With a name like that, I was expecting an MOR indie band with their eyes on the major label stardom prize, for some reason. Turns out, to my immeasurable joy, that Perfect Blue are in fact creators of abstract, blissed-out soundscapes that recall the less beat-y moments of Seefeel, the floating repetition of Pink Floyd’s ‘Live at Pompeii’ set and the subtle, intricately textured layers of Main.

The four tracks here shift in and out to form a blurred whole; multilayered planes of sound building up a many-frequencied core that’s reinforced by occasional, muted beats and vaguely human sounds. At times it threatens to go full-blown into ‘Loveless’-style lysergic overload, especially on ‘In Fear of Fear’ which twists up the tension rating a notch with carefully looped sounds of (perhaps) heavily treated strings or feedback.

Just staying on the right side of lame chill-out blandness, Perfect Blue inject enough darkness into their relatively sedate music – sinister echoed tubular bell sounds here, shifting bass sounds there – to maintain the attention. Like some of the finest music for relaxing to, it relaxes you in a way that’s slightly frightening and intimidating.

Perfect Blue

More in the endless stream of middling independent-hoping-for-majordom music that I seem to get sent for review at the moment. Seven Days Awake are deftly running the marketing treadmill before they walk the fanbase-building walk, with a nifty/’edgy’ Flash website, street team and the ubiqitous Myspace page with ‘adds’ ahoy. There used to be a time when a band would make its ‘brand’ known by building a fanbase through regular gigging and carefully put together demos, sent in hope to reviewers and promoters. These days, with a few mouseclicks, a band can make themselves look entirely established when they’ve only been together five minutes and have only released one CD single.

Not that I’m levelling accusations of audience-hoodwinking at Seven Days Awake in particular; their familiar-as-old-socks take on a polished hard rock/emo/nu-metal style is at least passably musical, well put together and pushes the right buttons. Smoothly-produced, buzzing riffs tie together the vocal histrionics to result in four songs here that may well be ‘for real’ and from a band that ‘means it’. It’s just hard to tell, as they’ve been presented as such a finished product. It’s nice to make your own mind up about a band, rather than to have it polluted with marketing schtick and a supposed slick professionalism that should develop naturally, not be created prior to an initial release.

Good luck to ’em, but when a band positions and markets itself in the same way that 1,000 similar bands are doing at the same time, it’s hard to distinguish the individuality or creativity; traits that unfortunately seem to come at the back of the queue in the current musical landscape.

Seven Days Awake

I do love a good vocal accent in music, and Finland’s Echo Is Your Love have a delightfully strange one in their lead singer, which immediately propels their music into the realms of the odd. Like the combined shoutings of Liliput, Huggy Bear and Babes in Toyland, the lyrics are yelped, screamed and crooned with a beautifully out-of-kilter range and phrasing. Combine this with some top-notch gliding indie guitar noise and the result is charmingly aggressive, and aggressively charming. In the same way that the Breeders, Veruca Salt, Velocity Girl and Magnapop took indie guitar rock and twisted it into odd shapes using out-there dynamics and a delicate musical style that is quick to snap and lash out, Echo Is Your Love have taken traditional guitar band elements and reinforced them with real depth and emotion. At times bordering on intense noise or there’s-nothing-there quietness, on this album they never forget to include melody and tunes. This is what makes them repeatedly listenable and admirably strange.

Echo Is Your Love
Run Out Records

Billing itself as ‘The Third Wave of Psychedelia’, this excellent compilation isn’t purely a collection of soundalike bands referring directly to their ’68- or ’88-centred influences; it’s more a cross-section of new music made by bands who’ve obviously listened to and dabbled with psychedelia to a variety of extents. This means a variety of styles from Beatle-booted blissout, through indiepop and postpunk to fuzzy soundscaping.

So whilst it does feature bands that wouldn’t be out of place on a new Pebbles or Nuggets compilation – the sitar-tinged S.F. Sorrow-styled dreamy pop of Lovetones, the fuzz guitar drawl of The Black Angels and the brilliant stoned drone of Brian Jonestown Massacre, for example – it quickly moves in different directions. Calling your band Black Nite Crash suggests an obvious Ride influence, and the sound of Ride, Stone Roses and the shoegazers of the early 90s pervades the tracks from Black Nite Crash themselves along with Pioneer 4 and The Otherside. The Electric Mainline and The High Dials, amongst others, bring to mind the what-was-once-dubbed ‘perfect pop’ of the releases of Sarah Records or Slumberland – jaunty, bright guitar lines over dreamy vocal lines and simple compositions.

Where this compilation gets most interesting for me is the point at which bands spin off on their own trajectories. For example, Dedelectric offer a bizarre, jerky 80 seconds of attitude that’s like Liliput gone very weird; The Telescopes provide a dense, threatening slice of echoes, mournful trumpet, quietly chanted vocal and static noise; and Say Jansfield produce an example of the kind of odd combination of folk and electronica that’s so damn hip at the moment.

Hopefully there will be further volumes of the self-styled Psychedelica ‘revolution’ – on the basis of this example, there are a lot of bands making a lot of interesting music out there. Like the many indiepop compilation tapes of yore, I’m glad that people are still collecting together music like this – there may not be many big names on here, but it’s nice to have the work done for you when looking for some new bands to investigate!

The full lineup for the compilation is: The Lovetones, Dolly Rocker Movement, The Black Angels, The Stevenson Ranch Davidians, Brian Joneston Massacre, HeadQuarters, Black Nite Crash, The Hiss, Daydream Nation, The Future Kings of England, The Shrills, The Otherside, The Vandelles, Floorian, Pioneer 4, The Electric Mainline, Snowdonnas, The High Dials, Say Jansfield, The Bleeding Hearts, The Bavarian Druglords, The Telescopes, The Lazily Spun, Spacegarden, Fuxa, Dedelectric, On Holiday, Dabenport, God is an Astronaut, Silvertone, The Fuzztones, Silver Apples and Electric Prunes. (And in the case of those last three bands – yes, it is those bands, not three cheekily-stolen band names).

Northern Star Records

I’m in the interesting-yet-unfortunate position of writing this review based on the memory of two listens to a CD which will no longer play for me. So cut me some slack as I do my best up against failing modern technology.

Dirty Little Faces seem, at least on the basis of their press release (which mentions influences such as The Who, The Jam, The Beatles and The Strokes) an uninvitingly straightforward prospect. However, as memory serves me, the two tracks on this single are pleasant enough mod-tinged indie stompers, that might be better received if not promoted through the citing of names so quick to turn off many potential listeners in the holier-than-though indie fraternity. The choppy guitars, uptight vocals and character-led lyrical lines were a pleasant diversion and provided a few minutes of head-nodding satisfaction; but within seconds of the CD ending, Dirty Little Faces had become in my mind just another generic indie guitar band. The quandary in the current musical climate is that there a lot of bands doing a lot of this music with equal competence. Individually they can knock out a good indie disco tune, a good iPod moment to propel you along, but collectively it’s just melodic noise with nothing to define or inspire. Is it a complaint that a lot of bands make serviceable, listenable, yet ultimately unoriginal music? Not really – the complaint is that the more regularly it happens, the more each band seems an uninspired retread of something that went by not ten minutes ago – regardless of merit.

Dirty Little Faces
Fierce Panda

Winners announced:

The Olympus Mons
Morton Valence
Conrad Vingoe
The Dials

Discuss. Best new music in the country?

Half of Glockenspiel, Steve d’Enton, was once the drummer in Quickspace, and his new outfit’s music – as evidenced by this CD – explores similar areas, albeit with wildly different sonic results. A simplistic churn of melodic repetition binds each of the three tracks together, each being distinguished by a particular melodic flavour. Quickspace’s jittery, hypersensitive bounciness is replaced by a gliding, mellow feel, and on ‘Glock one’ a soothingly syncopated beat carries along a floating Seefeel-like electronic drone, punctuated by abstract, echoing glimpses of sound. ‘Glock two’ is altogether more traditional in its melding of mournful guitar lines and blurred, reverbed vocal samples. Godspeed and, perhaps, Explosions in the Sky have already taken this line of music about as far as it can go, and it’s a relief that ‘Glock three’ veers away from it into another relentless-yet-quiet drum-led smear of a tune. This is where hints of a band that is more than the sum if its Krautrock and post-rock influences seem to occur: a reigning in of experimental music that is at once utterly strange and eminently listenable.

Glockenspiel

I’ve just been made aware that the deadline for Fopp’s ‘Award for new music 2006’ has been extended – it is in fact very soon (9 June). Now, I’m not normally a fan of these kind of schemes as they tend to involve hidden payments from, and bad deals for, bands involved. But this one seems pretty good. It’s free to enter, aimed at bands that are out there gigging and recording without a deal, and the winner gets to record for free, to get a free single release that’s distributed to Fopps around the country, and (maybe most importantly) to hang on to the rights of their stuff that’s released. Could be worth a go, it seems…

More info and form here.

In case anybody is in need of a designer (for record sleeves, flyers, posters, websites etc) I’ve just put a load of my work online to see – mostly music-based but some other things in there as well.

www.nineteenpoint.com

Enjoy, and drop me a line if you need a designer to make your things look right nice.

(ps. I’m not trying to go head-to-head with Chris in the design playoffs here… it is a coincidence!)

Flying and Yeah on this CD are reinventions of tracks from The Telescopes’ awesome eponymous album from ’94. They’ve been given the full at-one-with-nature, multi-instrument treatment that reflects the band’s live shows of late; the vaguely recognisable and vaguely audible hints of melody and lyrics from the originals are swathed in rich drones and soothingly tribal rhythms. Sharing the intense depth of sound that is evident in outfits like Sunroof! and Six Organs of Admittance, the 21st century Telescopes have taken that blissful, stoned shoegazer style and smeared it into a naturalistic, anything-goes modern world music. The sounds of making music – scratched strings, random clicks and pops – blend with the music itself to create a whole that is beautiful and precise whilst seeming utterly handmade and fresh. It’s proper ‘head’ music, psychedelic to the core and incredibly rich in content.

The Telescopes
Double Agent

ps. Yes, I am somewhat biased as I have released a Telescopes record myself. However I assure you that my journalistic integrity remains intact.

pps. Relive those blissful, stoned shoegazer days with a selection of classic videos!