News This Week In New Music (24th May 2014)

Here’s to the bedroom kids. The ones with wires tripping them up whenever they quit a recording session to go make a cup of coffee. The musicians who got all their tips from intuition or a bunch of Youtube ‘how to’ videos. The ones who cobbled up as much of their pocket money as possible to invest in a semi-decent microphone. Some of the artists below have graduated from a humble bedroom into a more fitting studio environment, but all three prove that you can begin humble and have a bit impact. Sometimes ‘bedroom pop’ is ridiculed, mocked for its amateurish results. But everyone has to start somewhere, and more often than not it’s a rough-edged early demo that fans might hold closest to their hearts.

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

TRACK OF THE WEEK
Happyness - Leave The Party


Happyness are obsessed with characters. In a recent DIY interview, the South London group explained how they come up with movie concepts in the studio pretty much every day. Ranging from films about Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie settling down in a humble town (Bradford) to become property developers, right up to the story that defines their debut album ‘Weird Little Birthday’ (where an unfortunate soul gets out-attentioned by Jesus on Christmas Day), when there’s a tale, there’s a way. In some senses, the band themselves play characters when they perform. There’s an intentional US twang to their delivery - you wouldn’t know the bulk of the record was written in Bermondsey, that’s for sure. Call them slackers, call them college kids. They’re probably looking to be labelled these things. When it all boils down, Happyness are brilliant geeks, living out the best of their crazy concepts with the record button pressed firmly down to “on”. A special band.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Shunkan - Dust In Your Eyes


Home videos have their place. Sometimes a high-budget, tell-all expression does the job, but when a musician picks up a camera themselves and invites viewers into their world, instead of dispelling a certain mystique it can open up a brilliant door. What’s significant about New Zealand artist Shunkan’s ‘Dust In Your Eyes’ clip is that it quite simply shows her having a good time, hanging out and being bored but not regretting a thing. It’s a neat offset to the melancholic strain that tugs at her debut EP. Not everything’s drenched in tears in Shunkan’s world, honest. This video does well to prove just that.

DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK
Liu Bei


Liu Bei’s debut ‘Infatuation’ track sounds like it’s extracted tiny fragments of a hundred existing bands. The opening seconds mimic Manchester band MONEY’s choral calling card, but the rest plays out in less distinct terms. As ideas jumble together into one beautiful orbit, in the end it doesn’t strictly matter how Liu Bei picked up their sound, or the countless subconsious mini-plots that influenced this debut. Ultimately they landed on a grand, affecting way of expression, and it’ll have a huge impact.