News This Week In New Music (11th January 2014)

The Christmas break didn’t exactly starve everybody of new music. But when this week kicked off, it was immediately clear that almost anybody with something to say had saved their big talk for 6th January. Minced pie crumbs firmly dusted off, the week treated us to a countless amount of exciting new music, with tracks from Happy Diving, Francis Lung and all of the below doing their best to distract from any post-NYE bugs and poorly executed resolutions. The following all stood out in completely separate strands, one being a force that outdoes nature itself, the other being an intelligent bedroom producer, and the third being the most multi-talented son of a… in recent existence.

Here’s the best of what happened this week in new music:

TRACK OF THE WEEK
Girl Band - Lawman


Googling them will probably just lead to Spice Girls Youtube binges, but they probably wouldn’t last as long as the average Girl Band track. Give these guys a second’s breathing space and they’ll flood the scene with colossal, endless noise. Feedback that isn’t feedback. Screeches that do more than just screech. Somehow, they also piece together every inch of madness they’re capable of constructing into something resembling a pop song (we’re talking in extremely relative terms, here). There’s rhythm, a structure, a chorus even, if you count a chorus being the same thing as a verse only amplified tenfold. ‘Lawman’ is proof that extremes win the day, that boundary pushing usually sources the odd gem. This isn’t a coincidence though - Girl Band even covered Blawan and came up with pretty much the same thing on the intensity richter scale. They’re safely marked out as something special.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Mas Ysa - Why


Thomas Arsenault can do everything. He can skew genres, sing like Bon Iver and still look cool. And he can direct. The New York based musician (who’s had his fair share of travels, which reflects on this ‘Why’ video) collaborated with Natalia Leite, fusing ice hockey scenes with shots of Twin Peaks style woodland, big warehouses full of unused materials and a pretty adept jogger (played by Thomas, of course). Released over the Christmas break, it affirms that Mas Ysa is fearless about almost everything he does. Even if ‘Why’’s endless pop screeches - similar to Autre Ne Vuet in its unrelenting shamelessness - might distract occasionally, he still stands out as an artist (in capital letters) doing something nobody else even considered trying.

DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK
dd elle


Even if no clues have emerged since dislocated, sort of mysterious musician dd elle released debut track ‘a note’, whoever’s behind the project has seriously upped the anti. ‘Kind 2 U’ - their second track to date - is a finite, fresh and perfectly routined reminder of how identity doesn’t matter when pop knowhow is executed in a fashion as confident as this. There’s slick guitar licks, toy xylophone style synths and the kind of playful refrain that might end up on a Youth Lagoon record - it’s all there, hundreds of tiny, recognisable tidbits.