In an effort to continually seduce your ears, Clash has rounded up the cream of the music that is written about in it's August issue and slapped it on a download album.
It’s as varied as every band selected for our precious pages, so download it now, fire up your pod and read on...
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Bombay Bicycle Club
'Always Like This (James Rutlidge remix)’
It’s been a patient wait for this North London quartet but Clash is quite satisfied that it’s been worth it. Having the small issue of an unfinished school education whilst trying to record your debut album is an irritation but thankfully for our lobes and lugs BBC are now officially school leavers and their debut album has been soaked up in all the right places. After Jim Abiss (producer to Arctic Monkeys) personally requested that he work with these young lads, you can expect to start expecting.
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Broken Records
‘Good Reasons’
The Scottish Arcade Fire? Fuck right off NME. Take your lazy comparisons and shove ’em up yer dwindling readership’s u-bend. Broken Records indeed love strings though; fiddles and cellos combine raucously to bleed tartan claret all over their hands, meaning their frantically fretted songs are covered in the blooded fingerprints of Macbeth and restless Caledonian soul. ‘Good Reasons’ is perhaps their most colourful ode to their homeland, spraying around blasts of guitar, their folky strings and a healthy dose of their accordion.
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Slow Club
‘Wild Blue Milk’
Few bands in 2009 have impressed us live as much as Charles and Rebecca. Their alternative folk, skiffle ripped songs have more nuance than Agatha Christie’s entire back catalogue of blade twisting mysteries yet peddle more innocence than a penny farthing. To put it simply their pace and tone captivates. They may not be thrashing their guitars nor leaping from amp stacks but rock’s canon demands variation and this is exactly what Slow Club deliver so sveltely. We want membership cards!
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Bibio
‘Ambivalence Avenue’
This young sampladelic artist is the sonic equivalent of doing yoga in your local forest. Obsessively gleaned fragments of sound recorded in the great outdoors are layered and set upon one another to bring out the best features and aspects of one another. Kinda like dry stonewalling but without the vagaries of rocks. The result is a meditative wall of gentle sound that thrums, brushes, surfs and strokes its way into your life.
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Jay Haze
‘Dangerous Bite’
Jay Haze has been ruffling features and peering in bins in his adopted home of Berlin now for a number of years. He keeps himself incredibly busy as owner, A+R and principal DJ of numerous record labels that include Tuning Spork and Contexterrior. He’s a man of the dub cloth yet this basis is stretched to breaking point across all dance genres. With ‘Dangerous Bite’ his much-loved melancholic tendencies are pushed to the fore in a jacking and crunchy aerial dance attack.
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DJ Food
‘All Covered In Darkness Parts 1 & 2’
Tricky one this. Never really the same person, the DJ Food project has been rumbling since 1992 when it was conceived by Strictly Kev to feed DJs with tools to DJ. Various people have produced and performed under this umbrella moniker such as Paul Brook, Paul Rabiger and Issac Elliston. More recently it’s Strictly Kev that’s been strictly DJ Food, and this track comprises the first wave of material for about nine years. And there’s a lot of it: over seven minutes. So get munchin’.
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King Cannibal
‘Virgo ft. Face-A-Face’
Thank the river Styx for King Cannibal: a one-man merry-go-round of dark dancehall and slithering bass. Having recorded under the name ZILLA for the last period of years, Dylan Richards now prefers the tastier King Cannibal name as he marks out his primal territory of dancehall and dubstep. Here, ‘Virgo ft. Face-A-Face’ could easily be a lost MIA vocal session with King Tubby and Laurent Garnier on the sliders.
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Major Lazer
‘Lazer Boom 1 (Diplo Album Mix)’
If you have ADD then listen to this track. It’s an entire digest of Switch and Diplo’s new dancehall album, ‘Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do’. All fifteen-odd tracks crammed into three minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Bam! Though if you didn’t know this you’d just think it was a crazy Jamaican record. Of which there are a ceaseless amount. Check this issue’s profile for the full story on the mental creation of the album - a tale of twenty-five singers, weird noises and stab threats. Jah!
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Friendship
‘Graveyard Shift’
This cheeky signing are an amazing addition to Too Pure’s Singles Club, and their arresting juxtaposition between acerbic and colourful guitars and murky, warped drums and vocals are gonna rob the spots of fans of Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective. They also made a fucking tremendous video, which we heartily recommend you watch. People ask you to watch videos all the time and loads of the time we ignore them. ‘Graveyard Shift’ however is a glistening example of something your retinas should stretch to.
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Double Dagger
‘The Lie / The Truth’
Baltimore’s latest new band, Double Dagger, are a trio that are all angles and screams; their music is skeletal rock with enough brusque whips of a pedal-ridden guitar to please fans of Shellac and Les Savy Fav. Yet before you think their name is an ode to some black crafted quasi-religious rock cult, these dudes are actually designers, and daggers have a deep, deep history in the genealogy of fonts and typeset. So there. Why they want two though is beyond the bounds of our Baltimore-based intelligence mole.
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Kasms
‘Male Bonding’
Self-proclaimed overlords of ‘shriekbeat’, Kasms are a live phenomenon not being held back by the vagaries of studio pedant nor by the fact that one of their numbers used to be in Test Icicles. Kasms are all about the cuff. And being right off it. All their recordings are slashed onto reel-to-reel tape and mastered roughly in their studio instantly. Deathrock is their vibe in reality: fast, loose, distorted and collapsing under its own energy. Oh and their singer Rachel loves nothing more than attacking the audience during their sets.
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Tortoise
Prepare Your Coffin
Disregarding convention, Tortoise take a chainsaw to rock ‘n’ roll by chopping in dub, electronica, ambient, jazz and anything else that’s not permitted in the handbook of ‘How To Bore’. ‘Prepare Your Coffin’ perhaps sums them up as well as their new album can: urgently cinematic traversings with sublime rhythm section interplay between guitar and keys as they segue in and out of distinctive 1970s themed adventures. Where’s that fucking hare now, eh?
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