Because I missed last week, here are two excellent covers to round out a full on week. First we have this dark and morose cover of The Cars' 'Double Life' by typically dark and morose LA heathens Cold Showers. It features the Vivian Girls' Katy Goodman lurking in the background, and can be found on the Decay 7" out now through Art Fag - buy it here.
Sarah Chadwick has stepped away from Batrider for a bit to do some solo work - you can hear some other tracks on her Bandcamp - and this cover of Chris Knox's 'One Fell Swoop' is bloody ace. She can do no wrong in my eyes. She is bringing out a release called Eating For Two in August on Brisbane's fine Bedroom Suck label - I'll keep an eye out for that one, as should you.
Ah, coming back to work after a three day weekend like we are here in Australia is tough. So here are some tracks by a few obscure acts (one moreso than the others...) to stall our starting time - after all, we love to waste as much as we can, right?
First we have Danish band Thulebasen. Thulebasen started as an experimental, sketchbook-like solo project for vocalist and lead guitarist Nis Bysted in 2001. Now up to the second release, Gate 5, which came out earlier this year, Bysted is joined by Felia Gram-Hanssen and Niels Kristian Eriksen, and the trio work hard at creating complex yet unified, groovy and melodic takes on relatively traditional rock music, ones that do not suffer from the boundaries of a traditional songwriter’s imagination, but are somewhere between the gutter of social realism and sparkling fantasy. On Gate 5, field recordings from the band’s European tours blend together beautifully with vocals, unpredictable snippets of melody, noisy guitar riffs, catchy synthesizer melodies, pulsating rhythms, hypnotic space-rock grooves and sudden echo effects. 'Monster' is one such track...
Cold Showers are an LA outfit that find themselves linked to Mexican Summer for their first release, the Highlands 7". The video for 'I Don't Mind' is sweet - slightly disturbing, but sweet. They sound unnervingly like Gun Outfit too, with the post punk/slight drone/male-female vocal tradeoff/lots of apathy. Im into it...
AH, I.R.O.K... I.R.O.K. are THE INTERGALACTIC REPUBLIC OF KONGO. They make psychotropic afro-punk, contagious and violent (apparently). Their debut album Yé Yé God Revolution was recorded in East London and in Southern Morocco where the sound was dreamt up by front-man Mike Title (formerly of Dead Kids) when he found himself on the concrete stands of a north African football match. This is the sound of chaos, of ecstasy, of joy and of panic. This is also the weirdest and funniest music video Ive seen in some time...Im not sure if I actually like this song or not, but I certainly cannot stop watching it...
