FTC Discovery # 6: Blood Oranges

Blood Oranges

Blood Oranges are your new favourite girl/boy indie pop band from Leeds, it's a fact! their new single "The French Word for love" is basically a rejection from someone telling you they just wanna be friends, looking back to the first Maccabees album with female backups, its close, its personal and it's from the heart. Blood Oranges succeed for me, out of the two songs I've heard thus far, because like their inspirations Los Campesinos, their songs seem to be written by normal people for normal people, like a visit to the supermarket that seemed like it was going to be perfectly ordinary but seems to be the one that sticks in your head everytime you think of the supermarket.

FTC Discovery Nov # 5: Dead Ghosts

Dead Ghosts

Dead Ghosts are an already influenced Vancouver Garage Rock band... everyone can do garage rock right? sure, but how many can capture the sound and feel of the experimentation and the threat of the times. Dead Ghosts self-titled debut does, with fiddly guitar leads and sixties boy band refrains, like the MC5 stabbing the beach boys to death on the devil's turnpike. Lo-fi sweet guitar jangle pop with a blues tinge, for fans of King Khan, Black Lips and Strange Boys...

FTC Discovery Nov # 4: White Fence

White Fence

White Fence is the side project for Darker My Love man Tim Presley, and if his involvement on DML's excellent album wasn't enough for one year, and an involvement in the also excellent Strange Boys Be Brave album, White Fence released his lo-fi pop self titled debut earlier this year.

The album harks back to the proto-innocence of artists like the byrds or the hollies, taking a road trip with a performance artist tribute to Syd Barrett. It's a sonically structured affair, often sounding like it's going to cave in on itself but using this potential destruction as a abrupt hook or audio reboot.
It's very much of now, a generation of musicians who wished they were lost in the misrepresented sixties summers seeking to find some of the open minded solace in our industrial time. A hell of a debut from a industrious and always excellent (thus far) mind

FTC Discovery Nov # 3 DJ Nate

DJ Nate

DJ Nate is from Chicago, Illnois and creates tracks in time to Jukin' which claims to have it's roots in african dancing, but is in musical genre not too far from Chicago House or Ghettotech. Rhythmic and hypnotising DJ Nate meshs the sub genres of house and rhythm and blues with a complexity that will awe you into a swagger not your own.

For Fans of... Solar Bears, Terror Danjah, Oriol

FTC Discovery Nov # 2: Fantastic Mr Fox

Fantastic Mr Fox

Gutted that Guardian Band of the day just pipped me to the post on this one, also record of the week in DJ Mag cos like James Blake (who championed this guy) Fantastic Mr Fox is a cross genre maniac... Dubstep? Rn'b? Soul? anyone's guess? The Evelyn EP takes handclaps, synth, dense layers of competing vocals and beats which enhances the once simplistic nature of the dubstep template to a classical/digital style orchestra. It must be labourious for Mr Fox, who claimed in the aforementioned article that tracks often require hours of work on single sounds and often hundreds of tracks exist within one. Dubstep's not dead, its merely growing a new body.

For more information check the Guardian article
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/nov/16/new-band-fantastic-mr-fox or

FTC Discovery Nov #1- James Blake

James Blake

James Blake has been around for a while but also no time at all, still in his very early twenties, Blake has already conquered several genres in his previously released EPS, overcoming jazz structure and thick soul with a post- dub step edge, that hawks to the popular genre but also to a more fluid underground garage sound, but Blake's concepts don't need to be defined by genre rules and he's all the better for it. If you like your music mangled and often predictable, you'll appreciate Blake's classical training and ear for the extraordinary.

www.myspace.com/jamesblakeproductio

The Duke Spirit- Kusama EP

The Duke Spirit- Kusama EP 

The Duke Spirit were the first band I ever interviewed in April 2005, just as they were about to take the stage with Brighton's own British Sea Power and I'd heard one song and managed to get through the interview, despite having a pint of coke (accidentally) poured all over me, but since then I've been in love, I've seen them a million times and promoted them a couple... The Kusama EP, leads with single proper Everybody's under your spell (and I'd assume a track from the fortcoming third album) The Duke Spirit formula is kinda simple, soaring feedback enhanced guitars almost battling each other, pounding rhythm section and Liela Moss' soulful howl, if it ain't broke dont fix it... The Duke Spirit merely tweak it, adding in an extra couple of hooks here and there, complicating the percussion, hitting you harder, faster or with more heated emotion, the lead track goes ticks all their boxes, each verse/chorus pounds through with even more alomb, learning from the difficulties of the buzz on cuts across the land, but survived from the desert hiatus of the neptune. Additional tracks "Victory" and "Northbound" also fratinize along the same way, the former a off-kilter sixties group produced by Josh Homme, the latter is more soulful and soothing. As usual, The Duke Spirit build you up into a frenzy, only to save your heart afterwards. 9/10

Girls- Broken Dreams Club

So it's all slowing down in the world of new music, people compiling lists for the end of year polls and looking at bands to put on the all important who's going to be hot shit next year, so let's look a few returns to the world of music...

Girls- Broken Dreams Club 

Girls return with their (is it an EP, is it a 2nd album) Broken Dreams Club which in two words can be described as truly magnificent, the glass eyed wonders return with something that truly opens up their sound to a unbelievable new possi. Opening track "Thee Oh So Protective One" soars with it's brass backing and although cliched this EP takes them from the confided and afraid teenagers of their debut to a lot more self satisfied and less self hating future... as one of the lyrics lullabys "I'm not so young anymore..."  While that may be true, Girls always seemmed like a band with more life experience than their youthful years suggested especially amongst their stories (or lack of) involvement in religious cults. Broken Dreams Club suggests so much more in its seven track thirty minute experience that suggests Girls sound has plenty of maturing and analyzing of itself beyond the fuzz pop confines of it's debut, a "snapshot of the horizon" you say? Can't wait until we get there! It's going be one exciting journey!  10/10