Round-up This Week In New Music (30th August 2014)

DIY brings together the week’s best new music, from Real Lies to QT to Kinds.

Words: Jamie Milton
30th August 2014

Festival season’s on the brink of bowing out, and a few big affirmations have emerged. The biggest might state the obvious, but it’s one DIY’s witnessed from showcase tests like Sound City and The Great Escape right up to the fevered Reading 2014. New bands are at their best when they’re given time. They require practice, room to explore ideas, means to collaborate, a clean slate to build on. Sometimes a fevered excitability formed from online can hinder this process, and it’s something every publication’s guilty of furthering. But when everything boils down to defining festival appearances - from showcase to headline status - nothing clicks unless a solid foundation’s in place beforehand. Right down to this week’s biggest Discovery, the art of taking time appear to reign victorious.

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

TRACK OF THE WEEK:
QT - HEY QT

“Suddenly, everyone started to jump, it’s like nothing I’ve ever heard,” runs the mantra of QT’s debut collaborative track. The real lyrics should probably reference the online reaction it’s received. “Suddenly, everyone started to tweet,” would be a more astute judgement.

SOPHIE and A.G. Cook treat their music like a science. But that’s their business. When a song like ‘HET QT’ is thrown out - just like that - ready to be consumed en masse, its aim is to go straight for the gut.

If that doesn’t work, fair enough. But it’s pointless throwing out Aqua comparisons, extrapolating the sources and twiddling thumbs over a song that’s - at its purest - a gigantic pop track dressed up in fairly different clothes. There’s a discomfort to it, that’s true, but ‘HEY QT’ carries the kind of chorus that’d sweep up thousands in any environment. The big whiff of irony doesn’t matter. The energy drinks, the shiny Fifth Element aesthetic; ignore it if necessary. Don’t overthink and just listen to one of the defining songs of the year, by hook or by crook. When it boils down to ‘HEY QT’’s bare parts, we’re left with a gigantic chorus, a cheeky grin and the realisation that sometimes music shouldn’t be taken so seriously.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK:
Real Lies - Dab Housing

This video arrived just before the turn of Reading Festival, a reminder - despite many London-centric type’s claims, and those of Real Lies themselves - that bands definitely still matter. They can still change lives, even if those lives don’t happen to reside in an East LDN postcode. Still, something about ‘Dab Housing’ - and its accompanying video - sticks in the conscience. Real Lies aren’t a typical band. They bring guitars up to this rooftop of theirs, but that’s about it. If their intention is to inspire, it’s not to bring thousands into sweaty festival crowds, it’s to remind twenty-somethings of their best days, both past, present and future. Nostalgia lines the seams both musically and in the emotions they provoke. Bands most definitely do still matter, but they’re arriving in splintered, scattered form - every so often out jumps a gem, like these guys.

DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK:
Kinds.

Cornwall duo Kinds. appear to have absorbed every miniature dose of post-2000 pop, fragmented the end result, and applied it to their own scatterbrained sound. ‘Run’ - their second track, and the finest by a mile when placed next to heady synth debut ‘Breathe’ - is part R&B, part house, part bubblegum pop, part experimental electronica. It’s the kind of song that possesses several hearts at once, all beating to different patterns. In many ways Kinds. are the actuality of the average late teen’s music taste, a playlist that can make abrupt turns in any direction. Click-happy, short attention spanned but brilliantly complex - ‘Run’ ought to be the beginning of something special.

Tags: Real Lies, Listen, Features, Neu