the feel of your shows?

Vassalotti: “Well, we’ve been talking to a lot of [label] people, especially from the UK, so they’ve become friends, and most of them aren’t standing at the back on their phones, they’re down the front dancing.”

Cox: “And it’s interesting, because even with indie music becoming this massive fucking thing – and it really is fucking massive – it’s amazing to find out how many music fans are still in it and it’s not just cold industry people. Like, there are still a lot of real people in it, almost more than in DIY punk music right now. I don’t know why it is, but it’s almost as if there’s an opportunity to reinvent something now, and that’s attracted a lot of bizarre people.”

––– How has mainland Europe responded to Merchandise?

Vassalotti: “This festival is, in a lot of ways, a barometer for the rest of Europe, and that was probably the biggest crowd we’ve ever played to, last night. I think there’s a lot of people hearing stuff for the first time here, and people being open to new things, which doesn’t happen so much back home.”

Brady: “Back home, if you’ve not been told that this thing is great by at least 10 people, well, why waste my precious free time checking it out?”

You mentioned how massive indie music has become now – do you feel that that has given your punk

critics even more ammunition since you moved away from hardcore?

Cox: “Totally. There’s a massive backlash against indie music now, because it’s become so big. People think it’s not cool enough anymore, or not edgy, or they talk about it not being ‘punk enough’, which is the funniest one. It’s so stupid to me, but basically a lot of hardcore punks don’t want anyone to do something more interesting or new – they’re afraid of something new, so they judge it immediately.”

––– Does it feel like they’re missing the first rule of punk – to do what you want?

Cox: “Yeah, but I expect to always get the backlash because we’re not playing punk anymore…”

Vassalotti: “… but it’s not been as bad as I thought it would be. There were tons of punks at our show last night.”

Cox: “It’s just going to get stranger. We’re coming back in August and I don’t know how that’s going to be. I assume it will be totally different. It has to move on.

When we recorded our demo it wasn’t like we had any support from punks. No one liked it. History might paint it like we’ve always been supported by this small community, but the reality is that when we put out this demo most of them were thrown in the trash, even when I gave them out for free to friends. It’s not like the spirit of punk protects you all the way up to your first RedBull show and then it goes away – it’s not how it exists.”

––– What made you quit hardcore?

Cox: “You mean, was there a time that we decided to get funky? Ha! No, there wasn’t any one thing that made us change the music we were playing. I really didn’t think anyone would like the second LP [‘Strange Songs (In The Dark)’] we did. I just thought there was no way. But in a lot of ways we’ve never stopped, and we’ve got other recording projects but the press isn’t going to cover those bands, because there isn’t an audience for it.The audience for it already has the records.”

––– Now that you’re getting all of this interest from labels, is it not a little too late? I mean, you’ve made it this far alone now. Haven’t you proved you don’t need a label?

Cox: “It’s really obvious that there’s been a huge paradigm shift, and the power is back with the musician, but not everyone has embraced that. Like, there’s still a lot of people who feel that we have to cater to something, be it the press or a manager or the clubs, and that doesn’t fucking matter. If anything we’re proof of that right now.

But again, the UK and Europe have just been way more excited about a band like us.We have a bit of that pull in the States but not like here, and it’s because it’s entertainment in the United States, it’s not art, and

there’s something to be said for entertainment too, but no one can make things up or improvise or play different versions of their songs live, and that’s all we do. If you interviewed us in Mississippi it’d be totally different – it’d be good for you to see. The South is a lot like England, y’know, they say ‘reckon’ a lot, the mud, the bad teeth thing is a myth, though.Your teeth are great… what was the question?”

Vassalotti: “Record labels.”

Cox: “Yeah, they’re great.”

––– Will you sign to one?

Cox: “Maybe. I do wish that people would just believe in what they’re doing. That’s what’s kept us in underground music for so long. Blind faith, operating in total darkness with complete faith in what you’re doing.”

––– So is endurance the key to success? I’ve loved some bands who’ve called it a day after one record, disappointed with their level of success.

Cox: “What kind of life is that? I mean, imagine being someone who’s like, ‘I’ve done music for five years, and I think I’m done with it now, I’m going to become an accountant.’ It’s not like music is something you should do just to make money or make a career out of.”

Brady: “The most important bit is that you get a life. It’s

not like Primavera is a means to an end.This is the end!

It’s not like this is our showcase to get to the next level, where we get to open for Eminem or whatever – this is the reward. Why don’t people think that getting to play is the reward?”

Cox: “I think it’s because everyone learned a different way. For us, we learned how to tour on nothing, not even with gear or having records to sell at shows, so for us, getting to do this is insane.”

––– Do you plan to always give your records away on your site?

Cox: “I want to keep doing it, but I don’t know because the bigger things get it is harder to do, but part of me thinks we should keep doing it but incognito, like make a fake Russian website and put all of our records on it, with some other shit. I got into so much music because of file sharing, y’know. I had Napster when it came out; that’s how I heard Crass and The Dead Kennedys when I was twelve I believe music should be free because that’s how I got into music. It would be hilarious if we made some kind of statement about how we don’t want people to download our music, because that’s all I’ve done.”

––– Like your change in sound, that’s a move away from punk, too. So many bands reject the Internet and

only release on vinyl.

Cox: “But vinyl has become less and less punk. There was a Dave Matthews Band boxset released for Record Store Day that was like $700 and was going on Ebay for twice that. It’s like, ‘how did you manage to ruin this in like 4 years or whatever?’. The vinyl comeback was so short. But I think music should be free. I mean, I hope people who dig our records, or ‘fans’, I guess – I’ve never really said ‘our fans’ before, because that sounds weird to me – I hope they get into it and then buy the records too, like I do. And I would hope that if we can’t keep up giving away our music, all of our friends will, because that’s important.”

––– It must feel pretty good to have this success on your own after all this time?

Cox: “I’d say yes and no, because we really have been playing on blind faith. There was no great revenge plan on the world of music. Sometimes it feels that way, but no. We wanted a life playing music, the thing we didn’t plan was other people catching onto it. We just wanted to play, and now we’ve got to this point where we’ve been fetishized by some places. But I don’t have it in my heart to feel like we’ve got what we deserve, and I don’t care if we’ve converted anyone. This just happens to be a very fruitful time.”

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I sit waiting for METZ to show up in a hotel bar located next to Primavera’s festival site, a quick scout around the shiny, primary colour-drenched room is like a comical conveyer belt, a strange and enticing mix of musical lineage moving along from table to table. A sour-faced William Reid sits gulping vodka cokes beneath his sunglasses, Bradford Cox wonders around in a tye-die Ramones T-shirt munching on a wrap, Bob Mould sits quietly tucking into a pizza. Just as I look around to catch a glimpse of Ben Gibbard, in walks METZ, and after a painfully awkward handshake that goes horribly awry with a seemingly endless back and forth around not quite figuring out if I’m going in for bassist Chris Slorach’s hand or drummer Hayden Menzies’, we grab a table and sit down.

It seems the opportunity for a group with only one album behind them to be playing a festival of this size and stature isn’t lost on the band. While they brim with excitement during our conversation, later on that night lead singer Alex Edkins goes as far to proclaim, “Best night of my life, seriously!”

Yet although METZ currently don’t have much to sell, other than their brutally riotous, screeching and genuinely excellent eponymous debut, released last year on Sub Pop, the group have been igniting punk spaces and shitholes since 2010. It’s a prolific sounding record, played lightning fast, but when I ask if the band share similar productive traits, Edkins responds smiling with teeth so white I can almost see my sunburn reflecting in them. “Not at all, actually.” Turns out the Canadian trio, despite their propensity for hurricane force music, like

to take their time creating it. “For one, we’ve been so busy since the first album came out, but also we really like to take our time and work things out,” says Menzies.

We’re just really interested in stripping back, more and more,” says Edkins. “We just take what we have and skin it down until we have nothing left.We are definitely fans of less is more.”

So there’ll be no strings or orchestras to come on the next record then?

“Definitely not,” they all laugh. “If anything, I want to make it simpler and faster,” says Edkins, not that they have any plans to write a second album yet.

There’s something of an irony to be extracted here, as any time spent in the company of, say, album track ‘Rats’ (a song so seething, cantankerous, scratchy and vicious, it doesn’t sound like a ‘Bleach’-era Nirvana rip-off, as much as it does something Nirvana would have loved to have written for their debut album) will no doubt realise their often uncanny ability to make one instrument sound like two or more. If anything you’d think their aim was to sound greater than the sum of their parts.

“There were minor overdubs on the album,” Edkins concedes,“but we always have in mind what we are able to play live.”

Slorach interjects: “People are always astounded at how shitty our effects boards are. People come and take pictures of them after the show and you can just see the crushing look of disappointment on their face,” he laughs.

Alex mimics someone looking at a board and pointing “25 bucks, 25 bucks, broken, 25 bucks… in fact I only really use two and they’re both distortion pedals,” he says.

That said, it didn’t stop Alexander Hacke of legendary noise experimenters Einstürzende Neubauten to ask Slorach how he managed to get the tone he had on his bass after one show.“It was so surreal,” he says, still a little wide-eyed and with a beaming grin.

“You could see a little tear run down his eye.”

“Yeah, I got it tattooed in its place but it washed away with more tears.”

Most of our brief time together is just as jovial, often digressing into gushes of who we’re excited to see on this, the first night of the festival. METZ are in demand to an extent that exceeds their one record, too, with a heap of other interviews planned before their show in a couple of hours. Thankfully, what they are unable to convey aboard The Princess Hotel conveyor belt, they more than make up for as they take to the Pitchfork stage. They’re pitted against the massive draw of a sungoing-down Tame Impala set, which was by all accounts un-missable, yet METZ make it a lot easier to sneak away from. They still draw a healthy and appreciative crowd and play with the force and might of six members.

At one stage Slorach’s head bounces so relentlessly and fervently that I envisage it popping right off and rolling into the crowd, still bouncing like a defunct bowling ball as his decapitated body plays furiously on with blood gushing like a fountain from his neck.

Ending on ‘Wet Blanket’ acts as something of a reminder: revisiting the surge and gush of ‘METZ’ is as truly exhilarating as hearing it for the first time and only serves to reiterate its stature not only as one of my favourite guitar records of 2012, but also of recent years.

METZ 10 minutes with Canadian grunge punks METZ, as short and sharp as their vicious debut album p h o to g r ap h e r - o w e n r i ch ar d s

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Wu-Tang Clan may have porked out over the years, but there’s no doubt that Pantha du Prince was responsible for the heaviest performance at Primavera this year, with a stage set dominated by a three-tonne instrument comprised of 50 gleaming bronze bells. The carillon is the centrepiece of Hamburg techno producer Hendrik Weber’s latest album, ‘Elements of Light’, recorded with The Bell Laboratory, a handpicked ensemble of classically trained Norwegian musicians. Striking a balance between contemporary classical and dancefloor-ready techno, the record is an ambitious follow-up to 2007’s ‘This Bliss’, his acclaimed second album of accessible minimal techno, and 2010’s ‘Black Noise’, which saw him tweak and twist field recordings of bells into an irresistible atmosphere of starry-eyed euphoria. A few hours after their ecstatic performance in Primavera’s own indoor auditorium (a treat for knackered festivalgoers), Weber told me about his love affair with bells and why he doesn’t need to know a thing about music theory.

––– You’ve been exploring the sound of bells for many years now – why do they continue to fascinate you?

Hendrik Weber: It’s a sound that has a certain physicality.

As soon as you hear it, you connect it to a physical object. This is a fascinating thing, when you have this interfering of seeing and hearing, when it becomes one.

And at the same time the bell never has a consistent note, it changes. It has such a big variation of overtones and interferences, and the directions of the sound travelling, that you always have a kind of mess, which makes it so beautiful.

––– Hearing the carillon in Oslo City Hall was one of the moments that inspired you to use the instrument on this record. What made that carillon special?

HW: It has a lot to do with the environment of the place, the structure of the landscape, the city, the building.

The specific instrument has a different sound as well, as different manufacturers make them in different ways.

You have a lot of cheap ones that use cheap iron, and you can hear that the tones aren’t as refined. It’s an old, old handcraft. It’s an artform to create a nice bell.

––– Have you tried to play the carillon yourself?

HW: Yeah, but it’s not that I want to start playing an instrument. I had so many field recordings of bell sounds that I really wanted to explore it through someone

playing it, which is the most fascinating thing for me with The Bell Laboratory, this idea of the human interface. We wanted to do something with classically trained musicians, experimental, open-minded musicians who can read scores but at the same time can think and act beyond their normal frame. The whole piece was written before with the samples from the carillon in Oslo – I put it on my keyboard at home and wrote the melodies with the bells from the city hall.

Then we had to transpose and transcribe the different parts and put layers on top of it.

––– The audience at The Bell Laboratory shows seem to get completely swept up in the music, it’s almost euphoric – do you notice their reaction?

HW: I notice that they are dancing, but I think I have another view on the crowd, I recognise them as an organism. I’m not looking at single people, I see them as a swarm of birds where they are moving this direction or that direction. And in the end it becomes this picture, and then they lose themselves in the picture and you can actually recognise this on stage, the point where people get what we are doing.

It’s also because of the music. When you as a human being see another human being become part of this organism, it’s something that touches you deeply.When you see a creature doing what you would normally expect to be electronic, people inhale it as something new. Because it’s not the gesture of the bass player, or the guitar player playing a solo, it’s a more internal journey, and I think people recognise that. No one is the master, and this is what makes people happy, to see that there is no real master except for the pulse.

––– That’s very much the core philosophy of clubbing, too – the DJ is important, but not as important as the crowd. Everybody’s necessary.

HW: But some DJs misunderstand that. The danger of abuse is close, because it’s focused on one person. I got asked before if I am the band leader, and I am definitely not the band leader. How can I be the band leader if they tell me what tone to play? They have to tell me it’s E minor.

––– So you’re not trained in music theory?

HW: No. People think that you need to know everything before you can start working, but you don’t.

I mean, look how many people are playing at this festival

here who have no clue. I would say probably 80%. The Bell Laboratory musicians are part of the organism – I give my knowledge and they give their knowledge.

––– In many cultures, bells have traditionally been a mystical or religious instrument. Is that something that appealed to you?

HW: It’s not a conscious thing; it’s probably something in me that resonates with the sound. Bells are normally used by people who claim to have a higher sense of perception, but I think in the end it has nothing to do with that.

Everyone has the same possibility to enter that knowledge, and this is what we are basically claiming with this project as well.The sound and what you experience through it is not to be misused by people to lead you.

It affects you on a non-material level very strongly.

It affects what you are – not through your ears, not through your body, but in a way that goes beyond your material existence. I’m not a fan of churches, I’m a fan of giving everyone the power to use, in a very conscious way, the abilities of their presence. So it’s nothing mystical in the end.

––– Is there a possibility you’re getting a bit sick of bells now?

HW: No, no. I loved the performance today. When Bendick, the one next to me on stage, played his bells, I was like, wow. It’s fascinating, it’s just fascinating what it does to you, and how nobody uses it.

––– Are you working on anything new at the moment?

HW: Yeah.

––– Does it have bells?

HW: [Pause] I don’t know.

––– What’s it like?

HW: It’s Pantha [laughs].

––– Doesn’t that mean bells now?

HW: No, no, Pantha is not necessarily bells. It’s just a frequency range.

––– And are we likely to see you playing in clubs again?

HW: I am playing still. It’s still so much fun to play these banging shows, you know, I will never stop that. It’s the essence, in the end.

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D i s c lo s u r e Thanks to garage pop hits ‘Latch’ and ‘White Noise’, Guy and Howard Lawrence are currently the hardest working duo in commercial dance music. Between flights and sunrise live sets, they talk Sam Walton through their plan to imitate The Artful Dodger p h o t o g r a p h e r - l a u ra c o u ls o n

In the early hours of this morning, Disclosure played Ibiza. Tomorrow night they will be in London. The day after is Derry, then New York, and then the west coast of America, before coming back to Manchester, via Belfast.

And today? Today, Disclosure are in Barcelona, at the Primavera Sound festival. Another hotel room in another city. In the not-so-early hours of tomorrow morning – at 4:35am, to be precise – they will take to one of Primavera’s stages, underneath a giant solar panel, to perform another edition of their live show, then jump straight on a plane and do it all again 15 hours later at Field Day.Turns out they’re a bit knackered.

“Shit man, that’s not a good question,” laughs 21-year-old Guy Lawrence, the elder of the two brothers who make up the duo, when asked when they last had a day off. In sweatpants and an old t-shirt, sporting postpubescent facefuzz, a weary smile but still an infectious enthusiasm for talking about his job, he glances at his nodding brother Howard. “Since we delivered the album, we’ve had a couple of days off from playing, just doing promo, sitting in hotel rooms chatting. So that’s not that bad – go to Paris, talk to some French man, come home – but it’s still quite tiring.”

The problem, for Guy and Howard at least, is that right now quite a lot of people want to talk to them – not just in Paris and in Barcelona, but also in America (“these interviewers from New York and Chicago keep on asking what the clubbing scene is like in Reigate!”), Poland (“they sent that person who couldn’t speak English – he showed up and was like, hello... hi... er... how are you er...”), and on Australian national pop radio, where they’ve just been daytime playlisted – something that, when it happened in the UK in February, helped propel the fizzing garage pop of their latest single,‘White Noise’, to number 2 in the charts. Essentially, having constantly tweaked their sound for three years (their debut single of Burial-lite post-dupstep arrived through Moshi Moshi in August 2010), they’ve suddenly stumbled upon their own iteration of pop’s eternal ‘familiar but new’ elixir, and accordingly, uncompromisingly, their time appears to be now.

But perhaps that fortunate stumble should be less of

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a surprise than it appears. “It was a natural progression,” insists Guy, when quizzed about how they have mutated from brooding, glitch-laden instrumentals into joyful two-step neo-soul. “It wasn’t an ‘I don’t like that, let’s change’, it was more like, ‘we’ve done that now, let’s move on’.”

Crucially, though, what the Lawrence brothers did was less move on, and more move back. If the first wave of Disclosure’s sound was unapologetically stolen from the fidgety textures of their then-peers James Blake and Joy Orbison (“We wanted to learn how to make their songs, so just tried to copy them,” admits Howard, freely, “so ‘Love That You Know’ is a Mount Kimbie rip – us actually trying to be Mount Kimbie – then ‘Street Light Chronicles’ is a straight copy of ‘Hyph Mngo’”), the current brand recreates club bangers that would’ve been a highlight down Bagley’s in 1998 – all irresistible rolling garage beats, rushing filter sweeps and soulful vocals sped up and clipped to perfection – and which dominated the charts at the tail-end of the nineties in a way that Disclosure themselves are threatening to now.

But although there’s a magpie tendency running through all of Disclosure’s guises thus far, there’s also a pleasingly clear sense of intention to their current music-making: whereas the nascent Disclosure were simply absorbing and mimicking all that was around them, opportunistically lifting from the hip sound of the time, the updated version has had to delve into the history books; after all, when Disclosure’s natural forebears were dominating the national consciousness, the brothers Lawrence were only 3 and 6 years old.

It’s an historical approach that is 100% deliberate, too, insists Guy: “After our first few tunes, we started saying ‘I wonder where James Blake gets his influences from, I wonder where Joy Orbison gets his influences from’,” he explains, “and that led us to garage and house music. So over the last few years we’ve bought hundreds of old house records and listened to loads of mixes to just learn about it all.”

Such a bookish approach – more akin to the young guitar band strategy of listening to the entire discography of the Velvet Underground/MC5/Magazine before

producing joyful imitations – feels oddly charming in the context of electronic music, with its almost insatiable desire to face forwards. Indeed, Disclosure’s total lack of desire to experiment and obsession with learning about the past marks them out as curiously unique producers.

Then again, the more you talk to them, the less they seem to think of themselves as electronic producers at all.“A couple of years ago, we really wanted to be in that scene with James Blake and Joy Orbison,” remembers Guy of their early, copyist days, “and then we realised that we never could be, because we wanted to write pop songs, with structure.We didn’t just want to write buildup, drop, build-up, drop.We wanted to write pop music, just in the style of house and garage. I mean, you’ve got an hour of house music on your album? That’s a bit boring,

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isn’t it? A bit serious for us. People like SBTRKT and TEED though – they write songs. They just produce them in a fucking sick way.”

“I mean, there’s kinda a clear line for us,” continues Howard. “People who make instrumental house music don’t need to have any musicality at all. It’s an amazing craft – the production skill is incredible, and I respect that so much – but let’s take someone like Bodikka: there’s one chord in one of his songs! It’s not a musical masterpiece. It’s more like programming machines to do stuff, which is a skill in itself, but put that production style into pop music and that’s what stuff like ‘Latch’ is.”

Indeed, that’s the sound of most of ‘Settle’, Disclosure’s debut album whose release is perfectly timed for a thousand summer dancefloors: eight of the 13 tracks come with straight-up pop or soul guest vocalists making merry over the kind of addictive retrofuturistic pop that ‘White Noise’ and ‘Latch’ have helped to establish as Disclosure’s trademark. And the others, like the gorgeously squirming ‘Stimulation’ and opener ‘When A Fire Starts To Burn’, offer an earthier, clubready foil to the big vocal numbers. “The only thing we wanted for our album was a balance between club music and pop-structured songs,” says Howard, with pride.

“We write pop music in the style of house and garage.

That’s the only way to put it.” – in which case, it would seem, job done.

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such a simple manifesto – garage, plus pop songs, plus live vocals – it’s impossible to see beyond ‘Settle’ being anything but the 2013 update of the Artful Dodger’s debut, a record of almost unimpeachably

perfect electronic pop unfortunately remembered best for unleashing Craig David all over the UK’s boink.

Consequently, and in light of all Disclosure’s highfashion mixtape appearances and remix commissions, it might not be the most culturally credible reference point, but Guy is having none of it: “Man, that’s an incredible record!” he insists when ‘It’s All About The Stragglers’ crops up. “They were the only people doing garage music as a pop album with singers on it – chat to people like Todd Edwards and Zed Bias, Artwork, all them, they’ll admit, Artful Dodger smashed it.”

It’s super-enthusiastic outbursts like this that reveal Disclosure’s underlying personality. This is not a pair of moody brothers trying to look cool in front of the hipster kids – at least, not any more. Nor is their pilfering from electronic music’s past some sort of knowingly pastiched arch exercise in studio perfection, like another electronic duo one could name who also happen to have a new album out in 2013. Instead, the overwhelming impression is of a pair of mates just revelling in the music they’ve discovered, like the rest of us, and trying to play their versions of it to as many people as possible.

Less producer-pioneers, they’re more like the kids with their Stratocasters playing Hendrix riffs, or football fans recreating classic goals in the park simply because it’s fun.“Our music, it’s more like a homage,” says Guy as we finish up, who also adds that he wants to make an old-skool hip-hop album next, and get Q-Tip on it.“It’s our way of saying that that music was fucking sick – that that’s what we listen to all the time.The main reason our records sound like they do is because that’s the music we’re listening to right now.” And, with pleasingly circularity, because of Disclosure, it’s what we’re listening to, too.

“We’re going on when?” says Guy in disbelief when informed of tonight’s start time of 4:35am. He’s not impressed. “That’s the latest live show we’ll have ever done, and to be honest it’s not ideal, because by that time nobody gives a fuck what you’re doing onstage. The crowd is all fucked anyway and they just want to hear some music.”

“We still DJ in clubs,” adds Howard, “and that’s what that’s for – all we play is rolling house and garage for everyone to have a mash-up rave, but at the live show we do see it as more of a band.”

You can sympathise too – 4:35am at your average UK club is not a pretty sight. As it turns out, though, a balmy Spanish night an hour before dawn finds Primavera’s crowd excitable and well-oiled, sure, but the real casualties in the crowd – and comically conspicuous dealers – are easily outnumbered by eager punters waiting to see how Disclosure execute their bouncing garage in the flesh.

They arrive on stage to a crowd-sung chorus of happy birthday – Guy turned 22 four and a half hours ago – that gives way to a thumping techno thud, and for the next hour, much of Disclosure’s insistence on pop sensibilities is muted in favour of, frankly, rolling house and garage for everyone to have a mash-up rave. And glorious it is too: while instruments are played with expertise (both brothers have played bass and drums since they were toddlers, and keep that going in the live show), and Howard even takes on several vocal lines, the set’s real joyful moments come with the big synth drops of ‘White Noise’ and the slow introduction of Jessie Ware’s fractured voice filtering across the two-step spring of ‘Running’. Tonight, it would seem, Disclosure’s pop songs are going house again, but as the sun rises over both the Med and the Parc Del Forum’s bizarre brutalist playground, that Balearic rejig seems like the right decision.

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Th e H axan C loak Sound Art graduate Bobby Krlic is compelled to make music, although not for the many fans who’ve dipped into the afterlife via new album ‘Evacuation’ p h o to g r ap h e r - o w e n r i c h ar d s

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assumptions are made on the personality of a person based solely on the generalisations of their musical output, I’m not sure Bobby Krlic would be someone I would ever want to meet. His latest, and superlative, LP ‘Excavation’ (an electronically composed record for the afterlife) is riddled with all the ‘bleak’ and ‘dark’ descriptive clichés you can throw at it, but such is the vast dark hole of the record, it would only swallow them all into its engulfing, Cimmerian galaxy. However – and far more truthfully – to describe this album simply in generic, thematic terms would be wholly missing the point.

Yes, it’s a record soaked in death, the arteries of which are clogged with a tar so thick black and indelible that it trickles through your speakers and into your brain, but it’s also an ever-shifting, ever-expanding ball of narrative consciousness that moves gracefully and thoughtfully.

Like watching an asteroid hurtling towards earth, its initial path may be panic-stricken and terrifying, but you only have to study its path to realise its true magnificence and beauty. Ultimately you accept your fate in the comfort of its affect.

Bobby as it goes, is not the grim reaper but a loquacious, affable and softly spoken gentleman.As we sit down to talk, he has just finished a mini-tour that saw him playing with William Basinski in Germany. “We played at the Berghain, which was amazing,” he tells me.

“They’ve got the most insane sound system I’ve ever seen in my entire life.There’s loads of sub-bass in my set and it was literally rattling my eyeballs, I couldn’t even see. And then he [Basinski] came on and made everyone sit down and just played the most mid-ranged quiet set I’ve ever heard, you just had to whisper. I thought that was so brave.”

Bobby is a Wakefield descendent who moved to London to study ‘Sound Art’, “like fine art with a focus on music conception.”

“You don’t learn recording or producing techniques, you just learn about how to find your voice,” he explains.

“It was pretty conceptually based.”

This set-up didn’t originally prove conducive to Bobby’s very musical and hands-on upbringing. “I’d come from a very practical, kind of punk background of making music. I’d just started getting into electronics at the time and I wanted to go there and I wanted them to teach me, but they couldn’t, so the first year I found it really frustrating. I didn’t do art A-levels or foundation, so my mind wasn’t really wired into that way of thinking.”

Bobby’s practical inclinations soon merged with his conceptually taught ones as he began to weave together abstract and narrative-driven electronic music. Labelling has in fact been something of a weird thing for Bobby.“I mean if I was asked to label it, I’m not sure I would know what to call it, so it doesn’t bother me too much.Although it’s been called witch-house and that’s laughable. Oh, and it did get dub-step album of the month in Mixmag,” he says, which sends us both into a sputter of chuckles.

Likewise, the term ‘noise’ is something Bobby veers away from. “That term doesn’t really make any sense to me, I think it sounds reductive. I don’t understand what noise is, I understand what sound is but I don’t understand what noise is.To me noise is nothing, I don’t know what noise is.”

Adorning the cover of ‘Excavation’ is an image as striking, purposefully ambiguous and cloudy, yet as perfectly representative of the lexicon within the album as possible – a swinging noose against a black abyss. “It was a long quest to find that,” Bobby tells me. “This album is pretty conceptually based, it has a strong narrative

to it. So trying to find an image that encapsulates that is really difficult.A friend of mine who did the photography for my first record sent me over the pitch for this record and in the pitch there was some reference images and one of the photographers was called Cody Cobb – his images just struck me and so I Google’d him and just started going through all his work, and I don’t know what it was about this one but it just stopped me.The more I looked at it, the more I realised it’s not really a noose, as it’s not tied, then there’s this cloudy stuff obscured behind it out of focus and it’s suspended in air, so you don’t really know where it comes from and there are so many elements like that on the record.

“Visual identity is really, really important to me. It’s not just about the music, it’s about the whole experience.”

I recently stumbled across an interview a few years ago in which Bobby, rather refreshingly, declared: “I never consider the role of the listener.”

“No, I don’t at all,” he says flatly, but with a smile.“And that’s not easy, you know?”

I ask if this has changed as he’s taken The Haxan Cloak on the road in front of people.“No, I’m really selfish,” he says.“I don’t give a shit. If people don’t like it I don’t care.

“I’ve done plenty of gigs where I’ve cleared rooms out

‘I f p e o p l e d o n’t l i k e it I d o n’t c a r e. I’v e d o n e p l e nt y o f g i g s w h e r e I’v e c l e a r e d r o o m s o ut b e f o r e’

before.”

Is that ever satisfying?

“Do you know what, it depends where you are playing, man…” He stops. “You know what, it’s not. It’s never a satisfying thing. Like if I was playing to a room full of Rihanna fans, I wouldn’t just want them all to leave, I’d love it if even one or two of them could see or feel something in what I was doing… I do like Rihanna as well, that’s not an insult.”

Of the ‘darkness’, Bobby offers: “I’m a massive horror fan and that informs a lot of what I do.Without the terror you wouldn’t have the beauty and without the beauty you wouldn’t have the terror. It has to be a relationship that compliments one another.You can feel comfortable in being uncomfortable. I’m interested in relationships of power like that.”

In ‘Excavation’ it follows the narrative path of death and the after-life of a clandestine lead character, so I ask him if the character’s ‘excavation’ ran parallel to any Bobby was having? “It’s a tough one, that,” he says. “I think that with anything that I create. Let’s say that for every thirty days spent making music, I’ll probably feel like on one or two days I’ve come out with something worthwhile, and part of the reason it feels worthwhile on those days is due to what you put yourself through in the other days. It’s expelling something. Catharsis in a way.

That’s kind of why I do what I do.

“Ever since I’ve been a kid, I’ve never wanted to do anything but music. I didn’t even consider there was another option. It wasn’t even thought about, it is just something that I have to do. If I don’t make music I feel terrible.”

For Bobby’s recent sold out ATP show, he enlisted the services of My Bloody Valentine’s audio engineer, which was, “amazing! Really good.”

“He spent a lot of time tuning the system to what I was putting through it, which not many people bother to do, understandably, if they’re an in-house engineer. The second big thing is, having your own sound engineer is kind of like having a big buffer – if someone goes ‘can you turn that down?’ he goes ‘no’, and literally the minute we started sound checking there were people from across the street and upstairs coming over to complain and even the venue owners came over and said ‘you’ve got to turn it down’ and he said ‘it’s not in my interest to turn it down, it’s in my interest to do what he [Bobby] wants me to do and if he wants it to be loud, it’s going to be loud.

We’re not breaking the decibel limit of the venue, so I’m going to make it as loud as possible.’ That’s what I want my shows to be, I want them to be massive and loud and physical.”

“There is a point where at the end of every set I do, it’s a bit like… [Bobby exhales deeply]… You feel drained because it takes a lot of processing energy to be just pelted with sound.You feel tired.There are many things I could compare it with but I won’t, so I’ll stop there,” he laughs.

While Bobby’s creative tendencies are anchored more firmly in personal endeavour than audience pandering, he still talks humbly of the audience response to his music. “I tend not to look up too much when I’m playing,” he says, “so I don’t really look for reactions when I’m playing because there’s so much smoke and strobes and shit I can’t even see anything. So literally, man, if one person comes up to me after the show and says, ‘I really like that’ that’s job done for me really. When I was younger and I went to shows I daren’t approach people, I daren’t go up to people or if I did it took a lot of talking myself into doing it. So if someone comes up and says, ‘thank you for playing for me’ what more do you want?”

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Finally, we get to speak to Goat, moments before they deliver the most cosmic live show of the weekend

When the expansive sounds of Goat’s debut album, ‘World Music’, suddenly appeared from an unknown, supposedly voodoo-practising village in Sweden in 2012, it shattered the worlds of many, including my own.

But it wasn’t until Primavera that I got to see the magic that had been captured on that record put to force on a live stage.Only then did I see all the oddness,extravagance and mystery come to life, breathing and moving under the blackness of two o’clock in the morning.

As the band took to the ATP stage, they unfurled a groove-laden, tribal-soaked, guitar and rhythm-fuelled fury of a show that sent us all into a dizzy, while Blur shouted “Parklife” next door. It was a marvel of a performance, and a highlight of the festival. Prior to that moment, I managed to pry a few words from the usually clandestine and reserved outfit, or the member that goes by the name ‘Benny’, at least.

––– Congratulations on the success of ‘World Music’.

Was the level of acclaim it received expected by you at all?

Benny: Thank you very much. We expected nothing when we recorded the album, that is the plain truth. So we were totally surprised, I still am to be honest. It was an effortless spontaneous creation made out of nothing.

A silent hymn to the eternal. A celebration of life, love and joy! We are all very grateful.”

––– Almost as striking and memorable as your record was the photo’s of yourselves that circulated along with it. Can you tell us a little bit about the intention behind them. Is there a sacrificial, ritualistic meaning behind them?

“I think you are referring to a photo taken at the temple?

Who knows what went on then and there but I guarantee that it was far out and that the meaning is of the most profound order. We do not like to partake in any kind of violence so sacrifices are of course out of the question.We are peaceful people.”

––– Can you tell us a little bit about the geographical anchoring of the group, both physically and musically?

How have the cultures, traditions and music experienced in your hometown of Korpilombolo shaped Goat?

“To the very core. Korpilombolo is essential to Goat.

Some of us reside there, some in Gothenburg, others in Stockholm and Malmö and others still outside of Sweden. But that does not matter for the Goat resides in

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us all.”

How has the conventional touring circuit affected you as a group? Have you felt removed and alienated from your original and musical home or enthralled and excited by the varying experiences of different places?

“First off, when it comes to playing live, we only do what we feel like. Goat will never be a conventionally touring band for many different reasons. There is just too much of an effort involved.We have other priorities.

But while touring and playing live we have met a lot of wonderful people and seen a lot of nice places. It has been very inspiring and I can ask for nothing more.”

––– By focusing on keeping your anonymity, it must create rife opportunity for false words and stories to circulate about you.

“I don´t care much for these things actually. The only thing I can say is that not one of the many speculations I have heard or read about us are even remotely close to the truth, which suites us just fine. We will spend our time however we choose and people that feel that they have a need to speculate can speculate all they want. As long as I don´t have to sit around and listen to it I am fine.”

––– Do you still consider the group to consist of a core of three?

“I consider the group to be in constant change. Like it has been for decades. Members come and go as they please, and money too my friend. Nothing is permanent.

For live shows there is more or less one set of people at least for the official live shows.That does not necessarily mean no one else partakes when we record stuff.

Speaking of rumours, there never was any such thing as a core of three by the way.”

––– You once said: “We don’t really make songs, we just play.” Is this still the case?

“This is how our records are done.When we play live at festivals and such, then we of course use a set list and play the songs more or less like they are on the album with some room for improvisation. You must give the people what they want, at least some of the time.”

––– Do you view your music to be spiritual in any traditional sense? And how much of the success in creating music with Goat lies in the ability to become transcendental?

“Yes very traditional. We move along according to the

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ancient scriptures. I have no idea about us being transcendental but one of the most transcendental bands ever around were Suck.The cosmic voice of India – Mr. PPN himself is another good example.”

––– As something of a follow on, are Goat drug experimenters? And if so, how has that affected the tone of the group and its ethos?

“What individuals choose to do is up to them.There are many ways to alter the content of the mind, drugs being one. Herein lies a great misconception of our time I think. We see the mind as equal to its content, which is just very primitive. All concepts are fleeting; there is no permanence in concepts. Not even the ones that you hold most dear. The seer is vast and ever expanding always on. Goat (the band) is about music so I´ll stick to that topic here.”

––– Is there anywhere else in the world you have visited that comes close to resembling Korpilombolo?

“No, not yet.Well, Baltimore maybe.”

––– How has your time been spent since the release of the album in terms of creating new music?

“We constantly play music and some of it we record.

Some of the stuff we record someone releases. Other stuff we hold on to for various reasons. Do you know that there are old Goat recordings from the ’80s being released in a near future, by the way? Check out Cardinal Fuzz Records, boys and girls!”

––– You released two remix LP’s for Record Store Day. Did anyone’s re-working of your work particularly strike a chord of intrigue? And has there been any thought or discussion about a live performance involving any of the artists on the record?

“Thank you. I am equally grateful for everyone’s effort.

That anyone would care enough about us to remix our stuff is just humbling. And then on top of that when it´s done by people/musicians you admire, it just fills your whole being with gratitude. If there are any opportunities to collaborate live we are open for this.”

––– What are your creative musical plans for the rest of the year? What will the next Goat record sound like?

“I don´t know, I´ll spend time with friends and family.

Go on vacation. Goat will travel for a bit doing some festivals. For the new record there will probably be some more of what you already know and who knows what.”

Killer Mike A success 9 years in the making, Killer Mike has earned the right to be completely unapologetic

Off the back of Killer Mike’s career high 2012 release ‘R.A.P. Music’ (R.A.P. standing for Rebellious African People), I find the Atlantan rapper in a cheerful mood just minutes before he takes to the Pitchfork stage.“This is my first time in Spain, so I’m a little nervous,” he confesses.

“The running joke in my crew is that I spent nine years becoming an overnight sensation!” he laughs heartily, as we discuss the album’s success. “I’m very happy to be at this stage in my career and have all these options open to me. I feel very blessed and very lucky.”

Mike has a decade-long career behind him, with longstanding and notable collaborations with Outkast and Big Boi playing figurative roles in his creative output (he features on the Grammy-award winning ‘The Whole World’), but the years of maturity building up to his success has suited him well.“Stuff that used to bother me as an artist when I was younger, doesn’t bother me any more. It’s a job. It’s the best job in the world, it’s a fun job, but it’s a job. It’s not about getting high before the job, it’s not about going up there inebriated, it’s about coming out and giving the best show and playing the best music you can and getting high and inebriated on your own time! But the younger me would be like, ‘I’m gonna get fucked up and go to the show!’.”

Killer Mike’s response to his surge of popularity is a simple one – give them what they want. “I spent a lot of years kind of being stepped on and ignored, so when people start watching they get greedy and they want more,” he says. “I want to just keep supplying now that there is a real appetite.”

The pinnacle to ‘R.A.P. Music’ is a raging, vitriolic assault on president Ronald Reagan. In the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death, despite her instilling hatred amongst many musicians and artists, even the sternest of left-wing artists and media commentators danced around their words, picking carefully and hiding behind the ever re-appearing word ‘divisive’. Many seemed, not frightened, but reserved in their assault. On ‘Reagan’ Killer Mike utters the words that few did in the wake of Thatcher, as he spits “I’m glad Reagan’s dead!”.

“I did a show in January, and I’ve never been afraid on stage before but I was afraid on stage that night,” Mike tells me. “Now of course I knew historically who Thatcher was, but I didn’t know how the people felt about her was pretty much identical to the way people like me feel about Reagan. So, as I’m rapping about Reagan, this really tall guy just starts screaming, ‘Die, Maggie, die! Die, Maggie, die!’ and I’m like, ‘What the fuck?!’ I didn’t know what was happening, it spooked the shit out of me. So when we went home and then she died, my wife was like ‘you know ya’ll killed that white lady?!’.

I definitely went and did my homework after that.” Mike laughs heartily and playfully, something that he does throughout our conversation, but when we begin to discuss the role of Reagan in his life, he becomes impassioned and stone-cold serious, spewing furiously, eloquently and extremely personally about the role that man had on his life.

“Ronald Reagan was essentially a conservative Jay Z, of sorts. I’m not saying Jay Z is Reagan, but what I’m saying is, if you want to sell something to black people right now at this moment, put Jay Z on the screen.

p h o t o g r ap h e r - La u r a C oulson

Ronald Reagan was that at one point. He sold things, he was a salesman and the Republican Party were smart enough to bring him in and use him as a salesman to sell agendas. What happened was that he became the face of bullshit agendas and had an evil economic policy, and more evil than that he became part of a conspiracy that gave weapons to people that didn’t deserve them and brought cocaine into the streets of America, and he helped not only destroy the fabric of America but directly my neighbourhood.” Mike fiercely pounds his chest.

“Cocaine and crack-cocaine and the sentences you got for that destroyed black families and locked up poor African-American families,”he says.“I saw my community crumble under what he was doing, I saw my community become a wasteland and I took it personally.

“One year, when I was in the sixth-grade I was getting told by officer friendly about avoiding being kidnapped and the next year he was kicking our ass like we were villains, but we were still children,” he says, saddened and angry. “It was because the perception had become: we were the dealers, we were the scourge, but we weren’t Oliver North, we didn’t facilitate bringing in crackcocaine into the country, we didn’t use military planes to do that, we weren’t the CIA turning our eye so that contras could continue a killing campaign in Nicaragua.

All of that was him and my thing is this: if a salesman was used to sell it then I am going to point at the salesman and say, ‘you are the fucking devil’. I have no qualms about saying I’m glad Reagan’s dead because I’m not just talking about the human being – who was old as fuck by the way, he lived older than he deserved to be – it’s about the ideology of Reagan.

“The first verse of the track doesn’t even mention Reagan, it talks about us as rappers allowing ourselves to be prostituted by corporations to sell bullshit to children.

We exploit the youth, we introduce them to the gang; we do that.We as rappers, and I have to accept my culpability

writer - Da niel Dyl a n W ra y

and my responsibility as a part of that.”

“Like, it’s cool to be 21, 22, and a member of the Republican Party and talk about Reagan like he was a great lion? No! He was a lying, old, dementia-ridden motherfucker and his wife was pretty dizzy too, to say ‘just say no to drugs’ when there is high unemployment due to his economic policy. American trade became shit under him and all of a sudden you’re telling masses of groups of unemployed, poor people who need to feed themselves, ‘don’t sell or don’t do drugs’ – it was hypocritical and it was evil. I’m very glad Reagan is dead, I should throw a barbeque every year to celebrate his death but I’ve only done it once so far” Mike opens up further, “My father was a black police officer and I’m from a city where right now the chief of police and the mayor were young black officers back then – these people were forced to lock up young black boys: five grams of crack got you the same time as five-hundred grams of cocaine. Now I mean, you have to do your job, you have to lock up a criminal, but you’re locking up a 19 year old boy, a 16, 17 year-old boy and sending these young men to jail for 20-30 years and my father hated it, he ended up leaving the force. I don’t know many black police officers who are sympathetic to that kind of policy, because non-violent drug offenses do not merit the kind of sentences they got.We have rapists, child molesters and murderers who get less time than non-violent drug offenders.”

We then talk about stand-up comic George Carlin and how, essentially, he too is a rapper, and the “piss and vinegar” of Bill Hicks that Mike so dearly loves. He then condemns materialism, bragging and flippancy in modern hip-hop and then we part ways and Mike takes to the stage before I can even get into the crowd. He then performs with all the impassioned, spiteful yet earnest energy that he just exuded throughout our conversation.

The word of hip-hop and music needs Killer Mike.

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Wo man The recent rise of Solange Knowles has to many felt as smooth as her retro RnB pop. Truth is Beyoncé’s little sister is two albums and a whole decade into a tricky career that’s lead her to do everything herself from now on p h o to g r a p h e r - La u r a Co u l s o n

At 15 years old, Solange Piaget Knowles lived in a world most teenage girls could only dream about. With a publishing deal and a record contract under her belt, she’d already toured as a dancer with her sister Beyoncé’s megawatt power trio Destiny’s Child and, with her manager father, stylist mother and a bulging book of contacts, the stage was set for her to shake off her chrysalis and flutter into the public eye a fully-fledged S.T.A.R. But teenagers are unpredictable souls, as anyone who’s been one can attest. Solange’s debut album appeared at the beginning of 2003, but despite a glittering roll call of producers and writers (Timbaland, The Neptunes and Linda Perry, to name a few), its contemporary blend of stuttering, sparse beats and pizzicato strings failed to make a dent in the charts. Now out of print and virtually impossible to hear outside of YouTube, ‘Solo Star’, in hindsight, is a decent enough record, though its juddering Timbalandisms seem a couple of years behind the times when you consider that Beyoncé’s ‘Crazy In Love’ was the deserved summer hit of that year.

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Whether a response to the album’s lukewarm reception or simply a flash of her defiantly contrarian nature, less than a year later Solange turned her back on singing, married her childhood sweetheart, became pregnant and upped sticks to a small town in Idaho, where her new husband was studying. Away from the pop industry and her huge family in Texas, she simply cooked, cleaned and brought up her baby, Juelz, and learned a few life lessons in the process.

“I think as an artist you have to go through those phases and those transitions,” she says of the period between her debut and her eventual follow-up record five years later. “You have to take things into your own hands if you want them to reflect you wholeheartedly.”

Solange is speaking to me backstage at Primavera, where she’s just come off the Pitchfork stage after a convincing performance featuring a live band, slick dance moves and seriously impressive vocals. She’s shed the lime green biker jacket she had on during the show and at our photo shoot this morning, but is still wearing the leather trousers and a lurid tropical print top. Her

face, as expected, is immaculate – with kohl-rimmed eyes and glowing skin, she’s even more beautiful now than she was as a slightly awkward teenage starlet.

“I think when I look back at my life and my career, really the timing has reflected where I was in my life,” she says. “I got married young, I had a child very young, and once I had my son that was my entire existence. I moved to the country and had that whole romanticised life, for a while, but I think I had to go through that in order to grow as an artist.”

Divorcing her husband not long after her son was born, she found herself a single mother with barely any time to record songs, let alone promote an album or go on tour. Still, she moved back to Houston and kept on writing, producing hits for her sister (‘Get Me Bodied’ and ‘Upgrade U’ from the album ‘B’Day’) and eventually completing her second record, ‘Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams’, in 2008.

“I’ve never ever stopped writing music, I’ve always written music and laid down things, it’s just been a matter of putting them out or not,” she says.“And when

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I think of the artists that I really love and admire, and aspire to have similar principles to in my career – the Sades, the Björks, the Kate Bushes – I think there are just different types of artists that really need to retreat and develop, and I think that is what I did. I had to retreat, I had to develop.”

That second album was a riot of Motown-infused twisting and shaking, with production from Cee-Lo Green and Mark Ronson among others, and it hit the Top 10 confidently in the summer of 2008 on the back of lead single ‘I Decided’. After that, Solange floated in and out of the spotlight, attracting attention for her sharply styled outfits as much as her music, which petered out as she locked horns with her label, eventually leaking the self-explanatory track ‘Fuck The Industry (Signed Sincerely)’.

Another long gap was finally closed last November with the release of an EP, ‘True’, where she again took a sharp left turn, recording a set of smooth-as-butter ‘80s-inspired jams with none other than Dev Hynes, the bespectacled hipster chameleon known variously as Blood Orange, Lightspeed Champion and one third of 2006’s flash-in-the-pan cult favourites Test Icicles.

It’s this back-story, full of unexpected twist and turns, that hints at Solange’s fascinating obstinacy, her continuing refusal to play by the rules. When you look like Beyoncé, can sing like Beyoncé and have access to the same team of producers, publicists and managers as Beyoncé, to avoid becoming simply a diluted version of Beyoncé takes quite some doing. And with a back catalogue spanning 10 years and not quite three albums, she must know the pop industry – and its darker side – inside out.

“For sure,” she nods. “I mean, I grew up with a manager as a father and a sister as a massive star, so I got to see the development of her career from my living room to stadiums. I danced with Destiny’s Child for a few years, and not only that, I actually signed my first publishing deal as a songwriter when I was 15.”

Despite the pressure of professional commitments at such a young age, Solange says it didn’t feel at all strange to be working with some of the biggest stars and songwriters in the world.“I was writing these songs and never really knew how to approach the situation,” she says, “because I was so young and I felt like it was such a big girl industry, I was in 10th grade, you know. But I think that’s really why it started out with my family, because they’re the first people I played the songs to, and how they responded to them was just incredibly humbling and amazing for me.

“I think I’ve had an interesting perspective on the industry,” she adds.

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he latest phase in her career, Solange 3.0, was without a doubt heralded with her cover of Dirty Projectors’‘Stillness Is The Move’, which caught the eye of the Pitchfork crowd back in 2009. And it’s been her songwriting partnership with Dev that has laid the groundwork for what is inevitably her most mature release to date, inspired by the hit-making duo that brought Janet Jackson out of the shadow of her older brother in the early ‘90s.

“In some sense there was this magic chemistry between Dev and I,” she explains, “but I certainly spent a year or so creating and developing this sound – studying Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, studying those records and the songwriting, really trying to understand why those songs were so powerful.”

You can hear traces of that endeavour in the EP’s lead track ‘Losing You’, a sultry groove that snakes around gushing synths and huge handclaps while Solange delivers a restrained and distinctly retro vocal over the top. But for all its smoothness, there’s a rough edge to the production that hints at the song’s indie credentials and makes it unlikely fodder for today’s steroid-pumped, spray-tanned, maximum-volume charts.

Solange and Dev met while working on a track for rapper Theophilus London, and the unlikely pair immediately forged the kind of instinctive connection that’s a rare find in the world of pop writing.

“I mean, I’ve been a songwriter since I was 13, and a lot of the stuff that I wrote for Destiny’s Child or my sister was in these writing sessions where you don’t know the producer very well, you have no background on who you’re working with in terms of their lives or their walks of life,” she says.

“Writing is a very personal and instinctual sort of process, so a lot of times I’ve been put into situations where every time you have a melody or a lyric and you project them out, there’s this level of fear – do you think this is corny, do you think this is cheesy?

“And there are times when I’ve worked with people where it’s very natural and you don’t feel that energy of fear. It’s never been that way with Dev, it’s always been very seamless and I think that was for me the most important thing, that I could be in a space where I could create and execute all of my ideas with someone I felt comfortable with.”

I ask what each of them brings to the partnership.

“It’s very complex, it’s hard to put it into words,” she says. “For the most part I think where the magic really lies is that we both have very similar sonic tastes but very different ways of executing them.

“My last album definitely had some very experimental moments and, as Dev has said, some far more even than

on this one. But I also have a pop muscle in terms of songwriting, and Dev acts on instinct a lot more as a songwriter and producer. He tends to have the idea, lay it out, and it is what it is.

“I approach things more in the sense of wanting it to have a formation, wanting it to have a hook and a bridge and a climax. More of a traditional pop sense. So I think that yin and yang makes for a really great project.”

Dev is also on the road with her, at least for now, playing guitar alongside a full band and backing singers, who are all under the total direction of the show’s star, right down to the shoes on their feet.

“I had a very specific vision for how I wanted the show to roll out,” she says.

Sounds like you’re a strict band leader.

“I’m not strict with them,” she laughs. “I don’t think that’s the right term, but I definitely like us to be prepared. I watch a lot of SOS Band videos from the ‘80s, a lot of Teena Marie and a lot of Vanity 6 videos.

The thing I really love about those bands and their live performances – like Sheila E, she’s a huge inspiration – is that it was all about the music, but it also was about individual showmanship. My idea is that if everybody in the band is a star, then we’re all projecting that even brighter and even stronger. I really looked for people who, if they were on stage by themselves, would be able to capture the audience themselves.”

Every aspect of the show is under Solange’s control, from the choreography – each of the musicians has to have competent dancing feet to keep up with the dance routines – to the set list and even the chord changes to transition between songs. “All of the stuff that might seem like it just happened was very premeditated,” says Solange, smiling widely.

How did Dev feel about taking on the dancing?

“The first time I told him that I’d choreographed moves, I didn’t really know how he’d receive it. But he was totally open to it and he completely understood the vision. I style the band as well.”

That would explain Dev’s very sharp suit and hat, then. (He looked unrecognisable tonight, in a leather Stetson over his old fluffy bear hat.)

“Of course, every single thing in the band. It’s not an easy feat,” she says, scrolling through a scrapbook of images on her iPhone. “All day I’m emailing designers, it’s a lot of work.”

That desire to manage each and every detail may be a result of her turbulent experiences in the industry, constantly battling labels to be allowed to do things her own way. But it also reveals a streak of that iron-hard Knowles industriousness, the single-minded commitment inherited from their father, who gave up

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his job to make stars of Destiny’s Child, and which powered her sister through her boot camp upbringing.

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o after releasing ‘True’ on Terrible Records, the label part-owned by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor and home to acts like Chairlift, Kindness and Twin Shadow, the next obvious step in Solange’s quest for autonomy is of course to set up her own label – a move that she announced earlier this year.

“I’m so incredibly excited,” she laughs, looking genuinely pleased to be taking on even more responsibility on top of the daily grind of writing, singing, performing, choreographing dance moves, styling her band and doing the school run. “[With Terrible Records] I really felt like it was a collaboration in terms of putting it out, commissioning the videos – so many things that I really had absolutely no knowledge about, which I learned along the way.

“Now I think I’m just at a place where I want to be able to house my own projects and roll them out with 100% creative and artistic control.”

Called Saint Records, the label will be home to her forthcoming album, as yet untitled but due for release later this year. While the songwriting partnership with Dev continues, other producers are also rumoured to be in the frame, including hip hop veteran Q-Tip –

but she keeps her poker face intact when asked.

Unsurprisingly, she also fancies having a go behind the controls this time round.

“For this next record I plan on producing a lot more and doing it sort of on my own,” she says. “I spent so much time developing and working on this sound, and that’s the hard part. Now things are rolling out a lot more seamlessly from a songwriting standpoint.

“I wrote the songs without any sort of musical background in mind, it’s really about the lyrics and the emotions, and a lot of the things I’m writing about are extremely personal. It definitely is a lot more political and attacks a lot more social issues than relationship issues.”

As well as her own album, she plans to release records by other artists, but surely she can’t have enough time to run a label as well.

“I do, I do!” she insists. “If something is important to me then I make the time. And the projects that I’m looking to put out I’ve actually had planned for a long time, so to be able to execute them and share them is gonna be so incredibly exciting.

“You know, as a young woman, and especially as a young black woman, to have the opportunity to put out projects that I thoroughly enjoy, and to give them a voice and give them a home – I’m just so incredibly humbled and thankful to have that opportunity.

“Labels are generally run by people who are a lot older, who have been in it for a while, so it’s exciting to see this next generation of kids, like Odd Future, who

are really taking their artistry in their own hands.”

It’s an unusual reference point, given that Solange has been pursuing her pop career for over a decade. She may be just a few years older than the Odd Future crew, but the generation gap between them makes her seem old enough to be their mother.

What she does have in common with Tyler & co., though, is a fuck you attitude to the way artists are expected to play the game; a carefree disregard for the rules and mores of the music business. That, combined with a desperate, innate need to become a star and fulfil her genetic destiny, forms the two-way pull on Solange’s psyche that explains her patchy, unpredictable career to date.

Where Beyoncé’s life has been a perpetual boot camp to achieve a classic vision of glittering pop perfection, Solange seems to thrive on making life difficult for herself, trying out different flavours, seeing what fits.And if she can just keep up the momentum and get that third album on the shelves, it may finally be her time to shine.

“This next record is gonna be even more of a ride, because I did this all on my own,” she announces proudly.

“Everything from creating it, paying for it, rolling it out – and now I’m happy to have seen the fruits of my labour.”

The more she takes on, the happier she is, it seems.

With her dream of complete control now tantalisingly close at hand, “things are starting to get a little easier,” she says.

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Loud AND quiet ALBUMS LIVE FILM REviews

www.loudandquiet.com

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Al bums 08/10

Boards of Canada Tomorrow’s Harvest (Warp)

By Reef Younis. In stores June 10

These New Puritans Field Of Reeds (Infectious)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores June 10

08/10

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Two years after its release, the neglect shown towards These New Puritans’ second album, ‘Hidden’, is still something of a mystery. It marked the moment that the Southend-based “company” shook off all neat comparisons, particularly to The Fall, as they puréed French Horns with collapsing skulls, dancehall with dubstep, minimalism with gothic orchestration and post-rock with Steve Reich. So grandiose and full of unfriendly ideas, it was never going to outsell Mumford & Sons that year, but in 2010 the critical hubbub around a record so inventive was soon muted, too. It left project leader Jack Barnett promising that the next TNP album would be a pop record. It’s not.

‘Field of Reeds’ is These New Puritans’ least commercial record to date, taking ‘Hiddens’’s boisterous fascination with DIY orchestrations to a place more serene yet ominous. Jack’s twin brother George is once again along for the ride, original member Tom Hein too, and the newly appointed singer Elisa Rodrigues, but Jack hasn’t written with them – ‘Field of Reeds’ is as much a collaboration between Barnett and composers Hans Ek, Phillip Sheppard, and Michel van der Aa as it is a band record. It’s particularly tricky to work out what brother

George has contributed, now the drummer of a group that has largely done away with any kind of percussive drive whatsoever.

Drums, of course, were always key to These New Puritans’ sound, but they feature fleetingly and just twice here, comfortingly familiar and syncopated on ‘V (Island Song)’ and eventually on ‘The Light In Your Name’, played doubletime as George makes the most of his studio time. Jack is more keen to embrace slowmoving soundscapes and choirs (‘Spiral’), dead space and minimal piano (‘This Guy’s In Love With You’), an overall sense of apprehension found in European independent cinema and what is essentially These New Puritan’s weakest element – his singing voice. Little of this is surprising, as Barnett has never wanted to make it easy for anyone to love his band – the hooks often came from the drums, so the drums have gone; his deadened sing-speak has been largely criticised, to it’s a recurring theme.Yet it’s when Jack sings that ‘Field of Reeds’ feels most contemporary and less like a film score. It’s a slow, slow listen, far subtler than ‘Hidden’, yet no less ambitious and no more concerned with what anyone might make of it.

It won’t even outsell Mumford & Sons’ singles these days, but the music of These New Puritans has always been heading this way – to concert halls and art galleries, where neoclassical compositions like these can be considered oddly beautiful and strangely alluring.

Buoyed by the cryptic digital egg hunt, and boosted by the strict listening lockdown, in a year where The Knife, MBV and Daft Punk have worked similarly grandiose introductions, the anticipation around Boards of Canada’s fourth album has bordered on fanboy feral.

Finally, we get to feel ‘Gemini’ pulse into life, the molasses-thick, chasm-deep melodies of the gargantuan ‘Cold Earth’ surge, and the amplified Moroder-futurism of ‘Sick Times’ rage and rumble with colossal power.The size and scale of this collection of tracks is staggering; big, booming ambience, skittering trip-hop glitches and BoC’s most aggressive drum programming to date meet sepia-tinged memories buried in the soundwaves. Roused by Richter-scale energy and heavy, heaving melodies,‘Reach for the Dead’ and ‘Jacquard Causeway’ continue the percussive assault, kicking in with clattering, cantankerous thumps while ‘Telepath’ and ‘Split Your Infinities’ death-threat interludes hint at the tension and trepidation that courses through the album. On ‘White Cyclosa’, chiming melodies sit on top of the menace simmering beneath, while ‘Uritual’ comes on like a wilderness song; a deranged desert session gone primal with shamanic didgeridoo and hallucinogen stares into space.

Cynically, these first listens could only ever scratch the surface. So in the same way the cloak and dagger codes and the record store mysteries prolong an already celebrated return,‘Tomorrow’s Harvest’ will also gradually reveal itself with every glorious listen. It’s a point underscored in the effortlessly accomplished ‘Sundown’ and the chest-cavity reverberating power of closer ‘Come to Dust’. More than just the final piece in the puzzle, it’s BoC’s eight year climax.

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Lust For Youth

Melt Yourself Down

Austra

Perfect View

Melt Yourself Down

Olympia

About Group

(Sacred Bones)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores July 15

(Leaf)

By Mandy Drake. In stores June 17

(Domino)

By Josh Sunth. In stores June 17

When Saints Go Machines Infinity Pool (!K7)

By Sam Cornforth. In stores June 23

(Domino)

By Sam Walton. In stores July 1

It can be very difficult to forge a distinct artistic identity in any genre, but that’s especially true of synth-pop, the chosen music of Swedish producer Hannes Norrvide, aka Lust For Youth. His third record, made up of largely instrumental synth-beat compositions, isn’t going to do it for him, but what we’re left with is thirty-six minutes of high quality, immersive, sometimes hypnotic music that surrounds and envelops you and even (at times) pushes away all cognitive thought.‘I Found Love’ is like the soundtrack to a mildly disorientating, yet not unpleasant dream where you’re surrounded by dark shadows and bright lights in primary colours. Elsewhere the pulsating title track builds towards a faint end-of-song nod to ‘Blue Monday’.While lacking any sense of groundbreaking originality, ‘Perfect View’ proves Norrvide to be an accomplished exponent of his art.

Melt Yourself Down – a sevenstrong progressive World Music collective featuring members of Acoustic Ladyland and other jazz-funk nuts – play the sort of brash carnival music that ends up being the highlight of your festival.

It’s the kind of boisterous, brass-heavy music that makes the Bacardi bar the place to be at 2pm, not the main stage and all its singer/songwriter dross. Melt Yourself Down attack like dancehall-gone-goofy on this eponymous debut album, only they play too fast for any kind of reggaeton skank to keep up.This is probably what ‘punk funk’ really sounds like – Afro party music pushed to its aggressive end, cowbells dented, the saxophone demented and wheezing. It also sounds like the band are having more fun than you are, even as you wriggle your arse over from the bar with pint of cider in a paper cup.

The first thing you notice when you listen to Austra is, of course, Katie Stelmanis’ operatic vocal lines somersaulting over each track.

Strong vocals can often be as much distraction as attraction, but there’s a hint of Braids’ affinity for balance in ‘Olympia’, and the fluttering synths that underpin most of the songs on the album are far from neglected.

You’ll find a whole lot of twinkling and chiming and victorious, mournful horn on ‘Reconcile’, while single ‘Home’ relies on delicate percussion and swooning verses to earn its place. Austra have acquired a unified sense of direction since their debut and, sonically, ‘Olympia’ is undoubtedly well crafted, but that’s just what most of these songs feel like, rather than essential listening.You can find plenty of moments of artistic precision here, but these twelve tracks don’t insist on themselves like great songs should.

‘Kokylie’,When Saints Go Machine’s breakthrough record, was an intricate fusion of electro pop.With this in mind the first offering from ‘Infinity Pool’ will have stumped a few people, as Killer Mike takes vocal duties on ‘Love And Respect’ with an old school rap. It is unlike anything the Danish quartet have done before, and not ones to stick to a tried and tested formula, they have once again evolved their slick sound.

Although ‘Love And Respect’ is a bit of a red herring, there is a more diverse range of upbeat styles that are expertly moulded together on this third LP. ‘System Of Unlimited Love’ is a psych rock jam, for example, while ‘Lodine’ is characterised by its classic hip-hop beats. Consistently pleasing and occasionally thrilling, it’s the evolution and progression of When Saints Go Machine that is perhaps more exciting of all.

Even within the admittedly limited canon of semi-improvised genre-hopping side-project albums, the third from About Group (Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor, Spiritualized’s John Coxon,This Heat’s Charles Hayward and free-jazz bigswinging-dick Pat Thomas) is a decidedly odd affair. It would be a catastrophic one, too, were it not for ‘All Is Not Lost’ – the rightful heir to Ginuwine’s ’90s sleaze classic ‘Pony’ – and a couple of other ear-catching curios. If you’ve ever wondered how Alexis Taylor would tackle a bluesy, freewheelin’ cover of ‘Walk On By’, for example, you’ve come to the right place.

Surrounding these, though, is the very worst kind of plinky-plonky, aimless “jazz” and a handful of half-finished Taylor songs that carry none of the confidence improv demands. About Group, then: crazy name, crazy band, infrequently brilliant and maddening for it.

Between The Walls

Sean Nicholas Savage Other Life (Arbutus)

By Joe Goggins. In stores now

07/10

Sean Nicholas Savage’s new record follows on from a trio (!) of full-lengths in 2011 that established him as a rising cult figure. Most noteworthy was ‘Flamingo’, a decidedly garish run-through of the singer’s favourite eighties synthpop touchpoints. On ‘Other Life’ he’s preserved his sharp ear for melody whilst taking things in a more soulful direction – territory that proves a neat fit for his rasping, and often fragile vocal style.With only minimalist instrumentation throughout – simple keys on ‘More Than I Love Myself ’, Beach Boys-esque, psychedelic, distorted guitar on ‘You Changed Me’ – Savage’s voice is laid bare, allowing his lyrics to come to the fore throughout. Contrary to the often-muddled ‘Flamingo’, here the key themes are clear – selfdeprecation (‘She Looks Like You’,‘Look at Me’) and regret (‘Change Your Mind’).The insistence on low fidelity can sound a little contrived in places, but ‘Other Life’ does little to damage Savage’s reputation as one of Montreal’s most intriguing prospects.

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Al bums 07/10

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Ghost Outfit

Holden

Surfer Blood

Cloud Boat

Hebronix

I Want You To Destroy Me

The Inheritors

Pythons

Book of Hours

Unreal

(Sways)

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores June 24

(Border Community)

By Sam Walton. In stores June 17

(Warner Bros)

By Reef Younis. In stores June 17

(Apollo)

By David Zammitt. In stores now

(ATP)

By Lucy Holt. In stores July 8

As soon as it begins,‘I Want You to Destroy Me’ is an album that wrestles to find a true personality amongst all its sonic carnage.The opening triplet of songs rage between old blasts of Sonic Youth and Gun Club, No Age and Japandroids, but while undeniably coated in a layer of precarious and occasionally malfunctioning TNT, it struggles to add depth to the rich lineage it places itself amongst. As the band reach ‘Words’, things alter altogether and while the coherence of thematic consistency is still absent, it suddenly morphs itself into a quality rather than a drawback. By the time they spew out the monstrous ‘Kiluhs’, they have reached a new plateau, once again.The album stutters and jolts as frequently as it surprises and delights – it’s draped in unpredictability and while it comes with some frustrations, the blindfolded journey is largely a thrill.

A 75-minute album recorded live on home-made analogue synths that veers between acid techno and free jazz while maintaining a ramshackle, almost post-rock aesthetic, Holden’s first LP since 2006 should be hard work, yet ‘The Inheritors’ contains more than enough character to command attention. Like a creaking carnival rollercoaster, its rickety runaway gallop is its crowning virtue: tracks frequently feel one stray bleep away from meltdown, but the record is so well paced that there’s barely chance to worry, and when ‘The Caterpillar’s Invention’ peaks with clattering drums and honking sax drones, recalling some bastard Godspeed/Battles soundclash, the only option is to savour the wicked deviancy and await the next lurch.

It offers a depth and genuine thrill that, in the context of 2013’s electronic music, with its order, precision and cleanliness, is a godsend.

Surferblood’s 2010 debut hit with a glazed, grinning, shit-eating charm.

Buoyant and insistently catchy, it served to underline that these young Floridian’s knew their way around a happy-go-lucky guitar hook.Three years on from ‘Astro Coast’ and those same sweet melodies briefly veer into Pixies territory on the barking vocal of ‘I Was Wrong’ and flit with florid Morrissey-esque panache on ‘Squeezing Blood’, but it also gives ‘Pythons’ an easy frequency; one safe in its fuzzy, sunny harmonies, jangling guitar lines and try-hard anthemia. ‘Blair Witch’ attempts to reel in The Shins’ wounded sensibility, the pop-by-numbers of ‘Say Yes to Me’ breezes past easily enough and ‘Weird Shapes’ briefly throws a curveball in a ‘100 Broken Windows’ era Idlewild. It makes ‘Pythons’ feel like a measured attempt at ticking off the requisite guitar pop boxes, but nothing more.

Signed to a subsidiary imprint of R&S, duo Cloud Boat create a sound that has all the hallmarks of their parent label. But while ‘Book of Hours’ incorporates dub bass, pitch-shifted vocals and syncopated beats throughout, it’s actually more indebted to the English folk tradition than it is to contemporary UK underground dance. ‘Dréan’ and ‘Godhead’, for example, repurpose Fairport Convention for the 21st Century, while ‘Bastion’ fuses pastoral and 2-step with devastating effect.The real opus, however, is the eight-minute suite of ‘Pink Grin I’ and ‘II’, a haunting dubstep-meets-Mogwai purging of the tension that’s built in the preceding eight tracks. ‘Book Of Hours’ is like those first slats of sunlight that penetrate at 5am, as the shapelessness of the night morphs into the focus of a bright morning; melancholically reflective, yet sumptuously warm.

Hebronix is the new project of Daniel Blumberg, ex-frontman of Yuck, a band whose debut album featured 18 fuzzy garage tracks.

‘Unreal’, on the other hand, is a deceptively long construct, broken only into six, with tracks like ‘Viral’ seeing its author collate his previous distant slacker drones and organise them into a more minimal, calculated fare.The rivers of American fuzz, it seems, not longer flow but rather trickles.Title track ‘Unreal’ and its accompanying suburban-set video act as reminders that Blumberg is not the New Jersey bum he would have once liked to be, but a perceptive London musician, concerned as much with spaced melody and sharp lyrics as other unruly dissonance.The album peaks with ‘The Plan’, a build of spiraling piano and commendable restraint, nearly arcing back down into shoegaze. It feels like Blumberg is more himself now than ever before.

Waxahatchee Cerulean Salt

08/10

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Katie Crutchfield is an all American kinda gal and an indie dream, just the right amount of awkward, confessional and doe-eyed. She’s named her project after a creek near her parent’s house in unknown Shelby, Alabama, perhaps because small-town feelings are so central to Waxahatchee and certainly this second album.

Debut LP,‘American Weekend’, was released just last year, and ‘Cerulean Salt’ brims with a prolific innocence – a get-it-down-and-get-it-out dairy-like quality. It’s anti-folk meets grunge-lite, not a million miles away from London duo Big Deal; the meeting of gently fuzzing acoustic guitars and crystalline vocals that want you to hear every single word, with the occasional delivery of something fleshed-out but hardly heavy. It’s Crutchfield’s unabashed nature that’ll have you wishing The OC hadn’t been cancelled, and ‘Cerulean Salt’ could itself soundtrack a whole season of LA models staring at Middle American lakes as they come of age.

Cynicism doesn’t wash here – it’s a pure, sweet record.

Photography by Frankie Nazardo / Tom Cockram

(Wichita)

By Mandy Drake. In stores July 1

06/10

Smith Westerns Soft Will (Co-Op)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores June 24 From their trash-glam, shit-fi debut album to the far superior, shiny ‘Dye It Blonde’, Chicago’s Smith Westerns have always sounded blasé but excited about aping their boyish heroes – first Marc Bolan and then John Lennon. Something has changed, though. ‘Soft Will’ – recorded once again in a hi-spec studio to give it a definite, if dreamy, sheen – feels like ‘Dye It Blonde’’s comedown; like a band no longer full of a youthful pep that’s impossible to simulate.They’ve clearly added ‘Dark Side of The Moon’ to their deducible record collection, too, although the result is merely a regressive instrumental slog for the second half of ‘XXIII’. Elsewhere, the band still sound most like Lennon as they try to smile through jaded tears on more upbeat tracks like ‘Fool Proof ’ and ‘Idol’, but it’s hard to ignore lyrics like “everyday’s a hangover”, however sprightly the keyboard chimes. By ‘White Oath’ (“chain smoke the day away”) and ‘Cheer Up’ (a sobbing waltz), Smith Westerns aren’t wallowing, but they have succumb to ‘Soft Will’’s sombre core, making the closing ‘Varsity’ (which sounds sanguine and a lot like Squeeze’s ‘Up The Junction’) extra buoyant and even more misplaced. Dejected though it is, ‘Soft Will’ has its moments, especially if you’ve just been dumped, but the vigour that made Smith Westerns so envious and young, it’s gone.

Camera Obscura

Baths

Desire Lines

Obsidian

(4AD)

By Josh Sunth. In stores now

06/10

It’s never difficult to tell when you’re listening to a Camera Obscura LP, because Tracyanne Campbell’s lazy cadences have always had the ability to straddle innocence and experience with unusual grace, sort of justifying their bookishness with a clear willingness to please. ‘Desire Lines’ is as easy to listen to as ever, but inoffensive, which for the first time in the Scots’ career somehow seems more of a gripe than a compliment.

Where tracks like ‘Let’s Go Bowling’ or ‘French Navy’ were as candid, relatable and honest as pop gets, ‘Desire Lines’ seems to blur out of focus for more time than is entirely comfortable. Many of the songs here pause a moment too long to ponder their own existence.

There are still pieces of head-bopping perfection (‘Break It To You Gently’, for one) that are as observationally astute as they are hooky, yet you can’t help but feel that the songwriting here doesn’t manage to justify the underwhelming safety of an LP that’s well within itself.

(Anticon)

By Reef Younis. In stores July 1

08/10

On ‘Cerulean’,Will Wiesenfeld created a debut album that was sparse and elusive, melodious and frighteningly progressive, but after suffering a debilitating bout of E. coli, those previous chilled out harmonies now run deeper and darker than we could have anticipated.

Unable to do anything beyond basic human functions at the time,Wiesenfeld’s frustrations emerge on ‘Obsidian’ – an album wracked with death and a lurching discontent.Those grim ailments inevitably cultivated the dark, acerbic observations that underpin the loathing of ‘Incompatible’, drove the tumult of restless noise on ‘Earth Death’ and turned the shifting layers of ‘Miasma Sky’ into a downbeat 8-bit beauty. It’s an aftermath and reflection that’s both candid and brutal, but for all the scything nihilism, the woozy, haze-drenched ‘Ossuary’ and the string-laden drama of ‘Ironworks’ encompass the flickers of positivity on what’s another rich, enveloping curation. In Wiesenfeld‘s resourceful hands,‘Obsidian’ is a re-imagination cut with a brilliantly ornate beauty.

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Al bums 09/10

Gold Panda Half of Where You Live (Notown)

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores June 10

06/10

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Big Deal

oOoOO

June Gloom

Without Your Love

(Mute)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores now

(Nihjgt Feelings)

By Sophie Coletta. In stores June 24

This boy-girl duo almost lived up to their name in 2011, riding the minor wave of hype that arose around debut record ‘Lights Out’. It was a stripped-down guitars’n’vocals only affair, but as it turned out there was as much frivolous “are they/aren’t they a couple” speculation as there was excitement about the music itself. ‘June Gloom’ sees them flesh out their sound with a full band, but in doing so they’ve lost something of their essence and taken a stride into the merely conventional. Much of this record is like Giant Drag, sweet vocal melodies tethered to a grungey backdrop, but in places the unwanted grunge-by-numbers shadow of, say, Foo Fighters appears.When the pair dial back the amps a little, though, things start to get much more interesting; ‘Pristine’ is an ice-fragile duet that hits with a hard emotional punch, while on ‘Close Your Eyes’ Alice Costelloe comes over like a corrupted choirgirl, the archetypal fallen angel. More of this please, Big Deal. Unplug again.

The problem with Witch House is not the unGoogleable name gimmicks. It’s not the impossible translation to live performance. It’s not even the shameful Pitchfork ‘rape gaze’ incident a few years back, even though there’s a special place in the music industry underworld for those involved in its coinage and promotion. Its problem lies in the fact that it was out of date at its conception. It’s so stagnant in its methods and limited in its contributors that there’s barely any room for progression, and that’s exactly the case with Christopher Dexter Greenspan’s eventual debut album.

After two years and two EPs under the onomatopoeic oOoOO moniker, Greenspan is still churning out the same chopped vocals and the same druggy synths that many have already called out for their repetitiveness.

‘Misunderstood’ provides a glimpse of hope with its initial lines of cavernous bass, but falls into familiar clichéd territory within less than a minute. It’s not that it’s not good; it’s just that we’ve heard it all before.

05/10

Photography by Gem Harris

When approaching this follow up to the massively (and deservingly) successful ‘Lucky Shiner’, any sense of trepidation felt by both listener and artist is instantly dissolved within seconds of the delightfully ambitious ‘Half of Where You Live’, which simultaneously takes off from where Gold Panda’s debut left off and leaves it behind altogether. It’s an expansive and occasionally explosive record, but also one wrapped in delicate intricacies and radiant warmth, something Gold Panda seems to be able to exude with nonpareil ease – the guy that made machines so personal two years ago.This too feels like an album planted in polar time spaces, the nocturnal bliss of ‘S950’ in stark contrast to the calypso techno-shuffle of the opening ‘Junk City II’, and it’s a record that fluctuates between tones and moods endlessly, each track bound together by a thematic thread (that of travel) and sonic fluidity that makes it so relentlessly captivating.‘We Work Nights’ is perhaps Panda’s furthest flung venture yet, a fusion of East and West, and it hums majestically, managing to capture a tonality drenched in poignancy. Leading track ‘Brazil’ may have proved something of a red herring for many, as in many senses it stands out as the brightest and loudest firework of the pack, but it’s the more dulcet ambient tracks here that will secure Gold Panda’s regulation as a master of emotional, smart techno.

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Wax Idols Discipline & Desire

The Ballet

Jagwar Ma

I Blame Society

Howlin

The Bardot Story

(Slumberland)

By David Zammitt. In stores June 24

(Fortuna Pop)

By Joe Goggins. In stores June 10

(Marathon Artists)

By Sam Cornforth. In stores June 10

A Grave With No Name Whirlpool (Stare)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores July 1

(Weird World)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores July 8

As with their debut LP,‘No Future’, Wax Idols again look to the late-70s for inspiration on their follow-up.

However, if the former was predominantly a punk and garage rock affair in the vein of The Buzzcocks and The Ramones, then ‘Discipline & Desire’ roots itself firmly in post-punk, referencing Siouxsie and Joy Division at their agitated, distorted best. In the two years since we last heard from the band, Hether Fortune et al have bolstered their sound beautifully, smothering the songs in reverb and adding stadium-sized snares making this album hit with all the more force.‘Sound Of AVoid’, for example, is an incendiary grunge workout, while ‘The Cartoonist’ borrows the dry ice and leather from Twin Shadow to create a soaring, bruising bass-driven anthem. In the battle for 2013’s post-punk crown,Wax Idols are giving Savages a close run for their money.

The gradual synthpop revival of the past few years has spawned a ton of superficial, faux-nostalgic records that have justifiably led to an automatic degree of cynicism being attached to anything labelled with the tag. New York trio The Ballet have produced something that fits the template whilst still being of genuine substance; they’ve managed to draw upon a diverse enough range of influences to make a record that does something new with a genre so firmly rooted in the past.The lush, sweeping ‘Is Anybody Out There?’ has more than a hint of The Magnetic Fields about it, while closer ‘All the Way’ evokes the spirit of The Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Just Like Honey’.

Bound to prove divisive, though, is the use of auto-tuned vocals, which are almost ubiquitous, and more often than not add a disjointed feel to an otherwise solid effort.

Jono Ma and Gabriel Winterfield, aka Jagwar Ma, here treat us to a nostalgic trip back to the days of baggy.The duo are another fine psychedelic export from Australia, and their more beat-orientated concoctions are a refreshing twist that separates them from their peers, while their ability to coat their tunes in their homeland’s bright rays prevents them from being a mere Madchester tribute act.The melodies on ‘Howlin’ are intoxicating, and they have some solid gold hits in ‘The Throw’ and ‘Man I Need’ that are tailor made for evoking hysteria amongst throngs of mainstream festivalgoers.

Accessibility is clearly the band’s raison d’etre, in fact, and as their sun-kissed grooves float around, underpinned by dance friendly beats, it all feels like a commercial, safe take on The Hacienda, which is perhaps why this record is so much fun to get immersed in.

Sometimes a band will settle into a single creative furrow, and keep ploughing and ploughing away until they’ve almost buried themselves. A Grave With No Name’s third record is one that sees them plunge both feet enthusiastically into that furrow.

Ironically, a song called ‘Dig Me Out’ is the highlight here, floating along as it does on layers of crunchy guitar, and evoking (in me, at least) the somewhat claustrophobic image of a man wearing black clothes, sitting on a black stool in a room with black walls, playing a black guitar. ‘Whirlpool’ is pervaded with a shoegaze-y vibe, but what starts out as a pleasant, hazy fug quickly becomes a plodding, four-four sludge, dotted here and there with acoustic vignettes.There’s a limpness and a lifelessness clinging to the core of this album; a feeling that AGWNN either can’t or don’t want to shake off.

‘The Bardo Story’ – the debut album from Baltimore’s Salvia Plath, but not from project guru Michael Collins, who’s previously gone by the equally ludicrous name Run DMT – is the year’s best late ’60s homage yet, simply by virtue that it’s not all good. A lot of it is outright daft, in fact. Foxygen’s problem earlier this year was that they let hindsight get the better of them as they distilled the cream of 1969 into an album that was too edited for a decade so off of its face.

‘The Bardo Story’ features moments of drugged up divine intervention, like hippy anthem ‘House of Leaves’ but plenty more freeform ideas that I’m sure seemed good at the time, man (2 minutes of whistling for ‘Stranded’, scraping would-be Velvets demo ‘Bardo States’, 3 more minutes of flange guitar and lapping waves for ‘Pondering’). Over 10 more records, the ‘Best Of...’ will be great.

Salvia Plath

Throwing Up Over You (O Genesis)

By Sophie Coletta. In stores July 8

08/10

Get it?! Throwing Up… Over You… There’s certainly nothing in any way nauseating (bet they’ve never heard that one before) about these East London girls, whose debut album evokes a DIY, stripped punk sound that falls somewhere between early Hole and what should have been somewhere on the Heathers score. Infused with infectious lyrics about summer, boys, lying and generally not giving a fuck over frenzied guitars and anarchic drums, the trio stridently shriek, shred and tear their way through eleven hyperactive post-grunge tales of teen angst without a care for relevance or acceptance.

In the golden electronic age of aural normativity and bedroom producer plagiarism it’s a refreshing change of tone, one that holds two belligerent fingers up to conformation. More than anything it’s a nostalgic throwback: a returning glimpse into embarrassing adolescent diaries, or a sighting of a cheating exboyfriend from school working in Primark.Tipp-Ex your trainers, draw on your rucksack.

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Live

Qui nd A d Lou

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Optimus primavera sound Parque Da Cidade, Porto, Portugal 31.05.2013 - 01.06.2013 Words by Chris Watkeys Photography by Daniel Jocelyn

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A r e v rima

Now in its second year, the Porto edition of Primavera Sound – a smaller, neat variant of the Barcelona original – feels less like Barca’s little brother and more like a familiar cousin with a few interesting quirks. Unlike the vast, urban concrete spaces of Parc del Forum, the Porto site is mostly covered in lush green grass, making it feel much closer to a UK-style festival, albeit minus the quagmire potential, and the prone bodies of overindulged revellers. It’s good to feel the grass between your toes.This is the land of the giant caipirinhas, where a good mix of local indie fans and international festivalgoers gather for what is consistently one of the best line-ups on the European festival circuit, scaled down a little, but enviable nevertheless.

Band-wise,Thursday evening is the least busy of the weekend; just a handful of great sets, with no clashes, to ease you into proceedings without having to think too hard about who to see and where to go next.

No difficult decisions to make tonight, dear punters – just wander towards the sound of the rumbling bass, and enjoy.

Unusually, the two main stages are situated almost directly next to each other, at the bottom of steep green slopes. As the sun sinks low behind the hill, casting bright slanted rays across the site, the first bands grumble into life on the second stage. By this stage of the evening at most British festivals a

fairly serious amount of beer will have been consumed and spewed, but here people are just easing their way into the night; as the temperature begins to drop and the sun fades away, the shimmering waves of Wild Nothing’s floaty indie drift out into the cooling air.Their set is an odd mixture of lethargy and energy, shoegaze laced with a distinct edginess.The set ends with a hazy, almost psychedelic sea of sound; a tenminute, entirely instrumental drone-rock epic, which sounds simply fantastic – plus, and it’s a little hard to tell from where we’re sitting, the bass player appears to be wearing no trousers.The festival nuttiness starts here.

Kim Deal makes a valiant attempt at the Portuguese language to introduce The Breeders, but all our uncultured ears can make out are the words ‘Last Splash’, the defining album they’re playing in its entirety tonight. Predictably, ‘Cannonball’ draws the biggest cheer of the festival so far – it tears along viciously, as insidiously catchy now as it was in the mid-nineties haze into which it was first released.This set has got all the features and potential to be a nostalgia swamp, yet it turns out to be anything but. It’s brutally loud, elementally basic and viscerally fun.When Kelley Deal briefly takes the mic, she spits out her lyrics with all the petulance of a sullen teenager.

The night has been building towards a

single moment, though – the entrance of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Cave, looking as foreboding and villainesque as ever in a black suit and shirt, commands the stage with all the theatre and drama of a Shakespearean great. ‘Jubilee Street’, from last year’s album ‘Push Away The Sky’, is the first high point. All swirling keyboards slashed through with discordant guitar, it explodes into a fierce, fiery climax, and you can almost feel an electric shock surge through the crowd.The set, mainly drawn from that newest record but liberally laced with classics from the band’s back catalogue, is simply statuesque in its majesty.

The stage lighting soaks the stage blood-red for ‘Red Right Hand’, and it suits perfectly the gathering drama of the song, while the violin in ‘The Weeping Song’ tears an impossibly sad streak through the night sky. Cave is at his demonic best; this weaver of dark tales, this rabid conductor of a driverless, runaway locomotive drama.

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DAY

two begins with the unhinged genius of Daniel Johnston and his band producing a sound that is weirdly tight and coherent for all its

01 Damon Albarn 02 Nick Cave 03 Daniel Johnston 04 Kim Deal

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disjointedness. Hanging twisted vocal melodies on straightforward rock hooks, Johnston’s engaging singularity is in full effect, which only make what Swans are about to do heavier, more merciless, brutal and relentlessly persistent. Listening to this pounding band – whose set lasts for what feels like three and a half days – is like being fed through an industrial grinding machine while some kind of deeply malevolent, eighty-foot tall automaton chews a live amplifier to pieces next to what’s left of your ears. I think in a good way, but to be honest it’s quite hard to tell.

Hopping across to the main stage for Grizzly Bear after that is like visiting the Lake District after being released from Guantanamo Bay and the Bear’s crafted melodies salve our ruptured nerve endings with soothing turns of epic and the dreamlike indie.

At one thirty in the morning, a time at which most of their original fans will probably be long tucked up in bed, easily the biggest crowd of the weekend thus far masses in front of the main stage for Blur.They don’t mess about in giving up the hits, wheeling out the big tunes straight off the bat; ‘Girls & Boys’, a nicely slanted diversion into ‘Popscene’ and ‘There’s No Other Way’ forming the opening salvo. But whilst it’s a refreshing experience to watch this band

outside of the UK, where you’re not surrounded by pot-bellied, thirty-something Britpop relics mawkishly reliving their teenage years, there’s an indefinable something which still makes Blur live a fundamentally nostalgic experience; probably because their music is so of its time that it’s impossible for it to shake off the shackles of that lost era.The fact is, they probably need to write a new album now.There are a handful of joyously transcendent exceptions to this rule, however; ‘Beetlebum’ has aged superbly, its bittersweet chords and untold yearning sounding raw, open and exceptionally beautiful, while ‘Tender’ is huge and cathartic, and a good minute after the climax of the song, the crowd are still singing the chorus back at the stage.

For the most part, Blur do much as expected and reel out the hits, but whereas you might expect the band to phone in the performance a la Pixies, Albarn especially seems to be pouring his heart and soul into these ancient pop songs. Similarly, Graham Coxon’s stomach no doubt churns as the always silly ‘Country House’ cranks up, but even he gets fresh kicks out of it as he throws in a skewed, off-key solo. It’s difficult to gauge the guitarist’s true feelings surrounding this ongoing live reunion, but when ‘For Tomorrow’ appears in the encore, all cynical thoughts become drowned in the floods of

energy flowing from the stage to the crowd and back again.

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LATE

on the final evening, Explosions In The Sky take the stage in the cool night air. Post-rock, as a live genre, is perhaps the least visually engaging, but the perfect sonic storm that the band create tonight at times overwhelms the senses. Stripping post-rock down to the barest bones of guitar and drums – no orchestration or samples for these guys – it’s incredible to see the ebbs and flows, and the many layers of their music recreated live.

Caught up in the maelstrom, the band sway and lurch; that disconnected, rhythmic movement, guitars slung low while a cataclysmic storm crashes around them. But there is warmth as well as violence in this performance; crescendos of apocalyptic noise giving way to gentler passages of composed restraint, like the violence of the rapids giving way to calm still waters.

On the final night when the crowd’s energy is diminished and their nerves a little frayed, Explosions In The Sky feels like having your face plunged into icy water. So when My Bloody Valentine open up with

the layered, driving, oscillating noise of ‘I Only Said’, it unexpectedly feels like a glittering, optimistic experience.The band are almost entirely motionless on stage, the vocals are indistinct, but the sound for the first few songs is fizzy: a 33 played on 45.

Theirs is the kind of music you can drift into, not hypnotic as such but certainly enveloping and stifling of conscious thought.Yet it’s an oddly muted reaction from the crowd, who are perhaps, by day three, wearied by so much seriousness in the music and in search of something fun.

And so enter Titus Andronicus, who blast out some raucous, loose-edged rock’n’roll on the ATP stage – a few good-time vibes on which to close out the festival. Patrick Stickles’ whisky-soaked, grizzled vocals – and the foot-stomping, big dumb songs he sings them over – give this final set something of a bar-room-meetshoe-down. It’s probably the last thing you’d expect to say about Primavera Porto, an event populated by a select, big name line-up, but one which retains a small-festival intimacy.

Although that is what’s key to its appeal.

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Live 01 MØ Photographer: Dan Kendall 02 Kings of Convenience Photographer: Lee Goldup 03 The Flaming Lips Photographer: Roy J Baron

Killer Mike XOYO, Old Street, London 21.05.2013

By Samuel Ballard ▼

“Last time I came here ya’ll scared the hell out of me,” admits Georgia-born rapper Killer Mike as he introduces his anti-political hit ‘Reagan’ to the hyped up crowd at London’s XOYO. “Everyone suddenly started shouting ‘Die Maggie Die!’ I had to Wikipedia that shit immediately!” Despite his dubious knowledge of international politics, Killer Mike is an artist remarkably in-tune with his audience – even one overbearingly made up of white east London kids. And whatever he lacks in this regard is more than compensated for in his delivery of modern (US) political rap. Not that that’s necessarily White House centric – his rhymes span both public and private spheres. It’s this that makes him so accessible to an audience so far removed from his origins, that and the fact that he clearly has a ball while on stage. “This is my church,” he exclaims. “And I don’t care what you look like, we’re all in here to have a good time!” His personality is infectious and as he leaps from the stage and goes into the crowd, he brings everybody in the room into the fold.This is hip-hop done as it should be: music that is exclusively inclusive to those within the room.Tonight is a reminder that when done properly, there is nothing that can deliver a performance – or social critique – quite like rap music.

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KINGS OF convenience Roundhouse, Camden, London 15.05.2013

By Amy Pettifer ▼

When an acoustic band play a large venue there are the usual concerns.

Will the crowd keep quiet? Will the banter be awkward? Will we be bored to death? Blissfully, it transpires that the sold out crowd is full of perfect fans – raucous in welcoming Erlend Øye and Eirik Glambek Bøe to the stage and silent as stationary when they start to play.The band themselves are utterly deft in commanding attention and conjuring unbridled joy. It’s a non-stop charm offensive, cheek cramping-ly uplifting in both its introspective and more outgoing sonic moments.The first half foregrounds the Norwegian duo’s faultless synergy – pick, pitch and harmony perfect through the jewel-like melodies that have made ‘Quiet is the New Loud’ one of the most stirring and re-listenable albums of its kind.The songs reverberate through the crowd like summer warmth, any hint of the saccharine undercut by Øye’s goofy twisting and Bøe’s deadpan narrations.When they bring out a band, there’s the irresistible bohemian jazz of ‘Boat Behind’, spotlight solos, mouth trumpet, en masse call and response and the glittering euphoria of ‘I’d Rather Dance with You’. Øye whips five thousand people into a frenzied motion of whoop and holla, the the man next to me proposes to his girlfriend. “Life is full of terrible moments – but this isn’t one of them!” screams Øye. A gorgeous, noisy, rare and reassuring truth.

MØ

FUN ADULTS

The Flaming Lips

Cargo, Shoreditch, London 14.05.2013

By Stuart Stubbs

St Pancras Church, London 29.05.2013

By Mandy Drake

Roundhouse, Camden, London 27.05.2013

By Jenni Hare

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MØ is the alter ego of Danishborn, glitch-pop artist Karen Marie Ørsted, and tonight we see just to what extent. Between songs she’s an overwhelmed, sweet Scandinavian girl, bowled over by the cheers. “I fucking love you,” she beams.

“You’re the best audience EVER!” God knows what would happen if she played in a room where people moved to her hi-fi, bumpin’ RnB. For the songs themselves – super loud, bass-so-heavy-it’ll-stop-yourheart and forever kept in time by the usual whip-snap of a million hands clapping – Ørsted is a fierce performer for a pop act, twirling her pineapple ponytail and grimacing as she punches out the synthetic drums fills. And then she sings, with the kind of voice that would walk The X Factor from the idiot stages – a Lana Del Ray half purr on the sultry moments, a Mariah dog whistle on the odd showboating occasion. She looks like Grimes, too, and behind her is a very cool montage slideshow of retro stock footage in black and white. It’s a winning combination backed by the finest session band you’re likely to hear. So why, then, does it not quite blow minds?

Chances are it’s the songs.The closing ‘Pilgrims’ (a brassy, fun skank) and ‘Dance With Nobody’ (a straight up rock-pop number) aside, there are no real bangers, which is perhaps MØ’s tell that she’s not a groomed fame seeker. Give her a writing team (or a better writing team) and she’d be virtually unstoppable.

Leeds based quartet Fun Adults built their own studio in a 200-year-old barn just outside of Edinburgh, making the quaint, ancient church of St. Pancras something of a home from home. A band just two singles in, they suit it in size (it really is swing-a-mouse large), but also in feel and congregational style.That is to say that this is a band more destined for serene, appreciated shows at The Barbican Theatre than Brixton Academy – they’re a band to contemplate sat in quiet rows, not whilst jostling for position. Like Yeasayer circa ‘All Hour Cymbals’ they combine modern electronics with instruments classically found at the heart of World Music; there’s a little shaking and a lot of clicking, incessantly so, and eventually to the bands detriment as the songs begin to bleed into one another. It’s an acquired taste from the off, namely because the band’s two singers represent the smooth and full-onwarble registers of Anthony Hegarty, which, combined with their impressive finger-picking guitar skills and disjointed time signatures, has them as something like a proto Dirty Projectors, minus the chirruping female vocals.The potential is clear, as the four school friends, dappled in homemade projections that have clearly been considered, rebuild their bookish brand of indie that is so bravely disinterested in classic hooks.You almost want to see it again before making a call on it.

To listen to the entire back catalogue of The Flaming Lips would be a labour of love and a personal triumph.Tonight they give us the York Notes, carefully selecting key songs that span their 30-year career, paired with a light show to blow your mind. Of course, it’s an epic, euphoric, frazzled affair. After a slow and somewhat awkward start, the band find their groove in a show that was postponed a week earlier due to man flu.This evening has an obstacle or two of its own. Mid-set, in a blurring climax of light and sound, a girl towards the front of the crowd is overcome by the intense pulsing lights. Ever the gentleman of space rock, lead singer Wayne Coyne proceeds to pause the entire show, telling the audience that “we’re all just goin’ to relax a little bit now, just calm it down and let her breath.” For ten minutes we do exactly that as the girl is taken backstage and later checked on by the front man himself. “She’s fuckin’ fine!” he yells. Good then, on with the show.

The Lips give the audience what they came for, a bass pounding, guitar screeching multi-faceted sound more suited to an arena than the intimate Roundhouse venue.

They settle into the classics and the crowd finally give Coyne the old school fervour he’s been craving.

To round off the night, black confetti falls like rain and the crowd relax into full appreciation for a band so humble yet out of this world.

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Impress your friends by listening to the Loud And Quiet issue 49 mixtape only at www.loudandquiet.com Featuring this month’s featured artists

: www.loudandquiet.com news / songs / past issues

party wolf idiot tennis Game. Set. Twat.

thought sport In the heads of wrestling fans

4 1

Noel Edmonds

IDIOT

Mr Blobby

Father of Mr Blobby

FAME

Being Mr Blobby

“Put your hand in this box”

MOST LIKELY TO SAY

“Blobby blobby blobby”

“Really, it’s just guess work”

LEAST LIKELY TO SAY

“Oh my, I’m such a butter fingers”

Dubbing his studio audience ‘The Pilgrims’

IDIOT POWER PLAY

Blobby could have crushed Edmonds, litterally

There is no logic to it, Noel

GAME, SET & MATCH

MY TIME Diary of a somebody

2

5

3

1. I love you, so bad!

2. Stifler’s Mom! 3. Hmmm... only 5 shots left. Let’s save those for The Big Boss Man. 4.This shit it dope! I hope he kills him.

5. Can’t believe dad likes this crap.

catchphrase Say what you want

Today was the reamist day ever! Nah, I don’t mean cos my Frosties has a extra toy in them, I mean cos we flowed out to Marbs to film TOWIE! In the airport we all had chips in Garfunkles, and it was really ream because Arge turned up in shorts and someone said he looked like a pig in shorts.Then we went to get on the plane – just an EasyJet plane innit. It was nice, though. I asked Sam if she liked the plane and she said yes.The best bit is when you take off and you can see all the houses below. Sam swore she saw her house from the plane, but she didn’t know that Gatwick Airport ain’t in Essex, it’s in Wales.

Gutted I couldn’t go in the cop pit to see the driver. Still a ream day, though.

I’m Spong!

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Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious.

Catchphrase answer. That riiiiiight, it’s ‘A Toad In The Hole’.

Photo casebook “The drunk world of Ian Beale”