It is now officially cold.
This morning a cup of tea froze before I could drink it. A quick visit to the microwave, I was forced to use a hammer and chisel to get into my eleven o’clock banana. Don’t even get us started on the Captain Scott-esque nightmare that is the Clash office toilet.
The worst thing? This is only the start. Soon, the Clash staff will be forced to reside in igloos burning old student guides to keep warm.
Until, then, though we’ve got singles to review. Under the microscope this week are dubstep, Welsh psych-pop, American riffage and a chillwave side project. Yep, a side project in a genre which in all honestly does not exist in the physical sense.
You couldn’t make it up… so we reviewed it.
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Single Of The Week
James Blake – Limit To Your Love
Let’s get this out the way first: James Blake is ‘Single Of The Week’ because ‘Limit To Your Love’ is the best thing out right now. It’s better-produced, better written and just plain better than any other of the releases on this page. However the melancholic side of James Blake doesn’t make him any more thoughtful than, say, Jack Sparrow. The divide between dancefloor and bedroom needs to be demolished, and there’s no better candidate to do that than James Blake. Following on from a series of acclaimed EPs, ‘Limit To Your Love’ is all glitch and piano, making the hairs rise on the back of your neck. Sure, it won’t send a club crowd into a frenzy but music like this was born in, and needs to be heard through, a massive soundsystem. A stunning achievement, ‘Limit To Your Love’ proves that James Blake will be difficult to dismiss in 2011.
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And the rest…
Hjaltalin – Suitcase Man
Bands from Iceland tend to write their own reviews – glacial riffs! Angelic singing! Mighty Viking drum solos! Thank goodness then, for Hjaltalin. Goodness knows what this sounds like. A free jazz take on the Stax legacy? The soulful influences are there, but the element of chance keeps this free of any Duffy comparisons. Taken from their second album ‘Terminal’ the new free download ‘Suitcase Man’ is a blast of joyful absurdism. They might be singing in English, but we defy you to make sense of this.
Gruff Rhys – Shark Ridden Waters
Welcome back one of Britain’s finest songwriters. Oh sure, he might not get the respect he deserves but ol’ Gruff can come round for tea whenever he wants. And we’ll even break out the posh biscuits. ‘Shark Ridden Waters’ is a typically wonderful slice of psych-pop, the sort of thing that Gruff Rhys can churn out before breakfast. In an ideal world, this would soar to number one with its beautiful horn refrain blasting out of radios across the land. Of course, it won’t. What a bloody shame.
Sleigh Bells – Infinity Guitars
God High School was shit. If you’re still there, then it still is shit. A melange of hormones and poor fashion choices, accentuated by teachers who fell into the job because no one else would employ them. ‘Infinity Guitars’ is the sort of trash which would get you three days detention if anyone ever plucked the headphones out of your ears. Three minutes of thrashing guitars, sledgehammer beats and ranting about ‘best friends’ – the sort of thing that makes double Modern Studies fly by.
Les Sins – Lina
Les Sins, or as his mother christened him Toro Y Moi. With chillwave a long lost trending term on Twitter, the producer has decided to up the tempo and introduce a slice of 80s R&B to proceedings. The result is one of his most immediate yet maybe not affecting releases. ‘Lina’ is an instantly catchy track, yet loses the swirling depths the samples on ‘Causers Of This’ benefited from. A worthy experiment.
Jim Jones Revue – Shoot First
Dirty, filthy rock ‘n’ roll is about as welcome as a juicy fart in a packed lift these days. No one told Jim Jones Revue, though, who proceed to blow guitar flavoured raspberries in the face of the mainstream. Outright cheek, the cowboy posing of their new single is what rock ‘n’ roll was built on. Fast becoming the band’s calling card, ‘Shoot First’ gleefully spits in the face of every manufactured trend going.
Kurt Vile – In My Time
Out now as a seven inch, ‘In My Time’ is a stop gap between albums, the sort of thing a songwriter does to tease fans before heading back into the studio. Consider us teased. ‘In My Time’ is like watching a picture of Neil Young curl and melt in flames, like seeing a reflection of Leonard Cohen in a bong. Kurt Vile again takes on some hefty influences, but with a lysergic vision of his own. ‘I am another year older’ he sings. Freewheeling music for a generation with nowhere to go.
