Prince Valium is one half of the Icelandic duo Sk / um (the ‘um’ side of it to be precise) that produced the well-received electronica mini-album ‘I Thagu Fallsins’ in early 2003.

Andlaus is almost entirely instrumental save for one track, Crying Hearts, and really is a product of its environment. When you listen to this album, you really couldn’t imagine it being spawned from anywhere other than Scandinavia. It is crammed full of ambient Arctic, glacial soundscapes that are evocative of acts like Sigur Ros. It is a testament to Prince Valium’s skills that an album as sonically wide-screen as Andlaus could be produced entirely from his bedroom. And for this he should rightly be given great credit.

However, the album is fatally tied to its musical heritage if not Prince’s own influences. The ghost of Sigur Ros hangs over the whole affair. Indeed, given that Andlaus is produced by an Icelander, it feels like one already knows it will sound like Sigur Ros before the first track even begins. Even the vocals on Crying Hearts, has more than a passing, disconcerting resemblance to Björk.

That said, there are moments of great beauty and reflection on Andlaus, particularly the opener, Mixed State. The tracks are expertly crafted in terms of mood. However, while there is much to commend Andlaus in terms of its addition to the canon of contemporary Icelandic music, there is not enough here to lift it out of that position, as there is so much here that one has heard elsewhere.

I couldn’t figure it out, and the music nerd inside me was taunting my lack of recall. We nerds are supposed to be able to sniff out a Memphis Minnie cover or an Ennio Morricone sample from a mile out. It was driving me nuts. I passed the CD over my cubicle to my co-worker.

“What does this sound like… Something ’80s, right?”

He put his headphones on. He agreed with me that it was something ’80s “or something.” I listened again and then called over another co-worker. A few hours (and a 2am phone call to the obligatory ’80s dance music aficionado friend) later we had deduced that the melody to the 7th track on Snakes Say Hisss!’s self-titled debut record sounded like the chorus to Taylor Dayne’s dance pop mega-hit “Tell It To My Heart.”

The point is, Snakes Say Hisss! essentially make dance pop in the vein of Taylor Dayne if she used filthy big synth loops and glitched out drum machines and sang mawkish near-emo Pavement-isms. And were underproduced. And, well… okay the Taylor Dayne comparison is a stretch. But that one song sort of sounds like her. I swear.

Bonus: Snakes Say Hisss! comes lovingly packaged in a beautiful screen-printed zine.

Double Bonus: They hail from the remote little village of Potsdam, New York, a town whose ice hockey team we beat the snot out of every time we played them.

-Maxwell Williams

Famous Class

I breathed a slight breath of disappointment to myself upon hearing the all-too-familiar uptight-cymbal-and-bass introduction to the first track on Songs From The Lodge. Here comes another in the seemingly endless production line of Hot New Bands with their stylistic feet plonked squarely in the new wave cliches of the ’80s, I muttered to myself, like the grouchy killjoy that I doubtlessly am.

Well, maybe I need to stop judging albums on their first opening seconds quite so much, as whilst New Rhodes owe something of a debt to the mini-epics of Echo and The Bunnymen and their ilk, they certainly give it enough of their own personality and lightness to stand them in fine stead. Their twinkling guitar melodies and tightly-controlled, complex-of-bassline songs certainly remind of such fine bands as McCarthy or even The Smiths, but the twelve songs here ooze charm, excitement and a cynicism-free sense of joy that’s lost in the music of many of their recent contemporaries.

I think that there are two reasons that New Rhodes can’t help but connect. Firstly, the vocals are delivered with such a fine sense of diction and poise, as they athletically wander across an impressive range, each line ending with a vibrato wiggle, often backed up with Ronettes-gone-city-centre backing harmonies. Secondly, the songs are so damned perky, with high-speed, bright guitar thrum tying itself up with nifty melodies into clean structures that don’t stay beyond their welcome.

I realise all of a sudden that New Rhodes take me back to the heady independent pop days of yore, simultaneously sounding naive and confident and betraying a love of performance and purity that hasn’t yet been marketed or produced out of existence. I was all set to dissect this album with reason and cynicism, but as the album went by I found it impossible to find it in myself to do so.

New Rhodes
Salty Cat Records

For all that the late John Peel gave music, it’s the Peel Sessions that will stand the test of time long after anecdotes about taping his show onto C90s as a teenager and queuing up to hand him a demo tape that one time he DJed at your student union have grown even duller than they already are. At their best they were a chance for a band to experiment and try out new material in the studio. At their worst an invitation to a few point-missing acts to replay their songs note-for-note, though this was, thankfully, a rare occurrence. This EP, consisting of the four tracks from Múm’s lone session recorded in 2002, falls somewhere in-between those two camps. Three songs from their 2000 album “Yesterday Was Dramatic, Today Is OK”, and one from 2002’s “Finally We Are No One” are offered up, and while there are no radical departures to be had, the necessary compression of time and budget imposed by a radio session, along with the opportunity for post-album tinkering, has had a pleasing effect on them.

Scratched Bicycle and Smell Memory, for example, both gain extra glitchy beats, and feel less fussy more skittish than their official counterparts, but despite the odd electronic edition or momentary meander, it’s the the uncluttered production that truly benefits the songs and grants them a general intimacy where once they might have felt a little too fragile and distant for comfort.

Hardly an essential purchase for the Múm-curious, then, but not without merit for those feeling starved of their gentle Icelandic tinklings.

Fat Cat

In August of last year I gushed about Green Pheasant’s eponymous debut album – a handful of songs originally recorded at home on a four-track for demo purposes, but which so impressed Fat Cat that they chose to release it with hardly any modification. I did, however, have one reservation: much as I loved its woozy, dream-like quality, I did wonder how much of that was down to the circumstances of its recording. The low-fi, distant qualities of cassette tape suits gentle acoustica more than any other genre you might attempt to commit to it, and the production on that album, consisting largely of turning the “reverb” dial all the way to eleven, could easily have been a response to the weaknesses of the format as much as a deliberate attempt to gently obfuscate. Would the larger budget that signing would inevitably bring result in a more obvious, less charmingly obscure sophomore album?

Thankfully, I needn’t have worried. Aerial Days sees Duncan Sumpner reject the temptations of the studio and continue recording at home, albeit having splashed out on some slightly more modern recording equipment, resulting in an album that’s more an appropriate and carefully judged step forward than a baby-and-bathwater-discarding act of self indulgence. As before the songs have a hallucinatory quality, but the hints of a folkier past have been toned down a little, a some new-found freedom has been exercised in terms of instrumentation, with friends adding recorder and trumpet to the bedroom guitar-and-drum-machine setup.

The only mis-step being a slightly-too-twee cover of the Beatles’ “Dear Prudence”, Aerial Days enriches the sound of its predecessor with care, and its creator deserves credit for restraint alone.

Fat Cat

On the basis of this four-song first single, Liverpool upstarts The Maybes? (and yes, that is an annoying question mark of theirs) present themselves as a solid, if somewhat unexciting, take on the combined sounds of The La’s, The Jam and – like so many others – The Beatles. Theirs is a stoned world of rock and roll, livin’ it up and tight male-bonding hugs on drunken nights out to see Oasis.

The first two songs suggest, I hope, the direction that the band might go from here. ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ is more Cast than The La’s, with its workmanlike writing and adherence to a well-worn have-it-large ideal. ‘Actions’, however, is happily more The La’s than Cast, with more considered and delicately rocking guitar lines twisting through some light-hearted harmonic indie rock. This is all very nice and very listenable, but it’s the two other songs here that are a sticking point for me: ‘Get On The Resin’, The Maybes?’ ode to hashish, is painfully quirky funk rock which reminds too much of the good-time nonsense of Toploader; whilst ‘Supercharged’ is an admittedly excited/excitable chunk of high energy rock-out, which unfortunately falls rather short of the Led Zeppelin/Live At Leeds heights it seems to be aiming at.

If The Maybes? can isolate where it is their music lies, and refine what they’re doing to something that seems less of a rag-bag of influences used with varying degrees of success, they have it in them to – putting it in the most patronising terms possible – win the heart of the common man. At present they seem slightly lost; but this is the first single. They should lose that question mark, though…

The Maybes?
Xtra Mile Recordings

This is fantastic – The Fore sound like they haven’t listened to any records except for a scant collection of pre-65 Beatles and Rolling Stones 45s. They’re so carefully studied in the sound and style of the Brit Invasion that it’s hard to believe that this isn’t some long lost recording discovered bricked in to the back wall of the Cavern. Each of the three songs on this demo, none of which come in at longer than two and a half minutes, seems to display a different aspect of The Fore’s obsessive reverence of a particular sound. ‘In So Deep’ is cheeky, jangly pop with melodies picked out over snappy arpeggios; ‘Love For Sale’ is a slightly slower, more reflective-sounding song with a Beatles-all-over bright guitar line driving it along; and ‘We Were Meant To Be’ goes in a more Stonesy direction, with stabs of guitar and jittery rhythms holding together some snarling, garagey vocals.

They may be forty years too late to make the most of this music, but that’s besides the point. This is incredibly authentic-sounding in its song structures, vocal and musical styles, and recording quality, and The Fore must know they’re destined for no more than tiny hipster’s clubs and underground beat venues. If they can stay away from the dreaded tribute act/wedding band situation of becoming more of a jaded parody than an exciteable, real group – and on the basis of these three songs they’ll have no problems doing that – they can’t cease to charm.

The Fore

TD Lind is a English bluesman who honed his chops with travels through Paris, Kentucky, Memphis and New Orleans. Now, that might sound like the stuff of nightmares to some – a pale-faced Englishman soaking up the histories of those who have led harder lives than he – so it’s good that ‘Come In From The Cold’ is a nicely subtle, upbeat slice of fuzzy guitar blues. Alongside the odd scrape of slide on guitar strings, the underlying, repetitive riff that forms the core of the song is overlaid with some lovely, complex fingerpicking and almost hidden drums and keyboards. Lind’s vocals are kept nice and low in the mix, and work all the better for it, as they don’t speak of years of torment and pain, but sound more like a good voice singing over a great backing. The song slowly builds to a quietly chugging density, and succeeds through seeming devoid of any connection with modern music.

Two further songs, ‘Let’s Get Lost’ and ‘I Don’t Miss You’, bring the vocals more to the fore, and lose the lead track’s smoky sense of impromptu musical thoughts accidentally captured onto tape. Straying too close at times to the unpleasantly mainstream, warbling, bland style of singers like James Morrison and – ack – James Blunt, these songs retain at least a modicum of emotional depth and musical simplicity that hasn’t been completely over-produced and polished. I get the impression that TD Lind could be pushed into the mainstream with the help of a hitmaking producer and an integrity-free manager; but that he’s not going to let that happen.

TD Lind

Here’s a pop record put out by a brand new California-based label, Surreal Ceremonies. They’ve gathered two really nice bands to put out a 7″ with.

Friday Bridge are a nice little beat-driven Swedish band whose lead singer sounds a little like Kahimi Karie and a little bit like Annie. The band is just a shade more lo-fi and looser, which is to their credit, because no one wants to hear an indie band try for well-produced new wave. Their contribution “The End of the Affair,” is shimmery, yet dark and utilizes a very trance-y synth arpeggio throughout the song, which I’ve heard used to similar affect by the old Creation band Pacific. The more I listen to this song, the more I like it, in all it’s Cardigans echo-grove bliss.

I’m a little more familiar with Kelly Slusher, ever since she worked with Rocketship’s Dustin Reske on a quiet little record a few years ago. Her addition, “Be There,” is the first I’ve heard from her since, except for her work on the Kitteridge Records Homemade Hits compilation with the band Boothby, which I quite enjoyed. Slusher’s vocals make your ears swoon and pine and when she sings, “Let’s go crazy for just one night” so delicately, you can’t help but think about a time when you’ve thought that thought. Her guitars catch up with her anxiousness on the chorus and the fuzz blends into the pretty river of keyboard melody, creating that perfect blend of nostalgia and déjà vu.

-Maxwell Williams

Surreal Ceremonies

It’s about the time when you read the latest CD sleeve-notes from the revolving door of musicians known as Antifamily that you want to fling it out of the window, hopefully onto a passing fan. This is because Antifamily pretentiously describe themselves as “the beat-group as an elementary kinship structure”, the press-release hailing them as ‘avant-punk’. Argh! But, you know, what with books, covers and judging nowadays it’s almost impossible to get away with writing a review just by glancing at the sleeve-notes as per usual, so having picked up the old quill I gave it a rather good spin…

Not too bad at all! The busy and rather interesting pop ‘Law of the Plainsmen’ fashionably bows down to Devo, smudging eyeliner, while ‘The Shaft’ shakes hands with Krautrock while acknowledging the Post-Punk explosion that followed. There’s a hell of a lot going on, I hear nice blips and solid bass-lines in each song; previous pain alleviated, massaged even. Each song has bunches of simple nuances played with sundry instruments: synths and steel drums on ‘Work Cheap’, plus cello and weird percussion on ”The Final’. Singers swap, languages change but are still sung in the same nonchalant tone, the pouting “jah?” kind of way, yet it would all seem hair-tearingly pompous if it was delivered with such fantastic acerbity. “Jah” indeed.

Like a toddler hours past bedtime, the album drags on with agitated and tedious energy, Antifamily releasing slithers of shiny silver pop poo on their Kraftwerk bed-sheets while crying to the nanny state. However, this child insolently defies authority with a pre-pubescent mysteriousness of Nico and an upbeat nature akin to Debbie Harry, leaving the table early to read ‘Nouveau-Poet Monthly’ in its rebellious little beret. I hope to God I won’t have a child so irritatingly talented as this.

http://www.antifamily.org/