Neu This Week In New Music (25th May 2013)

We’ve used our imagination with this week’s highlights in new music. Every song cited below is probably a completely different being to its makers. But imagination runs riot, and the beauty of perspective steps in. JUNGLE likely didn’t write his new single on Chess Club Records about Vietnam, but for some reason it’s all this listener can think of when it rings out loud and true. Sinead Harnett (pictured, above) probably didn’t think ‘I’m going to get signed to Black Butter records with this song’, but she did, and it makes sense. And Elliot Power probably self-produced his storming debut track himself, but we like to imagine a scrambling producer trying to hold it together while a mad-eyed genius brings idea-after-idea to the table.

Here’s the best of what the past 7 days has offered:

TRACK OF THE WEEK
JUNGLE - Platoon


In debt to its title, ‘Platoon’ takes you right to the heart of a grizzly battle in green, humid Vietnam. Up there with Jai Paul’s ‘Jasmine’ in placing you directly at the heart of an apocalyptic endgame, JUNGLE’s debut single doesn’t glorify warfare, but it documents the fear and the paranoia of ‘Nam to a T. ‘I’ll knock you down, brother’, runs the watered down refrain, and amidst the song’s clipped guitars, soul-heavy mantras, you could mistake yourself for a gun-wielding troubadour. Maybe we’re completely missing the point, maybe this is just another excellent track from an emerging Londoner, but something feels afoot here, something more substantial.

‘Platoon / Drops’ is out 15th July via Chess Club.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Sinead Harnett - Got Me


Oh Sinead Harnett. Her ‘Got Me’ debut on Black Butter is so smooth and poised it’s almost like a typecast slice of house-inflected pop. So calculated it’s on the brink of coming across as false. Credit to the label that’s releasing the track, the first time it lands in your ears you immediately think it belongs on Black Butter.

But credit to this Plastic Horse directed video. It sends Sinead’s unflinching cool through a multi-textured, colourful state. It lands you in the heart of the club in which ‘Got Me’ is so unflinchingly based. And even if it’s 100% tailor-made for a certain label, a certain type of fan, is that such a bad thing? Seeing a label, and a new solo artist, reach such great heights so effortlessly can only be a pleasure.

The ‘Got Me’ EP is out 26th May.

DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK
Elliott Power


Beauty is in the eye of the producer. The seams tying together Elliott Power’s debut song ‘Sink/Swim’, and all their wild-eyed, disparate parts, help produce one of the best opening gambits of 2013 to date.

It’s easy to imagine Power roaring into the studio and bursting forth with a million ideas a minute, with some poor sod at the desk attempting to tie it all together. But if ‘Sink/Swim’ took years to produce, we’d happily wait another several months to hear its follow-up. Perhaps not quite on the verge of Jai Paul (yes, him again) fandom, you could still see a similar mystique surrounding this newcomer and his fired-up delivery.

‘Sink/Swim’ is out now on iTunes via Marathon Artists.