Well hello there! Isn’t it nice to see you again?! Pull up a chair, darling! We haven’t spoken since GIITV got a sexy new lease of life with our spanking new website! Isn’t it just gorgeous? It gives me that same feeling as when you’re given the chance to use something brand new and lovely, which gives the feeling of both undiluted joy and absolute terror in case you break it. But, fear not intrepid ‘Zine fiends – we shall all run into the unknown abyss together, with giddy excitement of how sexy our new God Is In The TV Zine is and natural wondering of what point I’ll press the wrong button and accidentally delete everything and get bonked on the head by Bill. This is your first ever singles round-up on the new site, so lets get right on it and show you some lush new music. I’m a bit too excited. WEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!
First up with Get Hole (sounds a bit rude) is Japanese Voyeurs, which came out on Monday. When the lead singer of a band says they want to bring the ‘brutality’ back into music, then they’ve certainly got quite a bit to live up to! Although you would perhaps expect Japanese Voyeurs to be another one-size-fits-all female-fronted heavy band, they actually deserve a lot more credit than what people (who don’t give them a chance) will give them. When trying to create real passion and panache in a track its all too easy to scream down the microphone and play everything at a hundred billion trillion miles an hour, whilst the drummer hits his bass pedal at the speed of a pneumatic drill. Thankfully however, Japanese Voyeurs do not do this at all – instead, we’re offered outrageous vocals courtesy of Romily Alice, that scale from high and low in a delightfully fragile yet powerful way. The intonation of her voice coupled with the low, burling bass guitar bathes the track in feelings of glorious frustration and angst. It’s the type of spirit and electricity you seldom find in tracks that transends any particular ‘type’ of person – a fifty year-old fat metalhead with a massive beard will find just as much pleasure in <i>Get Hole</i> as a 20 year-old dubstep fan off his tits on pills (yes I am over-generalising and using cliches, but it works). Get Hole is dark, smoky and gloriously menacing.
Next up is Two Wounded Birds with All We Wanna Do. This track is pretty much the definition of Power Pop – at under two minutes it manages to squeeze in all the exhuberance and jangly-guitar daftness that is in most indie albums. It’s the equivalent of a small hamster having the speed of a cheetah and the weight of a hippo. Listening to All We Wanna Do is like thinking back to the sanguine days of childhood – endless summer holidays, the excitement of Christmas and the time before Cornettos were shrunk to about half the size (in the nineties they were HUGE! Now they’re the size of a dwarf’s little finger). The track just screams ‘Possibilities!’ ‘Excitement!’ ‘Anything! Anyone! Anywhere! I WANT TO BUY THAT PUPPY BECAUSE I CAN AND YES I AM OLD ENOUGH AND MATURE ENOUGH TO LOOK AFTER IT – NO IT WON’T SHIT IN THE DRAWER LIKE THE LAST ONE DID’. I’m not too sure about it being a single, mind – in my opinion it doesn’t really showcase TWB brilliantly but, at the end of the day, it is a very fun and infectious track that DEFINITELY makes you feel better about everything (it cheered me up even though a Seagull pooed on me earlier).
Unless you’ve had your head in a blender then you can’t have missed Yuck’s latest single, Get Away. 2011 could prove to be a massive year for the band, after the ‘buzz’ around them in 2010 has absolutely snowballed. I may as well say now that, I absolutely love this single. Get Away is an example of beautifully crafted psychedelic pop – I honestly don’t understand how anyone could NOT like it. The multitude and layers of guitars, synths and drums work together perfectly – ensuring that the track feels hazy and distorted, yet easily accessible and free enough that it doesn’t sound artificial or static in the slightest. It feels like 6Music are playing the song just about every ten minutes, which is brilliant. More people need to here music like this – uplifting and beautiful, Get Away is a heavyweight punch that floors people who bemoan a lack of soul in modern-day music. With artists like Yuck and Warpaint paving the way for what the next era of music will sound like, we’ve still got a fighting chance. Get Away is the perfect single for Yuck to release – it shows their entire being and self within a masterful four minutes. Its radio-friendly, people-friendly and, importantly, chart-friendly.
Jessica 6 (I keep misreading their name and immediately think of Jessie J. Must. Stop. Doing That.) released White Horse on Monday. The first thing that struck my mind when I gave the track its maiden voyage on my CD player was “Wow, I’m back in 1994!” Comparisons to Tracey Chapman, Annie Lennox and perhaps even Heather Smalls are guaranteed to crop up when people hear Jessica 6 and vocalist Nomi Ruiz (Hercules and Love Affair), but being lined up alongside some of the best female vocalists to ever grace our world is certainly not a bad thing! The electronica backline ironically gives the track a wonderfully lo-fi retro feel. The bass gives a feeling of genuine groove and head bobbing-ness that doesn’t feel fake at all. Although the White Horse is probably more enjoyable for nostalgic reasons rather than having it stand on its own feet, Jessica 6 are creating tracks with soul and substance, which in the use of synthesisers and the like can often be lost. It’ll be good as a soundtrack for a trendy bar or club – like, brilliantly good.
Highly-rated ‘epic’ band Spokes have gave us a lovely offering this week with 3,4,5. The singer sounds to me a little like Elbow’s Guy Garvey. The backing vocals and subsequent harmonies encompassed within them work beautifully, and layer the song well. A LOT of people will fall in love with Spokes, and they’ve got a bloody good right, too. They’re kinda like what would happen if Elbow and Arcade Fire bumped into each other in a coffee shop (maybe it was a busy day so they had to share a table), decided they fancied each other, went on a date, years down the line got married, and then had a child. That child would be Spokes. I would LOVE to see Spokes headline a big festival – their music seems tailor-made for an ‘epic’ last-on-stage bonanza in-front of thousands of people. 3,4,5 is big and boisterous whilst still possessing a gentle touch that stops the listener feeling disconnected and alienated from the track – its a Grizzly Bear giving you a hug and a (very careful) pat on the back. Normally I can’t stand ‘epic’ music like this – a lot of the time it can come across as being pretentious fake, but Spokes feel genuine and convey their message with an honest facade.
To finish off this week, we have Fenech-Soler (read it as French-Solder…reckon I need glasses?) and their new one Stop and Stare. To be perfectly honest – if nothing else it’s nice to listen to some dance-type music that isn’t bloody dubstep! I mean I like dubstep, but you can’t move for it these days! Stop and Stare ticks all the boxes for a quality club track, and is sure to be a big success. After seeing that Fenech-Soler have a slot for Bestival lined up in the summer, I’m very, very tempted to buy a ticket. It’s perfect warm weather, fun music. The bridge brings everything down nicely just before a ‘banging’ chorus. Stop and Stare doesn’t break any new ground, but it certainly does pitch in with much-needed work for areas in dance that aren’t really thought of much these days. Last month the band announced that singer Ben Duffy is undergoing chemotherapy for testicular cancer – as a result, they have decided to donate proceeds from Stop and Stare to Teenage Cancer Trust.
Well my beauties! That’s your (first!) single round-up for the new site all wrapped up for this week, and we’ve certainly got some ace tunes to pick from for our highly-covered single of the week. Any other week it would have gone to Japanese Voyeurs, but instead I’m giving the Single of the Week prize to Yuck and their brilliant new single Get Away. If you’re fed up with static, boring music that contributes nothing to our era, then listen to Yuck and scream “FINALLY!!!!!!”
