Slushy Guts

Slushy Guts is the musical alter ego of one Stephen Keane, who also operates as a well-known artist & illustrator under his Chaos Vs Cosmos moniker. Armed with a only guitar, a dinky keyboard and a furrowed brow, his music is the sound of late nights and early mornings; stripped-bare 4-track bedroom recordings made in the gray dawn light. It’s introspective, wry, poetic stuff not unlike that of Mark Kozelek or Mt Eerie, albeit a beyond lo-fi version, with the guitar playing tape-hiss bringing to mind early John Fahey.

Slushy Guts has released a series of very limited homemade CD-Rs, all illustrated beautifully, of course. After shows warming up for Idiot Glee and Future Islands, he’s becoming a regular presence on the LDN live circuit, so you should have plenty of chances to catch the live show over the coming months. Make sure you wrap up warm – this is a pretty cold place to be.

Slushy Guts play The Others (6/8 Manor Rd) 18 November with Hounds of Hate and Girl Mountain

The Hundred in the Hands

Brooklyn based duo Eleanore Everdell and Jason Friedman, otherwise known as The Hundred in The Hands, released their eponymous debut album recently despite starting to brew their uniquely understated brand of shoegaze infused electro-pop just over a year ago. Having previously worked together under the guise of The Boggs, Everdell and Friedman bonded as they began playing one another French techno, post-punk and vintage hip-hop tracks in a van as they toured across America.

Writing together and recorded between home, studio, London and New York, they’ve produced a subtly eclectic collection of strikingly self-assured and sleek, brooding disco numbers. “We keep our eyes and ears open absorbing the lessons of the pop classics, folding the present into the past toward the future to create dub histories; avant-pop split between the austere and feverish,” they say. Sitting somewhere between The School of Seven Bells and Tom Tom Club, Everdell’s menacing vocals combine with a simple pop sensibility to great effect – you can experience it first hand as they head out on a UK tour at the end of the month, in support of their Warp labelmates !!!

The Hundred in the Hands play KoKo 4 November with !!!

Gold Blood

One of the bands playing at a gig I worked at last week include on their Myspace page no less than fifteen bands they believe they share musical elements with. In truth they shared more than a passing resemblance with only one of them – the most insipid and least revolutionary on the list. When Gold Blood are compared to classic acts, the names usually come from one of two polar opposites – either Italo disco/dense electronic music or balls-out old-school hardcore punk bands. And unlike the Beach Boys/Kool and the Gang/Pink Floyd/Duran Duran wannabes, this prospect is something to really buy into.

Gold Blood is a two-way collaboration between Michael Anthony Wright, a self-professed keyboard nerd, and Emile Bojesen, a hyperactive vocalist with more experience in screamo bands than anything else. The two somehow meet in the middle with little compromise. At their astonishing live shows, Michael is hunched at the keys making death eyes to anyone and everyone while Emile penetrates the front row, flailing wildly in time with his yelps – it’s as intense as any Holy Roar band and as danceable as any Kitsuné project.

When he’s not endangering the crowd’s health & safety, Bojesen is a university lecturer – another good example of the contradiction and wonderment at play within Gold Blood.

Gold Blood play 93 Feet East 8 October

Surfer Blood

Surfer Blood are five young men from Miami Beach, Florida. Despite a healthy distaste for drum ‘n’ bass, they met at an Ultra Festival after-party in Miami and decided to get together and polish up a couple of songs. Less than two years later, we’re presented with their debut album Astro Coast – a strikingly well made record melding together elements of powerful psych, robust surf and shimmering shoegaze into a delectable echoey brew. The album obviously caught the public imagination over in the USA, making an appearance in the lower reaches of the Billboard chart. Since then, Surfer Blood has been sweeping across the UK, picking up a slot at Koko, selling out the Lexington, and launching into a support tour with Interpol this October for their first taste of the big stage. Live, they’re an endearing gang of young friends, goofing about and laughing when one of the others pulls a tentative rock star shape. But with such a mature sensibility and a knack for catchy melodies, we’ll be seeing a lot more from Surfer Blood.

Sam Amidon

Moving to New York City to rebel against the folk music he and his family had played together since he was a toddler didn’t really work out for Sam Amidon. While he’d intended to get into indie rock and free jazz, he found that the hipster kids were all playing the same American folk songs he’d been trying to leave behind. And what a rich vein of music to mine: murder ballads, tragic tales and love songs played and learned and passed on based solely on merit, with the best and most memorable surviving to the present day. Amidon puts his own spin on them of course, interspersing the tracks with surreal improvised stories and sometimes destroying delicate tracks with noisy jams, guitar solos and strange physical tics and dances, not unlike UK folk experimentalist David Thomas Broughton. His latest album and career high I See A Sign collects nine such standards and one beautiful reworking of a trite R. Kelly track, showing Amidon can turn his hand to other types of music too. It was apparently recorded in just two hours at the Greenhouse Studio in Iceland, with arrangements by the white-hot talents of Nico Muhly and Valgeir Sigurðsson providing a mouth-watering cherry on the cake.

Tennis

Tennis’s story appears too perfect to be true. Alaina Moore and Patrick Riley set their disposable income aside for six months until they had enough to buy a yacht and sustain themselves on a private adventure. They climbed aboard their ‘Swift Ranger’ and sailed on a rough course along the east coast of the Americas, taking in destinations which would come to provide emotional source material for their music. “One day we were in a bar in the Florida Keys and ‘Baby It’s You’ by the Shirelles came on. We’d never heard it before, but we loved the wall-of-sound thing, and decided right then that we’d try to create that when we got back.” Having sold their instruments to help fund the voyage, they went about reacquiring enough to flesh out their dreams. Each song that came out of the voyage was named after a different stop-off point – ‘Marathon’ (Florida), ‘Baltimore’ and ‘South Carolina’ make up their first seven-inch, paddling in perfect surf-pop melodies with shimmering backing vocals and sharp focus. On meeting dry land again, our two lovers were wed and on listening to these tracks, it’s obvious why.

SLEEP∞OVER

Y’know in Eternal Sunshine when the old house on the beach at Montauk buckles beneath the reverse suck of destroyed memories? sleep∞over are the aftermath of that; their cooing lost beneath thick layers of dust-laden, trembling synths and a gloaming choir of howling fantods. Some might call it “witch house” or “haunted house” – the inference to Beach House is certainly warranted – but sleep∞over are just “interested in creating a thick sound,” according to Stefanie, Christa and Sarah. From the dark dreaminess arises the odd unexpected clanks or howls, which Stefanie puts down to home recording accidents.

“We did most of it live and ended up with only one room mic working. We’re slightly technophobe. Modern studio recording can sound soulless. Something feels comfortable and personal about a home recording—and we started because we’re friends, and everyone should play music with their friends.” This ethos has served the fledgling band well, releasing their first single, ‘Outer Limits’ on Gorilla vs Bear’s Forest Family label. “They were nice, so we did it,” says Stefanie as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

And what about the infinity sign in the middle of your name?
“That’s how long we want to be your friend.”

Meursault

With his band tagged as downbeat and introspective, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Meursault main man Neil Pennycook might be something of a sourpuss. Not so, it seems. “I’m quite chipper actually,” he says merrily down a crackly line from Glasgow, where he’s recording with a pal. “People assume because of my voice and the way I sing that I’m somehow in pain or tortured, but if you listen to the lyrics, they’re not always that dark.” Not always, but often. Debut LP Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues is a brilliantly brooding and cheerless ride of gloomy rumination that earned comparisons with Arcade Fire and introduced the world beyond their Edinburgh garden to an epic landscape of folky multi-instrumentation and precise and measured bleeps and bangs.
Recently released follow-up All Creatures Will Make Merry sticks to the script, cranking up the ambition and the joy (“There’s even a love song on it!”) while remaining faithful to their lo-fi upbringing in a swathe of beats, noodles, strums and howls. As with their previous effort, the latest long-player comes courtesy of Scottish indie Song, By Toad. “It’s the perfect place for us to be right now,” reckons Pennycook. “They’ve used the template of labels like Fence and Chemikal Underground, and everything works. There’s no reason for us to want to be anywhere else.” And the dark tag? “Drowned in Sound called us “a troubled mind or six”. I’m not sure I want my mum to read that! I don’t want her asking me if I’m disturbed.”

School Of Seven Bells

The School Of Seven Bells may or may not be a real place; it’s the name of a mythical Columbian pickpocket academy. It sounds like a setting Hayao Miyazaki might dream up for one of his fantastical animations; or indeed, one of the lucid dreams of Alejandra Deheza, who along with ex-Secret Machine Benjamin Curtis and her identical twin sister Claudia, forms The School of Seven Bells.

Their new album is a textured sonic tapestry, curiously entitled ‘Disconnect From Desire’. “The album’s title is actually an ‘oblique strategy’,” explains Deheza. “It’s from a set of cards Brian Eno created. Each card has a kind of creative solution on it. I pulled this card that said “disconnect from desire”, and it happened to resonate like crazy with everything I was writing.”

This kind of gentle mysticism seems to run through School Of Seven Bells, right from the name through their approach, the shoegaze production values and semi-abstract lyrics. “It’s part of our daily lives so it has to come out that way,” Deheza elaborates. “If something resonates with us or inspires us to do something new then we pay attention to it.”

The School Of Seven Bells may or may not be a real place, but this band have created an immersive synthesis of their ideas and influences that’s every bit as intriguing.