In just under three-minutes, Aurora, the new single from A Grave With No Name does exactly what you want the lead track from a new album to do. It prickles the skin, fucks a little with your senses, then leaves you craving for more. And more is what we’ll get when Whirlpool is released on July 1st via Stare Records.

But for now, all we have is this. Featuring Alanna McArdle (Ides, Joanna Gruesome) on guest vocals, Aurora crawls along on a subtle and focused bassline that feels like it could explode at any second. Anna’s vocals are sure-footed and somewhat mesmerising, bringing a soft beauty to a track that seems to be hiding something sinister beneath the surface. For now we’re happy just admiring it from afar.

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Houses | A Quiet Darkness

Words by Katie Malcolmson

Indie has been saturated with bedroom electronica projects ever since it became glaringly obvious that anybody with an ounce of common sense (not necessarily musicality) and a Mac with Garage Band could knock out a half decent beat and plonk some kind of vague melody on top of it. Upload yr sick tracks to Soundcloud, ask yr friendz to share it on Facebook; “Listen! Like! Share!” and VOILA – you have a bedroom electronica project. Duo Dexter Tortoriello and Megan Messina’s bedroom electronica project goes by the pseudonym Houses – a name that implies something that is sturdy and safe, yet at the same time empty and hollow. The name ‘Homes’ would have evoked warm feelings of comfort and shelter, and substance within, yet the name Houses more accurately reflects the band’s spatial sounding broken beats and quiet, distant vocals – a purposeful sentiment of emptiness lurking below the surface – a house ain’t a home.

Houses’ second album, A Quiet Darkness, is a far cry from the aforementioned plethora of lo-fi bedroom electronica projects that exist purely on the Internet. The real life couple, Tortoriello (also of bands Dawn Golden and Rosy Cross) and Messina have created an album that is both conceptual and interesting, and the result is utterly beautiful. The album follows the story of a married couple separated by a nuclear holocaust and attempting to reunite along California’s Highway 10 before they reach their inevitable deaths, each song set in a different abandoned house along the way. (What a hook, right?!) Not only this, but the pair actually visited abandoned houses along the more desolate stretches of the highway to record the tracks.

The music is as cinematic as the concept, with padded broad synths warming up pretty melodies, ethereal drones and falling piano phrases that are electronically manipulated beautifully – plinking and plonking like raindrops. It could have been an idea blown out of all proportion if the pair was to ham it up in an attempt to sound as ‘epic’ as the concept suggests, but Houses nail it. Here, they’ve gone for a subtle suggestion of the feeling of acceptance and solitariness in the aftermath of the tragedy, paving the way for an accompanying sound that is distant and spatial – a musical backdrop that aids the visualisation of the lyrics.

Sleepy melodies and soft vocal harmonies serve to highlight the isolation, lethargy and lack of hope. Achieving a perfect balance playing with the juxtaposition of sparse yet rich sounding, A Quiet Darkness falls somewhere between Stars, Postal Service and The Notwist (to a lesser extent), and the warm piano and muted beats of ‘Peasants’ is almost reminiscent of Radiohead. The distant guitar in ‘The Beauty Surrounds’ echoes and strengthens the melody whilst ‘Smoke Signals’ swells like a haunting lullaby.

‘The Tired Moon’ is an odd change of pace, with no vocal narrative, but a repetitive hook and spacey drums and percussion. It sits uncomfortably among the other tracks, and the starkness of it breaks up the ambience of the rest of the album a little clumsily.

However, A Quiet Darkness is an excellent sophomore offering, with moments of aching beauty, sorrowfulness, and an eerie ambient calm. The band manages to achieve something that is quite rare in this genre – actual songs with actual melodic vocal hooks, verses and choruses. Soundscapes of synth and electronic beats, melted into live piano, drums and guitars all make for an emotionally moving album.

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This was going to be a Track Of The Day (man, I love those) until I totally couldn’t pick a ‘track’ so instead I take great pleasure in ‘introducing’ you to Burnt Palms. They’re from California, and you can tell. Which is a good thing. The melodies are sunny and you can almost feel scorching sand bouncing off the bass drum…and again, that’s a good thing, even if you hate sand (and I fucking do).

Despite their tendency towards the down-tuned and dynamically simple, this is Riff and Roll music and they really excel at both – you won’t find a jazzy interlude, an operatic allusion or any industrial layer deconstructions here…but you’ll find everything you want and everything you need. Simplicity and authenticity are their charms and songs and swagger are their strengths.

I don’t really want you to listen to me talk…I want you to listen to them Rock (‘Rather Die‘), listen to them perfect the 66 second song (‘Numb One‘), listen to them brood with immaculate harmonies (‘In My Mind‘), listen to them offer the dreamiest vocal cracks in Califor-N-I-A (‘Ghost Love‘)… I just want you to listen to their album. You might even enjoy it.

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Words by Jamie ‘San Fran’ Hallaman.

Sometimes it’s difficult to write about a song when you don’t know anything about the person(s) behind it. That is not the case here, however. Actors comes with very little information, but the music speaks completely for itself. The bio is deliberately cryptic, telling us that “Still Parade is not about a place or a person. It’s an inner state of mind.” Haha! What nonsense, eh! Well, no, actually.

I wanted to laugh at it, but I just can’t. It’s fucking glorious. It makes my head spin, my eyebrows furrow and my chest pound. The meditative vocals, the slow-bounce echo of the drums and that unexpected pedal-steel guitar that creeps its way inside your head to paint pictures of a Summer where days are replaced with moments that stir and linger  and ache and then you realise that all that stuff you said about the song being easy to write about is, essentially, nonsense because you’ve got completely carried away and all you want to do is lie on your bed and look at the maps on your wall and play the song on repeat again, and again, and again, and again…

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“Grim Brides we are Denmark band. We found this internet blog on website and see Bristol doing excellent band at this moment.

you like “fuck noisy music”?, you can feature Grim Brides on you blog site.”

Every now and again you get hit by something so hard that everything else around you disappears into a sea of black stars and white light. This happened to me whilst in a giant owl piñata in Brighton on the weekend after my head was thwacked by a guitar. I was fine, but then relapsed when I returned to find Grim Brides in my inbox two days later.

An apparent female four piece from Denmark (I say apparent after hearing the voices yelping into my ears like testosterone bulged banshees; Knife-like electronic trick or gender curveball?), and have just delivered one of the heaviest tracks of the year. Radio feedback gibberish seeps into drums and bass so thunderous and glitchy that I fear the guitar really did cave my skull in. Talking of guitar, what the hell is going on in the depths of this track I do not know but it sounds gloriously disgusting.

Vocals arrive like a wolf at the door screaming to be let in, before fading into a pleasant breathy melody that lulls us into a brief rest-bite until the call back howl of “JUMP” “GET OUT” pull us right back on to this death train.

I have no real information about the band, bar their names after searching on Facebook (Aksinja Drude is at the top of the list, if that means anything) and their origin. Whoever and whatever they are, it’s going to be difficult to top this as a statement of intent, or as a sonic slap in the tits. Grim Brides, let’s get to know each other a bit more eh?

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GFP Meets… | How To Dress Well

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By Rob Jurewicz and Tom Johnson

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It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that our interview with Tom Krell – better known to us all as How To Dress Well – ended up getting quite heavy. While it wasn’t particularly led there, the chat became about so much more than just the music he makes. Or maybe it didn’t. Maybe all that emotional weight is something that follows you around when you’re the kind of person who takes the often left-behind thoughts that come at us in the night and turns them in to songs to present to the world.

Which I guess is where we, as consumers, come in. What do we get out of it? Why do we feel such a connection upon hearing someone we don’t know, confront their own demons? The answer is a murky one that has something to do with context, escapism and growth, amongst many other things, but it’s true to say that most of us would be a little bit lost without that connection.

The music that How To Dress Well makes has always been about that very link and the grey areas that surround it. It acts as some kind of emotional gateway, the muddiness of his debut record, in particular, somehow provided a startling clarity by which we could examine our own inner-thoughts. Total Loss, on the surface, was a different beast. A far less dense record, it was his voice this time – a startling confessional falsetto, that was brought fully to the fore – that acted as a hand to guide. But guide us, it did.

A few months on from the release of Total Loss, and with a new record already in the works, it was an honour for us to sit down with Tom and discuss just what it means to be How To Dress Well…

I guess we should start by asking how the UK is treating you…

Very, very well. We started in Leeds, headed to the Great Escape and then Glasgow yesterday. It’s been great. We started in Europe ten days ago. The UK is always really good, we always get an amazing reaction over here.

Is there a difference in the reaction over here?

It differs all over the place in various ways. People are really good here. Manchester, weirdly, is one of the best cities in the world for How To Dress Well. We also just played in Latvia to 1100 people which was fucking insane.

You’ve always put yourself ‘out there’ for your live show; do you feel vulnerable doing that? Just you and a backing track?

That was a performance about exposure and vulnerability, but I found that actually just performing with a backing track didn’t really work. People didn’t see it as vulnerable, they saw it as something else. So now we’ve stripped down a lot of the songs. There is still a backing track because I think a live drummer is stupid in the 21st century – unless you play garage rock or whatever – but for me it’s a bit silly having a guy with sticks hit things when any guy with fingers can do it. It’s like using one of those big novelty lighters. Totally preposterous.

The main thing now is the live violin, which is just really beautiful. The voice and the violin play off each other really nicely.

Did the idea of that come from your Just Once EP, when you made the orchestral versions of your tracks?

Yeah absolutely. Actually, the relationship between Just Once and Love Remains is kind of how I see the relationship of between the live show now and the records.

Will there be a Just Once version of Total Loss?

No. Total Loss is done as it is. You already have vibes like that on Talking To You for instance. But the next record, which I’m quite far along on, is very organic and kind of like Just Once; but also pretty weird and noisy. I did Love Remains and Just Once as a project and I think everything I do from now on will be some synthesis of those parts.

When do you think we’ll see a new record?

2014. Hopefully the Winter, maybe February or March. It’s nearly done. I’ve been working with some really talented people…

Can you tell us who?

I can’t really say yet, but people who are into Tim Hecker and stuff like that will be really in to what I’m doing. That kind of zone.

So will it be a big shift in sound for you, do you think?

I guess that depends on your take on what I’ve done so far. If you think that Love Remains and Total Loss make sense coming from one artist then it won’t be a big shift – it’ll just be a new direction. But there are people who listen to Total Loss and can’t even hear songs in Love Remains, so they might think it’s totally new. Really it’s all just an evolution.

The way you use samples has always sounded like a very personal process. How does the process work?

It comes out of my listening habits, which are completely connected to my emotional state. So I’ll be in a vibe and I’ll hear a bit of something and then snip it out and put it in a folder, then revisit it and see if it was worth keeping and then build from there.

You’ve always been seen as a very sincere artist, and your fans seem to react a lot to that. Is it nice to have that kind of relationship with them?

That part for sure, I really love that. But I had a really intense incident with this kid in Berlin recently which made me snap out of a lot of naivety I had about my friends. He requested Suicide Dream 2 and we did it and he was so stoked. Then after the show I went out to the merch to say hi to people and he came over to me and was like “I’m going to go and kill myself now” and…it was just so inappropriate for him to put that on me, for one, and also just so sad that he was there alone and I didn’t know what to do. Does he want me to call the cops? It’s just way too much.

I think that sincerity and openness is really important but nothing I’m doing is immediate. You don’t get to just open your heart and pour your emotions out, you have to do it in really decisive ways. Its about forming bonds not destroying bonds. If you’ve ever been around someone who’s borderline personality disorder, they do this thing where they don’t trust that you’re their friend because you can’t stomach everything they have to give you. But you don’t need every part of it. There are important boundaries. Openness is contingent upon there being really important and certain boundaries. That’s why monogamous love is so interesting because on the one hand it looks like you’re closing down, but it makes possible this openness that’s very difficult to have with a random stranger.

So I’m all about sharing with my fans. It’s amazing. I’ve had really intense emotional experiences with fans that are really cool. This boy was crying at a show in San Diego, and his friend had just passed away, and he was feeling a lot of bliss and elation and also missing his friend and it felt really good. It felt like he was in a good place from this sharing.

Did ever think you would be put in positions like that off the back of making music? It must be bizarre…

It’s super bizarre. I was thinking about it earlier on actually, because I got this message from a fan on the Facebook page, and there was this girl and I remember meeting her in Latvia, and she was like “my friend I was at the concert with just got hit by a car” and she said she was pretty fucked up and that it would mean a lot if I could say hello. So I sent apologies and love and afterwards I was thinking, ‘how weird is this going to get?‘ I would love for it to be responsible and sustainable and have that kind of relationship with people, but I’m just a person at the end of the day, too. Some people think they can burden me with whatever they’re feeling and that can get pretty dark and is kind of selfish on their part.

Why do you think music brings that kind of response out of people?

For me at least, music and my emotional state have always been so connected. I feel like I’ve learned how to be sad by listening to sad music. There was obviously some kind of interchange there, like something in it attracted me to it, but then it gave me this whole vocabulary, not in the sense of words but in the sense of feelings. By which I mean the way the strings move in a songs makes you learn how to feel melancholic…

I make very emotionally-charged music because music has always been about emotional charges for me. I think that’s something very specific to music. Movies obviously have a mood too, but it’s the duration of a film versus a three-minute song. I never feel sad and think “Fuck, I need to throw on some Dardenne brothers!” but I am going to put Grouper on and go for a walk. That’s probably part of  it too; the way that hearing functions as both a passive and active thing. You can’t hold your iPad up and walk around your city. The same with literature. It demands such focused attention that it doesn’t have the same ability to colour the whole field of your experience. That’s probably the metaphysical reason why music has that emotional capacity but why certain people seize on my music, I don’t know…

I guess because it’s coming from such an emotional place in the first place…

Yeah. I’m not that crazy though. I don’t know if you listen to Xiu Xiu much? We’ve become good friends and he gets fucking wild animals, man. People cutting themselves, and injecting shit and he’s just like “I don’t know what they fuck I’m supposed to do with this.”

I do think there’s something wholesome about my music, in the sense that it’s about emotional growth and progress. At the end of the day, even if you go through really cold times…I don’t know. I would just never want anyone’s life to stop unless they were in conditions so intolerable that they probably weren’t able to listen to music. Life is just so precious and rare. It’s about improving life. It’s an emotional or sentimental education, not just destructive emotion. My shit’s more about sublimation, growth, re-organisation, catharsis, stuff like that.

I think that totally comes across too. It’s very therapeutic. If you listen to it in a dark room you can almost see all your emotions around you, because of the atmosphere…

That’s dope. That’s very much the goal for sure.

So who would be the How To Dress Well for you growing up?

That’s a really good question! I mean maybe some more destructive things. Bright Eyes was really important to me in terms of learning what emotional music could be like. I don’t know if you’ve listened to Fevers & Mirrors, but it’s such an amazing record and it’s just fucking sad.

I came out of emo and – this is another way of talking about destructive emotional music – I think I realised that tragedy and excess falls flat. So when someone is like “EURGH, EVERYTHING IS SO FUCKED!” you’re like, ‘Ok, you’re getting some pleasure out of how much pain you’re in’ and all of the tragedy is sucked out of it when you see that. That’s what I learned from Emo. The shit that I listened to when I was 16, man. That’s why my Dad was laughing at me.

Then I guess Grouper was a huge thing for me in terms of ambient music and emotion and introspection. The same with Brian Eno and Tracey Chapman.

So where next for you?

We’re touring for another couple of weeks, then I’ll take some time off in Berlin to do as much recording as possible. Then a small European tour and then just try and grind and get a record finished by October time. Then you have to wait a few months before it can be released, so maybe February/March time for that.

But I’ve got some shit coming out before then, there’s going to be this really cool fan pack for Total Loss with this bound-book and a t-shirt. The design is fucking amazing. It’ll all come soon enough…

howtodresswell.com/

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Islet | Triangulation Station

Words by Rosie Ramsden

Latest single from Islet, ‘Triangulation Station’, from upcoming album Released By The Movement, is almost-six-minutes of loaded post-punk guitar loops, near-infinite vocal layering, and wondrous Welsh psychedelic pop euphoria. The track, recorded by Stephen Black (AKA Sweet Baboo), will be released on band member Mark Thomas’s own Shape Records label, on limited 12” vinyl and download. The adventurous single will come with with three additional exclusive tracks: new Islet track ‘Inlet’, a woozy drone remix of ‘Triangulation Station’ by Welsh musician/producer R. Seiliog and Islet’s remix of I Chi by the Danish band Pinkunoizu. What a kaleidoscopic four-track treat indeed.

But now for the nitty-gritty of ‘Triangulation Station’; this single supplies us with constant surprises throughout, and can only be described as an unpredictable, other-worldly medley of noisy, synth-laden vividness. Characteristically, the Cardiff quartet have not played it safe, and this bold and exploratory single, with its influx of pulsing drums, unobtrusive guitar-based melodies and intrepid vocal stylings, perfectly embodies this. The vocals on this track, and more significantly the focused drone of singer Mark Thomas, who croons uniquely idiosyncratic lines such as ‘there’s horses on their tale, horses on their tale, horses on their tale, but they’re wild wild wild,’ are truly the twisted focal point of the single. The chorus, which sees the synchronization of Mark Thomas and Emma Daman, advertises the heart of the song as a revival of the natural, and furthermore, shows through both its lyricism and its boundary-breaking musicality, Islet’s distinctive foundation of DIY ethics and ideology.

So sit back, relax, and be prepared to fall into an Islet induced musical coma. You know, the good kind, full of hallucination and motley exaltation.

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Alright The Captain | Conversational Skills for the Socially Anxious

Words by Mark Robinson

The superbly titled (and appropriately named) new EP/album/mathrockart collage by Derby trio Alright the Captain is nothing short of ridiculous. Conversational Skills for the Socially Anxious is a perfect encapsulation of the band’s relentless touring schedule, with the album recorded live to give an accurate representation of the ferocious sound.

Let’s get the cliché’s done and dusted; if you enjoy Primus/Oceansize or even Rush, you will like or at least appreciate what Alright the Captain do. If you don’t, well go and listen to Peace, you utter pansy.

The trio offers up a relentless slice of math-core, filled with all the typical musical breakdowns, time signature massacres and outer space-size riffs you would expect of the genre. The band keep this all up without the need for a vocalist, whether this is a stylistic choice or not being able to find a vocalist mentally distressed enough to sing along is up for debate.

There’s no point singling out any of the five songs on offer here, because that’s not the point of this type of record. It’s a cohesive mess of ideas, and unlike the Primus reference made earlier: it’s not a showcase for one particular musician. Todd Wood sounds monstrous on bass, but it plays off the post-rock, spacegaze (that’s a genre, right?) style of Marty Toner. And Ash West-Mullen keeps it all locked up with some excellent technical drumming (check out opener ‘Bolognese Holiday’ – and yes, the song titles are silly).

Clocking in at around sixteen minutes, Alright the Captain arrive, raise hell, leave. Recommended.

Buy it here.

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Nostalgia can be a terrible thing, but we’re all grateful for a dose of it every once in a while. Gallant is a 21 year-old, New York-based artist who’s music harks back to the glory days of the mid-nineties, when pop/r’n'b crossovers were storming every chart everywhere. Thankfully though there’s something in his delivery and production that makes new track Please? (Vignette) sound beautifully fresh.

The smooth-as-silk falsetto vocals are show-stopping, and they’re the perfect match for the blissful ambience of the instrumentation that bubbles along on twinkling keys and crisp percussive beats. Please? (Vignette) is the first release from Gallants Zebra EP and it’s available as a free download; grab it below.

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Time to champion a champion, so to speak. Champion Sound Records to be more precise. The Belfast-based label have been absolutely killing it with their recent releases. Home to Ryan Vail – who made this delicious mix for us last week – and a handful of other great artists, they’ve upped their game again on latest release, I Cry.

Featuring Gemma Dunleavy on (rather stunning) lead vocals, I Cry is the lead track from Unknown’s new EP of the same name, and is a hypnotic mix of fractured beats, icy atmospheric synths and a dark and intense atmosphere that ripples throughout. We’re absolutely hooked on this; listen to it below:

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