NEW MUSIC: Fight Like Apes, Tracey Thorn, LÁ BAS, itsabrightlight, The History of Colour TV
New Music is brought to you by Deadly Music! which covers mostly independent indie, alternative, electro pop, post rock and ambient music, with a bit of everything else deadly thrown in for good measure.
Most songs reviewed here are available on a Soundcloud playlist, some of them on a Spotify playlist….both of which are embedded at the end of this post.
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Dublin-based electro pop punk act Fight Like Apes have announced the release of their eponymous 3rd album.
Due out on May 18th, it would appear that Fight Like Apes have finally embraced the nascent epic pop hooks that they may have backed away from to an extent in the past.
Known for their occasionally snarling take on pop punk, the songs on their latest release retain the rough around the edges approach but add in an element of pure pop that could well – and should by all rights – do the unheard of and find a brand new audience at a late stage in their career while keeping existing fans happy.
The transformation isn't quite as extreme as that of DIY act We've Got A Fuzzbox and We're Gonna Use It!! into Fuzzbox but with songs like “Numbnuts,” “Pretty Keen on Centerfolds” and the verging on glam rock “Carousel,” this is an explosive return for a band that could have gone awry many moons ago.
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Tracey Thorn – The Falling
After a fairly quiet couple of years following 2012's sublime Christmas album Tinsel and Lights – apart from writing award winning books obviously – Tracey Thorn (one half of Everything But The Girl) is making her inimitable presence known once more.
Following on from a rather lovely cover of Kate Bush‘s “Under the Ivy” back in December, Thorn is back with The Falling, a 16-minute soundtrack to accompany British filmmaker Carol Morley's first full-length feature, which stars Maisie Williams (above).
Thorn explains:
“I'd seen [Morley's] two previous documentary films, The Alcohol Years and Dreams of a Life, and I tweeted about how much I liked them. She saw that and came to a book signing I was doing for Bedsit Disco Queen.”
After Thorn appeared in one of Morley's dreams, the director reached out immediately. “When I said that I'd never done a film soundtrack before and didn't really know how to do it, she said, ‘Perfect.'”
Thorn's goal was to provide music that could have been made by the schoolgirl characters, a creative process unexpectedly brought her back to some of her own early recordings:
“It sounds more like music I made with the Marine Girls or on my first solo album, A Distant Shore. I think that's because I was deliberately trying to inhabit the mindset of these teenage girls. So it took me back into myself, in a way that I found really enjoyable.”
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Listen to new tracks by LÁ BAS, itsabrightlight and The History of Colour TV, AFTER THE JUMP…
LÁ-BAS – “Give Them Your Good Side”
LÁ-BAS is a supergroup of sorts based around Angelica Allen of My Midnight Heart and Trans-Siberian Orchestra, film composer Nathan Larson and Jordan Kern from Hot One.
Joining the trio on their self-titled May 12th debut album are members of The War on Drugs, David Byrne‘s band, St Vincent, The Cardigans, The Shins and Guided By Voices (among others).
The album apparently “vibes on the aesthetic of German Expressionism and Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and very specifically over the vast brutalist Ryugyong Hotel (aka the “Hotel of Doom”) in North Korea. Lyrical content owes much to Philip K. Dick, Orwell, J. G. Ballard, and Afrofuturist authors such as Octavia Butler. Allen brings soulful grit, operatic range, as well as a smattering of Kate Bush luminosity.”
Following “Automaton” and “Give Them Your Good Side”, the band has shared a more downbeat track in the form of “Be Afraid Baby Be Very Afraid,” “a stark groove about the futility of hiding, and the exposure that comes with love.”
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itsabrightlight – “Weaken Me”
itsabrightlight is the solo project of Sarah Frey from Sweden.
Something of the classic 80s pop about this one, the very beautiful, loungey debut single “Weaken Me” wraps you in a warm blanket and is reminiscent of the likes of George Michael, The Lover Speaks, Scritti Politti and A Certain Ratio.
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Starting out as a conceptual audio-visual project, The History Of Color TV was created by Jaike Stambach in early 2010.
Signed to Sainte Marie Records and following on from their debut album Emerald Cures Chic Ills, last year the band released the brilliant follow-up album When Shapes Of Spilt Blood Spelt Love which fuses emo, indie rock, shoegaze and good old fuzz.
With songs harkening back to early Cure and Felt introspection with a hazy swirl of reverbed guitar that takes on Cocteau Twins late pop and Lush dreaminess, a series of massively pumped up stadium-bound fuzz guitar anthems and a final epic blowout on closing track “Emerald”, its one to track down if you missed out last year.
In the meantime, have a look at this brilliant live performance from last week.
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Soundcloud Playlist
Spotify Playlist
