Music

New Bands: The Lovely Eggs, Tall Stories, Sacred Harp

Snipe Music Team | Tuesday 8 November, 2011 23:26

The Lovely Eggs

When legendary music hack Everett True (an early champion of Nirvana and Daniel Johnson) calls your band ‘fucking brilliant’, you’re allowed to feel quietly confident. Not ones to rest on their laurels, Lancaster duo The Lovely Eggs have since then put in the graft. Having just toured with Art Brut and Ganglians, they’re on the road again this month, before hitting the Lexington in London on December 1st with cult hero Jad Fair. Fraternising with indie colonies seems to be a habit of theirs: following their recent single and ode to OCD ‘Panic Plants’, the Eggs release ‘Allergies’, produced by Gruff Rhys of Super Furry Animals, which comes out via the Too Pure Singles Club next month; they even roped in punk veteran and comedy genius John Shuttleworth to appear in the video for last single ‘Don’t Look At Me, (I Don’t Like It) – as the man with the sausage roll thumb. For anyone not yet turned on to the Eggs madcap artrock-punk-riot grrl-pop, both their records and live shows (rife with northern working man’s club anecdotal humour), can’t be recommended enough. www.thelovelyeggs.co.uk

Don’t Look At Me (I Don’t Like It) by thelovelyeggs

Tall Stories

Tall Stories are a new London-based outfit making a fizzing, joyous racket that sets whirring loads of little cogs and joins and gems of music history, but manages to sound as fresh as a daisy; albeit a daisy that has been brought up a steady diet of high-powered plant food, as per the chorus of their soon-to-be-a-live-favourite “Miracle Grow”. Band leader Rob McCabe’s masterful pop songs are short, hyper-catchy blasts of sardonic but warmly human urban indie-rock ‘n’ roll, underscored by bleeping keyboards and crossed through with scrawls of guitar. The lyrics are about everyday life—East London tales of excess and distress told with one eyebrow archly raised. Think Hefner if Hayman had put away his seven inch collection, split up with his tweecore girlfriend, boshed a wrap of mysterious powder and gone down to band practice with a cob on.

These are punchy, perfect pop songs that bands like Buzzcocks, Violent Femmes and, more recently, The Wave Pictures would be proud to have written. Get in early on this one – look up their next show at www.tallstoriesband.co.uk.

Miracle Grow by Tall Stories

Sacred Harp

Sometimes you put a CD in the stereo and hear something so strange, new and surprising that it just knocks you for six. It’s the moment that keeps music journalists and music lovers going, amidst the rising tide of shoddy demos, unjustly hyped and commercially motivated landfill indie bands, and unfinished but already-signed East London acts that are thrust into the limelight mid-germination. Something well constructed, artistically balanced and generally fully fledged landing in your lap is something to look forward to.

So it is with Sacred Harp. They started out as an improv trio in Oslo, but felt the project subtly tugging in another direction, and yielded to the natural progression of bringing in a drummer to apply firmer structure to their dizzyingly inventive compositions. The result mutated into something brilliant – hard to pin down, with elements of indie-rock, drone, jazz, prog-rock and proto-feminist poetry from vocalist Jessica Sligter; Sacred Harp’s sound is like everything and nothing, full of precise atonality and opposed jarring and dreamy melodies. The debut album, “Window’s A Fall”, is out on December 5th, and UK dates are promised. www.brainloverecords.com/sacredharp

Sacred Harp – Found In The Open Country (The Underlying Deep Structure) by brainlove

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