Round-up Tracks: Karen O, Foxygen, & More

There aren’t too many to choose from, but the most significant of ‘Rapt’’s 117 seconds might be the last one, where Karen O - post-pouring her heart out - lets out a short, solitary shriek. It’s either the sound of her playing around, of it’s an intake of breath that took her by surprise. What precedes is a two-minute journey that the Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer seems entirely swept up within. “Do I really need another habit like you?” she asks, as if she’s actually waiting for a solid answer. “Love is soft, love’s a fucking bitch,” is the acknowledgement, but she’s still lured in by the strange hold of the song’s subject. Recorded seven years back, chances are Karen’s far-gone from the crippling indecision of ‘Rapt’. But it’s still a song that has its place and documents a strange, scary and exciting time. With that, however short and sweet it might be, it’s easily applicable to anyone currently at a to and fro between love and deathly silence. (Jamie Milton)

Back in the 1800s a French chap called Michel-Eugene Chevreul did a bunch of research on pendulums. He wanted to get to the raw science behind hypnosis; how on earth can a swinging object have such crazy effects on the brain? In the end Chevreul didn’t get the bare facts that he was after, and he found out that trances are a strange by-product of the imagination. It’s a phenomenon that FKA Twigs, a musical hypnotist of sorts, places right at the centre of ‘Pendulum’. “I’m a sweet little lovely gun,” sings Twigs in her delicate vocal, while the backdrop swings precariously between entrancing pockets of silence and brittle percussive cracks. Co-produced by Paul Epworth, it grows larger and more impressive with every twist and subtle tour de force, eventually becoming an all-enveloping trance with no emergency exit. There’s a reason why ‘Pendulum’ is one of the stand-out tracks from ‘LP1’, and it’s because it’s built out of sheer creative magic. (El Hunt)

Foxygen don’t deny that they’re referential. They get their kicks from parents’ record collections. They dress like their heroes and often wind up sounding just like them. On ‘21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic’, they produced pure carbon copies. It seemed crass at times, but it often sparked brilliant results. ‘How Can You Really’ - one of twenty-four tracks to make up their ‘… And Star Power’ LP, which in itself harks back to an age when bands could get away with releasing gigantic packages for the hell of it - marks a continuation. But it’s also their cleanest, most assured take on nostalgia so far. In an accompanying video, frontman Sam France continues to execute his finest glam rock impression. But behind the glitz and the camera-hogging, there’s a timeless piece of songwriting that leaps right up to the forefront. Jonathan Rado’s role has been switched to the piano, and it’s his chiming lines that lead the way, here. ‘How Can You Really’ puts a glossy mask on the past, but it’s hard to imagine a song like this ever falling on hard crowds. It’s too melodically clean, too charming to be ignored. (Jamie Milton)

When Peter Sagar isn’t playing the guitar in Mac DeMarco’s live band, he is busy with his solo project called HOMESHAKE. For a while Peter has been making sleepy and meandering songs, but this new song sees him up his game. Whereas his woozy back catalogue clouded over you like a beer blanket, ‘Cash Is Money’ sparkles due to its better production, icy basslines and chilled out groove. At one point, it even sounds like Mac or one his bandmates has given him some laughing gas to let loose on his synth as it misbehaves bleeping away in the background. Weird and wacky, yes, but a whole lot more accomplished too. (Samuel Cornforth)

Anybody who ever played Lemonade Stand as a kid during primary school ICT lessons will understand that getting the balance right in the perfect glass is a fine and precise art. It takes hours of fiddling ratios and totting up ingredients, and an attention to detail knowing few bounds; not that any of that behind the scenes faffing is at all apparent in the resulting cup of zesty, simplistic bliss. Exploding with carbonated pops and bloops, leaving a lingering tang in its wake, SOPHIE’s latest track ‘Lemonade’ appears to be a straightforwardly bizarre and refreshing enough song at first. The chorus does go ‘La, la, Lemonade,’ after all. The amount of weird shit and experimentation going on behind SOPHIE’s shopfront, though, is staggering, and the end product leaves everyone wanting another taste. (El Hunt)

It’s been a busy week for BANKS. She upped the anti with her ‘Beggin For Thread’ video, publicly outed Neon Jungle
for using her ‘Waiting Game’ single without a polite “can we?” in advance, and in slightly more under-the-radar circumstances, almost stole the show with a guest spot on Lil Silva’s ‘Don’t You Love’. These two collaborate on a daily basis, practically. Anytime they’re in the same city, it happens. And with that relationship, their meeting-of-minds routine has only gotten more assured along the way. ‘Don’t You Love’ is a masterful reminder of Lil Silva’s talent - his vocals tell only a small portion of the story. The focus is on backwards-sliding guitar samples and a womp womp refrain to make Skrillex feel small in comparison. Then BANKS comes in, and that’s the icing on the cake. (Jamie Milton)

When Ratking’s debut album dropped earlier this year, it was, and still is, a wake up call disguised as a barrage of noise. Wiki and Hak’s lyrics remain the highlight of the record, but sometimes it’s hard to hear what they’re saying thanks to Sporting Life’s chaotic production. It was a stylistic choice that made for an intense record, always requiring close attention. But sometimes it’s nicer to have things served on a golden platter, a more minimal background if you will. Ad-Rock’s skeletal remix of ‘Canal’ allows the lyrical strengths of Ratking to thrive, feeling no less gritty despite presenting a clearer backdrop. It may not provide the intensity of the original, but it retains all of the wit. (Joe Price)

It’s been over a year since this elusive Swedish/ American duo uploaded anything to their Soundcloud page; the only thing that proved they were still somewhat alive and kicking was a steady stream of Facebook posts promoting their sparse Scandinavian shows and promising forthcoming tunes.Their only two tracks to date: ‘10 Things’ – a gently woozy, dream-pop melody shot through with ambiguous, echoing vocals – and ‘If Things Go On Like This’ – a frenetic melange of blurry vocals, walls of reverb and a gushing, jangly guitar melody which underpins the whole track – lend their sound to a kind of Wild Nothing/ DIIV hybrid. ‘The Zoo’ is a great reintroduction; a track of parallels. There’s the sort of urgent, riding guitar rhythms widely associated with DIIV, and strained, cawing vocals which together propel dour, gloomy undertones. They’re soon balanced out though, when the chord changes and a brighter, dream-cross- jangle pop melody lifts the track to warmer climes. A middle ground between their previous tracks, FEWS continue to purvey the genre with enough differentiation to probably render them comeback of the year. (Laura Eley)

Tags: Foxygen, Karen O, Listen, Features