Morten Myklebust Plays London Tonight
Fans of Nordic music will be flooding down (no pun intended) to the Old St Pancras Church this evening for a first glimpse of Morten Myklebust, a hotly-tipped emerging artist. He’s apparently been working behind the scenes with Norway’s best and brightest for several years now, and if the rather beautiful track below is anything to go by, his self-titled debut album will see him doing justice to his talents as a newly-fledged solo artist. Lost hovers between Kings Of Convenience and Elliot Smith perhaps, at once soothing and sad.
26 Nov 2012
MPFree: What Is Wild (ft Foil) by The Deuces Wild
We love a one-liner here at Snipe. Technically the one-line song is more of a chant: the way to do it, as demonstrated superbly by today’s MPFree, is to surround the pivotal phrase with fast moving, quickly evolving musical textures so the listener never gets board. Here, all round Swedish creative type The Deuces Wild craftily sandwiches a mid-section of pure, farting-synth power between two smoky, jazzy bookends, so when that mid-section comes in, the effect is breathtaking and the vocals take on a whole new dimension.
What Is Wild is taken from The Feel EP, available through Expansions Collective.
15 Nov 2012
MPFree: Don't Go Alone by Cruiser
It’s difficult to dislike music this upbeat and positive. Philadelphia’s Cruiser present as a spikier Wild Nothing or Real Estate; they’re seemingly in possession of a similarly innate ear for melody. Currently the band, fronted by Andy States, have a limited edition pink 7” available through Company Ink Records, or you can download the Cruiser EP – produced by Jeremy Park (Youth Lagoon) – here.
13 Nov 2012
Yer Boots by Ghost Carriage Phantoms
For Prince, author of The Bangles’ mega-hit Manic Monday, Sunday was his fun-day. He is now, however, a Jehovah’s Witness and Sunday is no longer a time for messin’. Well here at Snipe – and beware, this link is award-winningly tenuous – Friday is our fun-day. Thus, today’s MPFree is a really cool little track from Ghost Carriage Phantoms, aka Merthyr Tydfil born songwriter Michael James Hall and producer Mark Estall. This is pure bedroom pop with a satisfying Casio keyboard line running through it like the name of a seaside town through a stick of rock. Debut album The Boy Lives – out now on Marketstall Records – draws predictable but accurate comparisons with the likes of Euros Childs and Gruff Rhys, though Hall does slip in touches of Perfume Genius and Badly Drawn Boy.
09 Nov 2012
I Can't Talk About It by His Clancyness
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The excellently named His Clancyness is Ottowa born, Bologna based songwriter Jonathan Clancy. He’s previously worked with the likes of Vivian Girls and Woods and has just put out a rather lovely cover of El Perro Del Mar’s I Can’t Talk About It, below. His debut album proper is due in 2013 (Always Mist, a collection of earlier bedroom recordings has just been remastered and re-released by Norwegian label Splendour); there are also shows this coming Saturday (Nov 10) at Electrowerkz and Monday (Nov 12) at the nearby Rattlesnake.
07 Nov 2012
MPFree: The Angel of The North by Tom Hickox
Perhaps unsurprisingly, North Londoner Tom Hickox has recently been snapped up by Richard Hawley’s management team – vocally the two share some common ground (Hawley also plays on Hickox’s forthcoming debut LP, pencilled in for a 2013 release), but there’s more than a hint of Anthony Hegarty’s quivering vibrato in Tom’s baritone too. The son of a Grammy winning conductor and an orchestral timpanist, Hickox spent much of his early adolescence immersed in the works of Beckett and The Angry Young Men, rejecting music completely, before a serious illness – and a subsequent period of recuperation – forced him to re-evaluate.
30 Oct 2012
MPFree: Fog of War (Baio remix) by Young Dreams
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After quietly and murderously seething for months over the current state of remixing – on the whole, mind-numbingly unadventurous tosh, knocked out in under an hour, masquerading as some sort of gift to fans in the form of a free download to avoid actually giving away any of the good stuff – we seem to be on something of a roll, kick-started by LIARS’ brutal reworking of The Twilight Sad’s NIL last month (which today’s MPFree bears more than a passing resemblance to).
Here Chris Baio (Vampire Weekend/Greco-Roman) gives Young Dreams’ (pictured) not unpleasant recent single the laid back disco treatment, furnishing it with pleasing dub flourishes. The Norwegians are supporting psych band of the moment Tame Impala currently; catch them at the Brixton Academy, October 30.
26 Oct 2012
MPFree: Zero Sum by Alec Gross
Let’s ease ourselves into the week with a little help from New York folky Alec Gross. Simplicity is key here – a Ryan Adams-esque vocal is accompanied by nothing more than a guitar and a mandolin, but the sound fills the speakers like a rush of air into a vacuum; anything more, you feel, would be superfluous. His Sorry Sorry Sun EP is out now and available here.
22 Oct 2012
Soul Love (David Bowie cover) by Austra & CFCF
In celebration of their 10th Anniversary Concert Series, the ever-dependable Paper Bag Records have put together a compilation of their own artists’ take on David Bowie’s 1972 masterpiece The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, itself celebrating something of a milestone in 2012. Download Austra (pictured) and CFCF’s dreamy version of Soul Love below; the whole album is available free here. Last year the Canadian label released a similar treatment of another pop classic, Madonna’s True Blue, described by Snipe’s Vancouver-born publisher thus: ‘this couldn’t be more Canadian if it was drowned in maple syrup and rammed up the arse of a polar bear’.
27 Sep 2012
NIL (Liars remix) by The Twilight Sad
Drowned in Sound posted a gushing piece about this track a couple of weeks back and it really is as good as they say it is. I haven’t heard the original but from what little I know of The Twilight Sad (pictured) I bet it didn’t sound anything like the astonishing disco monster streaming below. Involuntary rave faces all round, right? You can download the track for free via The Twilight Sad’s Facebook page; catch them live at Dingwalls October 23. The album, from which it is taken, No One Can Ever Know – The Remixes, is out November 5 on Brighton’s Fat Cat Records.
25 Sep 2012
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- The best church names in London, and where they come from
- Margaret Thatcher statue rejected by public
- Punk brewery just as sexist and homophobic as the industry they rail against
- The five best places in London to have an epiphany
- Nice Interactive timeline lets you follow Londoners' historic fight against racism
- Nice map of London's fruit trees shows you where to pick free food
- Hope and despair in Woolwich town centre
- Random Interview: Eileen Conn, co-ordinator of Peckham Vision
- Could red kites be London's next big nature success story?
- Diary of the shy Londoner
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