Features The Neu Bulletin (22nd April 2014)

The Neu Bulletin is a daily update of the most exciting new things DIY’s listening to. Some of the music you’ll like, some of it you won’t. We can’t please everyone, sorry.

Every day we offer up a choice show, a song of the day (branched under the understated heading “big Neu thing”) and a little something extra that’s caught our attention. Check back here every day for your latest Neu Bulletin delivery.

THE GIG
Painted Palms - London, The Old Blue Last


Three months on from releasing debut ‘Forever’, Painted Palms are ditching California for the UK. Good timing too - their dreamy first work neatly matches up with muggy spring evenings. Expect the OBL to be bathing in a sweaty sense of escape tonight..

THE BIG NEU THING
AViVAA - XX


Sydney duo AViVAA are so xx-like in their minimal, atmospheric instrumentation, they’ve gone and named their second single after the influential late-00s bloomers. That’s a touch unfair given how much else roams round ‘XX’, with Aviva Payne and Matais Coulter expressing intimacy in simple terms (“your touch electrifies me” being a neat chorus lyric that sums up the whole experience). Production enhances it all, with chest-thumping chants and those very xx-like guitar lines interlocking like a secret code to a locked door.

OTHER NEU BUSINESS
Lists


Lists is an apt name for someone bound to end up in a few chancers’ ‘best of’’s come the end of the year. Or maybe the next one, by the time the Edinburgh folksmith’s released an album. On his second track ‘veil’, he goes beyond the simple sweetness of debut ‘autumn’ into something more precious. Chimed pianos cut through any cobwebs that come from expressing emotion this finitely and with such honesty. There’s even a hint of R&B fighting its way through the filter, clashing heads with gloomy cello and even gloomier vocals.