Features Tracks: Grizzly Bear, Warpaint & More

Good day, everybody! The UK Storm has been savaging wheelie bins and garden chairs across the country, and threatening to rip all those Miley Cyrus halloween costumes apart at the seams. Naturally the DIY scribes decided the best option was probably to take shelter in a bunker of new internety music. After a good old natter over a hot toddy about which songs would tide us through the treacherous wind, these are the chosen ones.

Warpaint - Love Is To Die

‘Love Is to Die’ is a maze of a song. Its appeal stems from dead ends & swerving directions, like it’s playing hide and seek with whoever’s listening in. Where it’ll end up is anyone’s guess. The song teases and turns with such regularity it veers on the edge of being too showy, too loosely structured. The difference in key and energy between a verse, chorus and bridge is ridiculous. All three parts could’ve been selected from separate songs or recording sessions. Holding it all together however is Flood’s production, which paints the piece in illuminated life, endless energy. ‘Love Is To Die”s atmosphere is the only thing that’s absolute. It’s a building block, the kind that could only come from this very special LA band. Indecision never hurt anyone. (Jamie Milton)

Grizzly Bear – Listen and Wait

If you’re anything like me, you’ll already be dead excited about Christmas, and hoping that Santa is hip hop and happening enough to throw some cracking albums down the chimney. Other than the hotly awaited Mary J Blige Christmas record, top of my list are the two beauteous, mahoosive, and bound-to-be magnificent extended editions of ‘Shields’, complete with B-sides, remixes, and all the other roast din trimmings. Leading the charge is ‘Listen and Wait’, a melancholy cacophony of pounding keys and Daniel Rossen’s wrought vocals. Listen and wait indeed – ‘Shields Expanded’ and ‘Shields B-Sides’ both come out on 12th November. Take note, Father Christmas. (El Hunt)

David Bowie – Atomica

Bowie may like to crawl under his reclusive rock for years on end, but when he does resurface, he sure comes back with a bang. After releasing album of the year contender ‘The Next Day’ and lending a few guest vocals on Arcade Fire’s equally brilliant ‘Reflektor’, he recently announced ‘The Next Day Extra’ – an extended version of the original. Judging by ‘Atomica’, it’s not going to be one of those money-making bonus albums that get thrown around like an explosive baked potato. It’s more immediate than any track from the original album, and from the first listen it had me grinning like a Cheshire cat whose IAMS have been spiked with laughing gas. Earl Slick and David Torn choose not to go home, but to go hard – with explosive T-Rex guitar riffs – and that mixed with Gail Ann Dorsey’s pounding bass makes it into an absolute corker. The chorus sees Day-Bo belting out ‘Let’s get the show on the road’ - and after a cracking album, some genius guest vocals and what’s shaping up to be a brilliant bonus feature – that would be the icing on the metaphorical cake.(Kyle MacNeill)

Hella Better Dancer – Sleeptalking

Stepping away from the floaty, whimsical lo-fi so delicately mastered on 2012’s ‘Living Room EP’, London/Brighton based Hella Better Dancer have undergone somewhat of a reinvention with the release of ‘Sleeptalking’ – a blissfully hazy yet hauntingly unnerving slice of dark, melodic pop. There’s something about the creeping melancholy, the delicate yet sultry female vocal, the gushing chorus, the nonchalant yet ever-so –confident guitar solo in this latest track from the four-piece which radiates a new-found maturity. (Laura Eley)

Cut Ribbons - Bound In Love

As the nights get longer and we begin to descend into an inevitable cold winter we find ourselves clutching to anything that reminds us of the warm, cider-induced festival season of 2013. ‘Bound in Love’, the first track to escape the studio from Cut Ribbons’ debut album, is one of those things. It’s a slow motion montage of a summer road trip, the 4 minute 22 second musical equivalent of a Polaroid snapshot of friends in the midst of forging a soon to be distant memory. Filled to the brim with their signature sound, the band aren’t diverting from their original course: but who would want them to? The single is out on 18th November on cassette label, Kissability. Work is set to continue on their full length in January at Start Together Studios in Belfast and I look forward to its release in 2014. (Joe Dickinson)

Elephantine – Abreast

A collaboration between Kaila from Birmingham’s Youth Man and Anna from Birmingham’s Tantrums (R.I.P) sounds great on paper, but it sounds even wilder and kick-ass in audio-form than you could possibly imagine whilst reading this. I hesitate to call this a side project from the two musicians mentioned above, as this new venture is more of a musical ventilation for their frustration (and yours) with whatever it is that gets on their/your wick. A gigantic, stomping distorted groove thumps through the song occasionally giving way to clattered crescendos. (Jack Parker)

Kemuri – Playa de Agua

Ever since DJ Harvey’s epochal ‘Sarcastic’ mix CD washed up on these shores from Japan and transported us back to the White Isle via the deeper reaches of the disco cosmos, we’ve all been barmy for balmy Balearic. The thing is though….what actually is Balearic? You’ve got three options to explain it: the first is the socio-historical approach. Here you outline the importance of figures like Jose Padilla and Alfredo and how their cross-genre explorations - explorations that anything from dub to italo disco to Phil Collins b-sides to jazz fusion joints - reflected the delicate balance between E’d up hedonism and the tranquil beauty of Ibiza in the late 80s. Then there’s the quasi-mystical route which allows you to drone one about the ‘vibe, maaaaaaan’ and make a claim for pretty much all music ever made being Balearic. The third option is to just play this song. This is Balearic. This is as good as it gets. (Josh Baines)

Y O U T H C U L T – May Be Myopic

There’s very little on the internet to give anything away about Y O U T H C U L T, bar a short biography on the Italian new-music pioneer site Deerwaves which - when Google translated - leads one to deduct that they are male and from Sweden. The handful of songs which lie pretty much dormant on their Soundcloud page, however, sit in line with the spacious and dreamy soundscapes and poetic percussion of MONEY. ‘May Be Myopic’ drips with angst-ridden emotion - the hoot and howl vocal not unlike that of Jamie Lee’s half frail half gutsy tones - until all the contained fragility explodes into a piano crescendo and pained cries of ‘can you taste blood?’ – perhaps a little too close for comfort to the Mancunian scamps’ sound, but nevertheless a wonderfully atmospheric track. (Laura Eley)

YOUTH CUNT EP by Y O U T H C U L T

Illum Sphere – Sleeprunner

The current obsession with John Carpenter’s brooding synth work seems to be showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon. Illum Sphere is the latest producer to try his hand at recreating Carpenter’s signatures washes of fuzz, with his hypnotic new single, ‘Sleeprunner’. The Manchester based producer is keen on fleshing out his own dystopian soundscapes - however indebted they are to Carpenter, they feel singular and entirely his own. The thing that truly removes his work from simply being another Carpenter love letter, is the final stretch of the track. Slowly swirling into a psychedelic spiral, the track begins to evolve as strings lift it to ethereal heights, pushing out the menacing synth in favour of something considerably more beautiful. It’s an astonishing show of progression in such a short amount of time, and another reason why Illum Sphere is someone to look out for. (Joe Price)