News – Kids Love Lies, Manic Street Preachers, Kasabian, La Roux , We Were Promised Jetpacks, Levelload, Sound Of Guns and The Trouble with James Allan
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SINGLE LAUNCH 8TH APRIL @ THE LEXINGTON!
The ‘Power-Pop’ quintet play @ The Lexington in light of their new single ‘Count In My Head’ released 13th April on Cherryade records. Frontwoman Ellen writhes around on stage with the same gusto as Karen O whilst Leigh Harrison, Claudia Mansaray, Matty Saywell and Raf Singer play frenetic post punk.
‘Count In My Head’ refers to the Brit post punk scene and is a short, catchy jagged pop song that sounds like the Noisettes covering Sleater Kinney with Jemima Be Your Own Pet on vocals. Ellen melodically yips about a broken relationship and being tired of the constant fight “Only said what you want me to say, only did what you want me to do”. Other songs featured on the single are the girly angst ridden “Fight Face” and an acoustic mix of ‘Perfection’ which is a tirade against social climbers and name droppers!
Check out their amazing video (made up of 3,500photostills )
Kids Love Lies – Count In My Head
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phOBihQUHQo]
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Manic Street Preachers
Album ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’
18th May 2009
Columbia Records
Manic Street Preachers return this year with their ninth studio album, ‘Journal For Plague Lovers’ released on May 18th on Columbia Records.
Produced by Steve Albini and recorded live at Rockfield Studios in Wales during the Winter of 2008, the album features lyrics left behind by former guitarist Richey Edwards across all 13 new tracks. An original piece of Jenny Saville’s art is the cover of ‘Journal for Plague Lovers’, whose painting graced the cover of 1994’s ‘The Holy Bible’.
Nicky Wire said of the decision to use Richey’s words after all this time, “The brilliance and intelligence of the lyrics dictated that we had to finally use them. The use of language is stunning and topics include The Grande Odalisque by Ingres, Marlon Brando, Giant Haystacks, celebrity, consumerism and dysmorphia, all reiterating the genius and intellect of Richard James Edwards”.
Musically the band draw on their classic Holy Bible sound with elements of Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’, as well as a delicate, acoustic side.
Track-listing for Journal For Plague Lovers:
‘Peeled Apples’
‘Jackie Collins Existential Question Time’
‘Me & Stephen Hawking’
‘This Joke Sport Severed’
‘Journal For Plague Lovers’
‘She Bathed Herself In A Bath Of Bleach’
‘Facing Page: Top Left’
‘Marlon J.D.’
‘Doors Closing Slowly’
‘All Is Vanity’
‘Pretension/Repulsion’
‘Virginia State Epileptic Colony’
‘William’s Last Words’
A UK tour will be announced shortly.
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FREE KASABIAN TRACK
On Tuesday 31st March, Kasabian will release their new track Vlad The Impaler as a free download from Kasabian.co.uk. It’ll be available until midnight on 3rd April.
The single is taken from their forthcoming album West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum, out 8th June.
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LA ROUX
Spotify Session live at YOYO
The red haired one has teamed up with the digital service of the moment to release the La Roux – Spotify Session live at YOYO. In a first for the service, three tracks recorded during La Roux’s oversubscribed four-week residency at YOYO are available exclusively to Spotify premium users . The session features tracks from La Roux’s forthcoming debut album, due out in the summer, including both singles released so far, Quicksand and In For Kill, alongside live favourite Tigerlily. The session will be made available to all Spotify users from 3 April.
Free download bundle
Meanwhile, the original studio version of Quicksand is available to download free from LaRoux.co.uk for a limited time. The track is being paired with the demo version of Fascination as an exclusive digital bundle available only from the official site.
NME Radar Tour + US dates
La Roux has been announced as the headline act on the NME Radar tour with support from Heartbreak, Magistrates and The Chapman Family. The tour which has famously given a leg up to the likes of Crystal Castles, White Lies and Friendly Fires, will kick off in Nottingham on 29 April ending with a grand finale at London’s Koko on 19 May. Before then, they will play a handful of dates in the US . Head to LaRoux.co.uk for the tour dates in full.
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We Were Promised Jetpacks
‘Quiet Little Voices’ – 7″/DL out May 4th
‘These Four Walls’ – CD/DL out June 15th
Listen: www.myspace.com/wewerepromisedjetpacks
Single: www.indian.co.uk/jetpacks/quietlittlevoices.mp3
Dates:
15 Apr – Scala, London (supporting Frightened Rabbit – SOLD OUT)
30 Apr – Hinterland Festival, Glasgow
1 May – Hinterland Festival, Glasgow
14 May – Water Margin, Brighton (FatCat Showcase – Great Escape Festival)
15 May – DrownedinSound Stage, Brighton (Great Escape Festival)
09 Jun – Cabaret Voltaire, Edinburgh
10 Jun – Doghouse, Dundee
15 Jun – King Tuts, Glasgow
16 Jun – Night & Day, Manchester
17 Jun – Bodega, Nottingham
18 Jun – The Lexington, London
19 Jun – The Cockpit, Leeds
20 Jun – The End, Newcastle
We Were Promised Jetpacks’ ‘Quiet Little Voices’ represents the lead-up to a debut album that is already highly touted, several months before release. The band’s youthful energy (their average age is 21) explodes thunderously as ‘Quiet Little Voices’ reaches its indescribably huge chorus. Every space is filled, the tension bristles achingly in Thompson’s vocal delivery as the rest of the band crashes around him with a perfect balance of force and harmony, but the romanticism and accessibility of a pure pop sensibility is never hidden too deep. B-side ‘Let’s Call This A Map.’ is no different: an energetic, Interpol-esque introduction gives way to the kind of intertwining, effortlessly stirring chorus that has inspired such confidence in and excitement around this band.
Assembled in Edinburgh as high school friends in 2003, “We Were Promised Jetpacks'” first ever gig saw them winning their school’s battle of the bands competition. Proceeding shows were after-school performances around the city of Edinburgh which were well attended and fuelled the band with a hunger and ambition. The 4-piece came to FatCat’s attention when listening to some of the friends on the Frightened Rabbit Myspace page. Before even releasing a single, WWPJ have laid claim to some recent successes which suggest the heralding of a major talent bursting to emerge. A well recorded three-track demo was circulated and managed to pick up a KEXP track of the day over the pond, and plays on national stations in the UK were popping up on XFM, BBC and Q radio.
A tour through September 2008 as main support for Frightened Rabbit garnered great reviews for WWPJ. This being their first jaunt into England, healthy crowds arrived early on each evening due to the huge buzz in Scotland now filtering down south of the border. Already WWPJ have been reviewed by NME, The Fly, WIRED, Vanity Fair and Clash, have been featured as Q’s Track of the Day and played on Zane Lowe to great acclaim. A demo version of ‘Quiet Little Voices’ recently won Zane Lowe’s ‘Fresh Meat’ as well.
Fresh off the heels of a successful SXSW jaunt (performing alongside Glasvegas and Primal Scream) and with an album scheduled for 15 June 2009 titled These Four Walls, the forthcoming year of releases and touring is set to be a busy one for We Were Promised Jetpacks.
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LEVELLOAD
‘I’ve Been Thinking’
http://www.myspace.com/levelload
Released on 25th May 2009 (Flightpath Records)
A snarling testament to obsession, mistakes, stalking and demented cruelty, ‘I’ve Been Thinking’ is simply a song about all the things that makes love painful and addictive. Bringing together gleeful messiness and proper pop sensibilities with the duo’s trademark combo of electronics pushed to the point of meltdown, thrashing guitars and Karen-O-in-a-bitch-fight vocals, ‘I’ve Been Thinking’ harks back to the glory days of Devo and adds a pinch of Late of the Pier.
Mariko Doi and Tony Wade collided one night under Tokyo’s neon sky, bonding over a mutual love of Blondie, Gang of Four, Link Wray, and the colour yellow. After the first song they wrote – ‘Palookaville’ – was instantly played by the venerable John Peel they realised that maybe they were on to something. Their quickly released follow up single ‘HND in RNR’ proved them right, setting the press and industry abuzz and even getting featured on ‘Dirty Sanchez the Movie‘. Since then they’ve toured Japan, faced down blizzards whilst touring Germany, and shared stages with the likes of Metronomy, The Hives, XX Teens and Cornelius.
No other band around today could make the music they are making, smashing Japanese and British influences to create punchy, visceral, new wave punk, all in the laudable search for “the perfect pop song”.
With “I’ve Been Thinking”, they may well have just found it…
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And in Local News …….
Liverpool indie band The Sound Of Guns found themselves at the centre of a firearms scare in Wakefield on Saturday (March 28) after a misunderstanding.
The group were preparing to play the Escobar venue with Detroit Social Club, when around 30 police officers sealed off the road. They were ordered out of their van by armed officers and told to put their hands where they could be seen.
Manager Paul Finney told theWakefield Express: “The only conclusion we can draw is that there was a gang of Scousers talking about The Sound Of Guns, and it got overheard.”
A police spokesperson said: “Police were called at 6.25pm on Saturday by a man who reported seeing a man with what was believed to be a handgun in the city centre. Police attended and a full search was carried out, which included speaking to a group of men in the area who were not involved. It proved to be a false alarm – with good intent. We have now apprehended the real villains ( pictured below) and we deny that there was any stereotyping whatsoever …..”
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And Finally
The Trouble with James Allan
” I drink Bollinger instead of Buckfast,” says Glasvegas frontman James Allan
This article also contains the following gems which sees James embrace, snog and enter “luvviedom” with gusto. Check out these gems
“” I hate to say that but my palate has become refined”
Or “I have found it difficult carrying the burden of those songs”
Burden ? He wants to get a grip pronto , the countries in recession and singing songs are a burden ? A BURDEN!
“Every day, I am bombarded with thoughts” Wow ! Really ? Like the rest of us arent ? Ah, but ours arent sent by the muse are they ?
And the classic up my arse statement
“I feel that my focus isn’t clouded by anything. A lot of the poems I have been writing have come to me because of my clarity of that focus . I need to make sure I get them down or I forget them. Certain words are coming into my head time and again and certain moods that will sum up the next record. As an artist, the state of mind is what makes an album and my state of mind has changed”
Dear God! I think he should read this article ………here from last weekends Guardian by the always excellent Marina Hyde. Reality Check!
“Time was when entertainers knew their place. Today they run riot, adopting orphans by the pramload, extolling oddball religions and even brokering peace deals. What’s going on?”
One Bono’s enough for any civilisation surely ?
This blog’s great!! Thanks :).
I thought you liked Glasvegas ? What’s tuned you off? The music’s still good no? Mind James does seem to be being put forward as some mystical poet-god, I guess that’s getting a bit annoying.
(this posting should be accompanied by the sound of maniacal laughter, thunder and lightning, and the ominous bonging of far-off church bells, but von pip’s site won’t run to that sort of budget, so you’ll just have to imagine them okay?)…
I hate to say “I told you so”, but… I TOLD YOU SO!!!! I knew it, Quiffboy has bought into the media bulls**t lock stock and barrel. The signs were always there… the overwrought self-regard of his lyrics and songwriting should have been the biggest clue. I don’t think there’s a problem when a singer is presented as a “mystical poet god” by the media and it’s very obviously the media’s own invention, and the artist involved remains grounded and likeable and human. I hated much of Glasvegas’ music and especially the lyrics and I thought that James in particular is one of the most obvious cases of “the emperor’s new clothes” in recent memory. But in some of the earlier media coverage, even when the NME was spouting such blatant cobblers as James being “a totem of honesty in an industry awash with lies”… ho hum… he didn’t seem to be especially up himself to any alarming degree. That has very obviously changed and for some bizarre reason he has decided to start viewing himself as some tortured philosopher/poet/artiste when, for me at least, he is very clearly none of the above! Aw, poor darling, bombarded by thoughts and “burdened” by the legacy of his own powerful creative outpourings! Oh Jesus H Christ on a bike, spare me! Baudelaire, Modigliani, Soutine, Van Gogh, Rothko, Pollock… now THEY were tortured artists! James is a Glaswegian man who sings in a band… NOW GET A F***ING GRIP!!!!
(By the way, I hope Anon isn’t still around to see any of this…)
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