Round-up April 2015’s Best Bandcamp releases
Tom Walters rounds up the month’s finest Bandcamp releases, featuring Heart Beach, Maxo and Faith Healer.
For the past few years, Bandcamp has bit-by-bit revolutionised not only the way we consume music, but the way we discover it too (see DIY’s Discovery piece as proof). Once upon a time masses would sift through rows upon rows of LPs in the comfort of a local record store, and while this tradition isn’t something that’s disappearing exactly, an ever-expanding digital world is constantly opening up new pathways for us to explore. Rather than packing up a dozen records down the high street on a Saturday afternoon, there’s now the option of rummaging through Bandcamp tags and adding an abundance of independent music to wishlists. In this feature, DIY does the rummaging for you. This is the Best of Bandcamp.
Catch up with March’s picks, featuring Supercrush, Quarterbacks and Yowler. See all our discoveries here.
Here’s a selection of April picks, from Tom Walters.
Heart Beach
Throw away all the cutesy chillwave and chiptune connotations with Heart Beach’s name - they’re not needed here. One listen to their haunting, darkly minimal self-titled new album is enough to confirm the three-piece as Aussie gems. The trick to understanding Heart Beach is to understand that they’re turning pop conventions on their head and running them through the gutter. ‘Holiday’ is all eskewed, shimmering guitars and gutsy dual vocals that hammer home truths in like nails: “I’m drinking coffee, at nine in the morning / wish I was at home, wish I was with you,” Jonathan McCarthy and Claire Jansen bemoan as their voices start soaring and the atmospherics become thunderous.
Maxo
Maxo’s world of glossy nightmares is like being inside of a glitchy Sega Dreamcast as it randomly generates landscapes akin to downtown Tokyo in the mid-2000s. Basically, it’s full-throttle escapism. ‘Chordslayer’, his six-track new record, traverses everything from euphoric Rustie-esque heights to moments of pure ecstacy that have only been previously achieved by Dance Dance Revolution champions. It’s a bit fucked up, and it’s a bit PC Music-meets-J-pop, but when the result is stormers such as ‘Reach You’, that can only be a good thing.
And after that sugar rush, here’s something to hide under the duvet to late at night. Cold Holding are a two-piece from Southampton who fall somewhere in between emo and post-hardcore, but as ‘She Wrote Me’ from their EP ‘Your Ghost; This Loss’ proves, they’re way better than simply being pigeonholed in that world. Creeping into life with an obscure, bleak sample, gritty guitar lines and half-spoken lyrics pave the way to a highly cathartic outburst that sounds like it’s blowing the speakers of the mid-90’s cassette player it was born to be heard on. Fans of La Dispute, Touche Amore and jangly, dreamy indie rock will find all of these worlds perfectly aligned, the air on them replaced with hugely satisfying analogue static.
Faith Healer
“I left my instinct because of cosmic troubles,” Jessica Jalbert sweetly sings as Faith Healer on ‘Cosmic Troubles’, the title track from her latest record. That might sound like just another emo line, but the Edmonton, Alberta singer-songwriter eschews all preconceived notions of what it means to be a pop artist in 2015 as she combines elements of folk, country, shoegaze and twee into one entirely different beast of her own. As the rolling, saccharine acoustic guitar clears the way for spritely keys and hushed rock ’n’ roll on ‘Fools Rush In’, it’s clear there’s something else here entirely when Jalbert is able to achieve all that and still launch into a solo that sounds like it’s straight out of 1967. Think Angel Olsen or Jessica Pratt making ever-so-slightly more upbeat music with a dash of clarity and spoonfuls more pop, and you’re almost but not quite there - Faith Healer is leading the way on her own.
With Bob Vylan, St Vincent, girl in red, Lizzy McAlpine and more.