News This Week In New Music (3rd May 2014)

Having zero preconceptions about an artist, no idea who’s behind the project - this often makes the experience of hearing a song for the first time even more exciting. It’s better not to know, more ideal not to be able to judge a book on its cover. It doesn’t matter what kind of music you’re a sucker for, sometimes a debut track hits you straight in the gut. Quirke - our Discovery of the Week, although let’s face it when Young Turks sign someone, everybody takes notice - did this with ‘Break a Mirror’. When music is this primal, this free of genre conventions, it can have an impact on just about anybody. The other artists to feature in our latest new music round-up, Public Access T.V. and Cosmo Sheldrake, are a little more constrained by media-types by genre tags. The latter’s labelled with folk, the former are claimed to carrying the Strokes flame. Either way, like Quirke they had a habit of hitting hard and fast with their latest efforts.

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

TRACK OF THE WEEK
Public Access T.V. - Middle Child


‘Do you believe in rock and roll?’ runs the chorus chant of Public Access T.V’s new track, ‘Middle Child’. There’s no doubting this NYC trio are big subscribers to the post-Strokes prescription of sweat-drenched riffs and post-00s hedonism. They might be the closest thing New York’s produced to the ‘Is This It’-era greats; at least on the basis of early 2014 debut ‘Monaco’ and this, their second song to date. Here, they string nonchalance and devilish attitude into a fizzing package, delivered with breakneck speed and endless style.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Cosmo Sheldrake - The Moss


Model villages are amazing. You can pretend to be a giant. There’s obviously the danger that you’ll fall over and collapse onto an entire mini-village, destroying everything, but avoid those dangers and you’ll have the best day out ever. Filmed in Bekonscot in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire (the original model village, apparently), a new Cosmo Sheldrake video’s been unveiled. Here, the stupidly talented multi-instrumentalist ditches his Brighton surroundings to wrestle with mini figurines and tiny trains. It’s more a live video than anything else, but live videos don’t tend to arrive in this form.

DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK
Quirke


New Young Turks signing Quirke is someone working on a different wavelength to the rest of us. Mere mortals take note. ‘Break A Mirror’ - taken from the debut ‘Acid Beth’ EP - is a horrorshow of endlessly quickened synthetics and maddeningly tightly-wound samples. There’s head-bursting, all-encompassing music - and then there’s this