News This Week In New Music (9th February 2013)

The weekend is for settling down and inspecting the scene (or stuffing your face with pizza and despairing at the football results, depending on your lifestyle choice). Every day we’re prompted with track after track, offering after offering of promising new music, but it’s around this time that we can begin to really pick out the moments that’ll be sticking with us during our fickle, scatterbrained existence. There’s been enough this week to suggest that 2013 could be one of the decade’s most memorable, progressive years in music. We’ve had everything, from uplifting electronica to striking synth-pop at its most poisonous. But being ridiculous, nerd-like individuals we here at Neu have rounded up the past seven days in new music, picking out the three contributions that stood out the most.

TRACK OF THE WEEK
Sunless ‘97 - Aurora I


When we spoke to Sunless ‘97 last year about their first couple of singles, and career as a whole, we got into the subject of travelling. Ed and Alice spoke at length about their love of Mexico and their desire to escape from normality by jetting off to someplace unusual and experiencing a culture shock or two. ‘Aurora I’ is an audible culture shock in itself. It details the life of someone heading home from a night out, wide eyed and beaming, but the instruments being used are that of a tropical utopia. At one point it sounds like someone’s playing a xaphoon, for crying out loud. Every waking moment of summer is extracted and crammed into this track, and it makes for Sunless ‘97’s finest song to date, by a long stretch.

VIDEO OF THE WEEK
Josef Salvat - This Life


Our new favourite wise & whimsical songwriter Josef Salvat also goes on some exploring here. Looking back sentimentally on some treasured memories (we’re presuming the clips intermingling in this video are of Josef’s own childhood), he steers a vintage car through some frosty scenery and reassures himself that ‘there must be more to this life.’ It’s a special video, in that it paints the song’s already despondent message in even more tragic colours.

DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK
Salt Cathedral


Stream ‘Take Me To The Sea’ up above and tell us it doesn’t make you wish you could play every instrument going. Some people can (the members of Salt Cathedral are bound to be capable), but it takes a certain skill to make music like this. Every direction you turn, there’s something novel and perfectly-formed to stumble upon. The New York group were new to us this week - they just came back from a tour with Hundred Waters - and we’re ashamed it took a name change (they used to be called Il Abanico) and something of a ‘relaunch’ for them to fall into our radar’s gaze.