Music RECORDS
INDIE WILD BEASTS Smother (Domino) ●●●●● Having covered back alley frottaging and the pleasures of ‘girls from Whitby’ on their 2009 release Two Dancers, the four-piece from Kendal have peeled back the net curtains even further for Smother, casting a pale light on the kinks of British sexuality. ‘New squeeze, take off your chemise, and I’ll do as I please,’ Hayden Thorpe warbles at the start of ‘Plaything’. The same queasy feeling of mixed pleasure and regret that Pulp captured at their peak is all over this album like the smell of unwashed bedsheets. Musically, Two Dancers’ winning formula of undulating melodies and sparky, danceable drums has been slowed down to a snake-like pace – the result falling somewhere between Barry White and a 80s indie disco. It’s stunningly beautiful in parts (‘Loop the Loop’), thrusting in others (‘Bed of Nails’ could easily find its way onto student union dancefloors), and it may make you feel like a bit of a pervert for loving it. (Jonny Ensall) ■ Wild Beasts play Oran Mor, Glasgow, Fri 6 May. Support is from Summer Camp, see interview, page 69.
INDIE ROCK TWIN ATLANTIC Free (Red Bull) ●●●●●
With Biffy Clyro now zapped up into mainstream consciousness in a sort of twisted alien abduction, there’s a vacuous hole now open for Scotland’s next alt-rock band to stake their claim in. Twin Atlantic however have been ploughing their furrow for years – non-reliant on benign Biffy comparisons – and their debut album Free is defiantly potent, with the title track a rock club classic-in-waiting and ‘The Ghost of Eddie’ explosive with grunge aplomb. It’s in these gruff moments that this band truly shines, but there’s so much fist-clenching hook elsewhere that it is hard not to predict international adulation on the horizon. (Chris Cope)
GARAGE POP THE LEOPARDS Never Been the Same (Creeping Bent) ●●●●●
This troupe of garage guitar growlers led by Glaswegian Mick Slaven (once a member of Del Amitri and a sometime composer of music for Traverse theatre productions) return after a 14-year hiatus, but still sound like they’ve been hanging out with the Cramps at the rock’n’roll diner at the end of the world.
The end result is a very personal jukebox, in which ‘Crazy Night’ stomps along like the New York Dolls fronted by Suicide by way of The Sweet circa ‘Blockbuster.’ The title track meanwhile is a teenybopper lament that merges the Bay City Rollers and The Nectarine No 9, and ‘The Wild Side Calls Me’ is a country waltz to die for on this greatest of first date albums. (Neil Cooper)
DISCO-POP DEBUT FLESH Sick Electricity (Creeping Bent) ●●●●● INDIE FOLK FLEET FOXES Helplessness Blues (Bella Union) ●●●●●
The brainchild of producer Stephen Lironi and Creeping Bent label boss Douglas MacIntyre, the music of Glasgow-based band Flesh is based around the ice-cool voice of Sharon Martin and aspires to an electro-squelch, dancefloor melange of Chic-styled gloss and the subversive, Ze Records avant- disco diva Cristina, who this debut homages on ‘Cristina’ alongside Edith Piaf and other pop art icons. In truth, it’s disco dolly, 1980s new pop bounce is even more gloriously mainstream, to the extent that if Girls Aloud ever deign to release another single, the gossamer twinkles of pounding, shop-soiled survivors’ anthem ‘Dial F For Fake’ should probably be it. (Neil Cooper)
‘So now I am older / than my mother and father when they had their daughter / now what does that say about me?’ is the first line of this second album from the Seattle- based indie-folkers, and sets the scene perfectly for the tear-sodden blend of nostalgia, regret and optimism which permeates this rewarding record. Like Phil Spector recording in a shack on a mountain, Robin Pecknold and co swathe their songs once more in a dense fog of reverberating drums and guitars, making way for the incisive jangle of the title track, and an almost medieval folk instrumental in ‘The Cascades’. (David Pollock) ■ Fleet Foxes play the Corn Exchange, Edinburgh, Wed 29 Jun.
ALT-ROCK THE FEELIES Here Before (Bar None) ●●●●●
Encircling the laidback parameters of Tom Petty and REM, this comeback album from US alt- rockers The Feelies – a band who were once the toast of 70s New York – shows that although the years have mellowed the post-punk trailblazers, they have not drained the band’s knack with a tune.
The Feelies released their incendiary debut, Crazy Rhythms, on Stiff Records in 1980, but by the mid-80s they’d reconfigured their guitar shapes and melodies into something akin to Americana, and it is this pastoral college-rock template which is revisited on Here Before, their first album in twenty years, and proof that aging gracefully can reap harmonious rewards. (Nicola Meighan)
ALT-ROCK EMA Past Life Martyred Saints Souterrain Transmissions ●●●●●
Erika M Anderson (EMA), formerly a singer-guitarist with the folk-noise outfits Amps For Christ and Gowns, makes her solo debut with this ethereal collection of lo-fi grunge ballads.
Hushed vocals set to low-key
guitar strumming that builds to a fuzz of distortion and feedback, right from opener ‘The Grey Ship’, makes for an impressive, escalating and intensifying aural assault.
And the songs, such as ‘Butterfly Knife’, which was inspired by a local teen goth murder case, reflect the former South Dakota country girl’s fascination with the dark side of her adopted big city home Los Angeles. Past Life Martyred Saints is a slow-burner, in a good way. (Miles Fielder)
74 THE LIST 28 Apr–26 May 2011