Astralwerks

The youthful vigor of Late Of The Pier bursts from the British quartet’s debut full-length, Fantasy Black Channel. This is witnessed in the amalgamation of high-energy styles topped with ska bounces and punk sneers. Mainly, however, it’s their electro-rock/synth-pop sensibility fused with inventive and contagious dance hooks that makes Channel effective. The carousel swing of “Random Firl” is balanced by the rapid rolls of “Heartbeat”, while the bleeps of “The Enemy are the Future” temper the grinding crunch of “Whitesnake”. There isn’t a genre Pier hasn’t plundered, but with their unfailing exuberance, it all works.

Photography by Jon Bergman

Los Campesinos! are fighting a war. And given that the Spanish word los campesinos translates loosely to “the peasants”, images of Franco and the Spanish Civil War can’t be far behind. But while this Welsh outfit is indeed in the midst of a revolution, the war is being waged between digital technologies and archaic modes of production. This is not to say Los Campesinos are Marxists, or even Luddites, but they do aspire to preserve something more precious: the materiality of musical culture.
     In just the last year, their song “You! Me! Dancing!” quickly turned from breakout single to an imperative mandate at hipster dance parties in lofts across the globe. Yet, less than eight months after releasing their debut Hold on Now, Youngster…, the band has already put out an ambitious second full-length, We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, whose parameters extend far beyond mere music. Only 5,000 hard copies will be released, and there will be no singles. But the limited-edition boxes come with a DVD documentary and a fanzine featuring contributions from Xiu Xiu, Grandaddy, and Menomena.
     “With MP3s now so easy to obtain, there has to be an incentive to want the physical product,” laments frontman Gareth (who refuses to share his actual surname). “As a fan, that should be part of the excitement, and something that’s now missing with a lot of music.

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Islands

After conquering the charts with the electro-pop of Hot Fuss and polarizing critics with the epic Americana of Sam’s Town, the Las Vegas rockers return with a third album that adeptly synthesizes the disco bombast and rustic sweep of its respective predecessors. It may be hard to take Brandon Flowers seriously on “Joy Ride”, when he so desperately labors to mimic Bruce Springsteen, crooning about “rattlesnakes of romance” that frolic in the rain. Yet on standouts “Losing Touch” and “Spaceman”, the futuristic synths and guitars and funky bass and brass lines fuse to ignite an unforgettable fire.

Photography by Nick Haymes

Antony Hegarty was just 18 when it happened. It was his freshman year at NYU and Hegarty was stepping off a stage much smaller than those he sashays across today. Just minutes after the show had wrapped up, a woman from the audience took the young vocalist aside to thank him. That pebbled vibrato of his was most likely in its infant stages then, but the effect could be considered somewhat universal. She had wept. He had found his voice.
     “There are lots of reasons to sing,” says Hegarty via telephone from his Manhattan apartment. “It’s like jumping into an ocean of human archetypes, expressive archetypes. All different animals have their own way of expressing themselves. You can jump in and it’s not just about you anymore, it’s about the whole experience of being human.” At the moment, Hegarty is taking a short break from touching up his forthcoming long-player, The Crying Light, and the pace he’s kept alongside his band, the Johnsons, until now seems to have left his speaking voice in pieces.

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Photography by Bohdan Cap

Nobody loves indie anymore. Dancing to intentionally awkward rhythms while students stamp on your toes? Why bother? Indie wasn’t always that. Once it really was independent — someone recording sometimes funny songs on their own in small spaces with little interest in sharing what they made with the world.  
     Le Volume Courbe are like that, which explains why they’ve gone almost unnoticed for the best part of a decade. Moving to London thirteen years ago from the North of France, Charlotte Marionneau has been writing songs and keeping the company of some of Britain’s most respected musicians ever since. Singing her heart out in her bedroom, she’s been joined by everyone from My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields to Mazzy Star’s Hope Sandoval strumming a guitar. “But it is just something I do for fun,” Marionneau pipes up. Even when Alan McGee got his hands on the track “Harmony” in 2001, “I didn’t take being a musician seriously,” she lilts in her French accent. “I never thought it was something I could do.”
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Photography by Alice Hawkins

Of all the tough decisions to make in life, picking Heart over Pat Benatar doesn’t really qualify. Yet Phillipa “Pip” Brown, or the musician known as Ladyhawke, is deliberating over which femme rocker she would consider a primary influence. “It’s not fair to make me pick one,” she jokes. “I would say Heart just based on the merit of “Magic Man”. The New Zealand-born electro-pop singer is on the phone promoting her guiltily pleasurable self-titled debut, an unabashed amalgamation of all the great synth-pop records of yesteryear. “I had a lot of great memories of listening to music while growing up,” Brown explains. “Yeah, I listened to Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins as a teen, but it’s the Pet Shop Boys, Madonna, and Split Enz that I find myself coming back to now.” And while Brown is keenly aware of the inevitable naysayer union’s dismissal that her songwriting is either ironic or cheesy, she has already prepared a response for those skeptical about her sincerity: “You’re damned if you do it your way, and you’re damned if you don’t. But I’m not second-guessing anything. I was so sick of brooding. I’ve done the depressing lyrics and writing sad songs thing for so long. My heart wanted to be happy and write poppy songs.” A seemingly modest goal for a newcomer but Brown’s songs go way beyond the typical, top-40 call of booty. Her dance-inducing singles, like the shimmering new-wavy “Paris Is Burning” and her Chrissie Hynde impression as heard on “Back of the Van” are a time machine to our favorite musical era.
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Photography by Alexander Wagner

Somewhere in the middle of Louisiana, en route to a show in Baton Rouge, Greg Gillis, the 26-year-old mash-up master behind the one-man party band Girl Talk, is listening intently to the local rock radio station — in other words, he’s working. “’These Dreams’ by Heart just came on,” Gillis says. “That song has a great instrumental breakdown — I really think I need to get into that.” The Heart classic would feel right at home among the 500-odd songs Gillis has sampled on his 2006 break-out, Night Ripper and on the recently released follow-up, Feed the Animals. Picking up where mash-up pioneer Danger Mouse left off, Gillis creates complex dance anthems that sound a bit like a Now That’s What I Call Music album on steroids. By frenetically sampling pieces of current top-40 pop and hip-hop with ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s classics (along with some insider hipster fare like the Unicorns and Of Montreal), Gillis re-contextualizes the songs involved, creating beats that are both brand-new and really, really danceable, all the while boldly layering where no sound collagist has gone before. We’re talking about a man who thought to mash-up MIA’s “Boys” with The Cranberries’ “Dreams”.

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Illustration by Marie Bliss Delpy

They name songs after 1960s dentistry equipment. Their first video employed ‘self-hypnosis’. Their merchandise includes yo-yo’s and jigsaw puzzles and they have had a long and well-documented love affair with vintage gear. In 1991, the year Tim Gane & Lætitia Sadier kick-started an eccentric Anglo-French musical experiment, few would have gambled it would last eighteen years. But “The Groop” also known as Stereolab has survived divorce and the death of a founding member to emerge stronger than ever, all the while retaining their status as bona fide outsiders. An encyclopedic knowledge of music from krautrockers Neu! to Mexican lounger Esquivel! remains stitched to their sleeves, and they blend apparently anachronistic sounds and musical eras into a formula all their own — breezy Motorik beats on the surface, with Brian Wilson-like attention to detail bubbling underneath.
      With the release of Chemical Chords, the band have notched up their eleventh album to date. Unlike the eighteen-minute guitar drone of one of their earliest releases, Jenny Ondioline, this latest batch of dense, pop-infused tunes barely scratch the three-minute mark, and were inspired, according to their composer Tim Gane, by Motown drumming and ‘60s girl groups. As you might expect however, laconic French chanteuse and pioneer of librarian chic Lætitia Sadier isn’t about to be swooning over boys on motorbikes or prom night dresses.
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Kill Rock Stars

With their latest LP venerable experimentalists Deerhoof reheat the brilliant recipe from last year’s breakthrough Friend Opportunity: classic meets indie rock, east vs. west, soft-loud dynamics, and complicated rhythmic work. The lyrics, however, span a topical and bilingual range surpassing their previous efforts, including the all Japanese-language opener and a two-part narrative (“Don’t Get Born” and “Fresh Born”) wherein a baby worries about its lack of planning. Satomi Matzusaki’s off-kilter vocals sound sturdier than ever throughout, and the gently destroyed closer “Jagged Fruit” stuns, with drummer Greg Saunier’s nuanced cymbal shivers creating electrical currents between guitar and bass before exploding.

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Smalltown Supersound

Despite being just three tracks, each over ten minutes long (the first of which is almost thirty minutes!), Lindstrøm’s first true album isn’t the attention sapper you’d fear it might be. Instead, it utilizes the long format as a means of slowly building each song (and the whole album) into a very coherent, disco space odyssey. The album starts out droning, preparing for a psychedelic experience, but quickly morphs into the slick, melodic beats that Lindstrøm is renowned for. The songs are repetitious in parts, but there are enough clever layers and twists to make this an opus to space out to — repeatedly.

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