My Favourite Bands (at the moment)
Every little while we get one of our contributors to pen a feature on their favourite music/scenes/acts/bands around at the moment. This time round it’s our favourite Hackney resident James Hoste’s turn……
I thought I would take this opportunity to play up some of my favourite bands coming out of the UK right now…
Firstly, my long term favourites, Late of the Pier. I was first turned onto these guys before they had a single release out in Autumn 2006 and consequently ended up watching them about sixteen or seventeen times over the next twelve months and not once did I find them repetitive, samey or remotely dull.
Each set seemed as fresh as the last. Don’t ask me how four kids form an obscure town outside of Nottingham, that’s best known for the Monsters Of Rock festival it used to host, can produce a band of such a young age who are quite so talented.
Playing their own brand of electro, punk, indie and a bizarre host of other things as well, they have since screamed onto the indie scene and have become firm favourites with anyone who has ears. Live shows are increasingly electrifying as the band dress progressively more garishly, cover their synths in all kinds of decorations and habitually throw themselves into the crowd. And that’s not even mentioning the songs, which, while something new, catchy and exciting on record, come into their own, live. And yet, despite all their influences, experimentation and general oddballness, they have become so popular due to the simple fact that they have a natural feel for what makes a great pop hook or melody and utilise that fact to staggering effect.
A truly special band with much, much bigger things to come. Vocalist and song-writer Earl Samuel Dust (Sam Eastgate) even has a side project under the moniker “LA Priest” which is original and experimental, though still very dancefloor friendly, electro.
Oh, and did I mention Erol Alkan has taken them under their wing, produced all their singles bar debut, ‘Space And The Woods’ (out on Way Out West Records, but don’t bother looking anywhere but eBay though as there was only 500 copies and they went in days) as well as their album. Alkan has even put out LA Priest’s debut single, “Engine” on his own record label complete with an extended rework courtesy of himself.
The XX are a very new band to the scene, forming only late last year I believe. Not necessarily an exciting prospect on paper, when put in your ears you’d be hard pressed not to smile at the beauty of it.
Shunning current trends for playing loud, brash music with lots of dull, and frequently pointless, synth lines, The xx play a stunning blend of indie with thick, fuzzy basslines and an undercurrent of blessed out electronica. Warm, heartfelt and deserving to be playing to a lot more people in a years’ time.
Worth noting also that their “drummer” reproduces all their drums live on a drum sample pad, whereas they used to just use a pre-recorded drum machine.
My Panda Shall Fly is another band hailing from London. Describing themselves as “Ambient Experimental Electronica” they’re pretty much bang on. Absolutely mesmerising live, they’re the post-rock band the UK always needed, except they’ve turned up a few years after the post-rock phenomenon really took off. And they’re an electronic act, apart from the one guitar, soloing effortlessly across the top of the dense electronica emanating form the other two members. A weird combination, but often this is the way to pave new sounds in what are frequently stagnating scenes across the globe. We need eccentrics like this to push music in new directions and keep music alive and exciting. Imagine if these people didn’t exist, we’d more or less live in a world where everyone was trying to sound like The Beatles or, in other words, everyone would sound like… Oasis. Not a tempting prospect.
I would have liked to add one of my favourite UK acts of the last few years to this list, the ever upbeat Bolt Action Five. Unfortunately, they recently split after an unusually lengthy bout of inactivity. However, vocalist Dan recently been finishing of the vocals on his cousin’s (Kissy Sell Out’s) debut album which will hopefully be hitting shops later this year, whereas the rest of the four piece have formed a new band named “Fables” and have a few demo tracks up on their myspace page. First live dates are in July I’m queuing up already.
While the next couple of bands aren’t, strictly speaking, from the UK (by which I mean, they’re from Baltimore and New York respectively), The Death Set and Kap10Kurt are possibly the two best acts I’ve seen so far this year and couldn’t resist mentioning them.
Firstly, TheDeathSet, who play (I hesitate to use the term, due to the negative connotations that ensue whenever it is uttered from someone’s lips, but is actually appropriate for this lot) what I feel is pop–punk, the way it was always meant to be; fast, loud, chaotic, offensive, short, frantic and fun. Songs rarely outlast the minute and a half mark and gigs usually see the band playing in all corners of the room, hanging from the ceiling, each other or collapsed on the floor while the fans keep the song going by taking over the mike. I’ve even had to step in and fix their drum kit in the middle of a song. The band/nutters of the year.
Accurately described as making The Libertines seem as exciting as Dire Straights (though I was never a huge fan them in the first place, but most of the world seems to have fallen for Doherty and his intravenous activities at on time or another). THE cool kids to be seen with in 2008, in that they are pretty much the antithesis of cool. Go. Watch. Now.
Kap10Kurt while currently based in NYC, hail originally from Switzerland (well, Kurt does, Leah is a US native and touring drummer for The Ravonettes as well), and are a brilliant electronic act. Taking everything that was brilliant about electro, the simplicity, the HUGE hooks and every last ounce of the fun, they brought it together into a live act which spawned it’s name from the Shatner Classic, ‘Star Trek’.
With Leah on drums (including a snare with a strobe inside it, triggered every time it’s hit) Kurt on synths (though he’s taped a long guitar strap to it and plays it, standing up, around his knees.), and a laptop for the backing sounds of bass and such. All put together, this leaves a live show that left me smiling for almost a week afterwards, and still does when I think back to it, and may well top my gigs of the year list.
The only downside is that with Leah also drumming for The Ravonettes they tend to tour relatively infrequently, so if you see them playing near you, take that chance and feel yourself grinning shamelessly, and helplessly!
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Reply #1 on : Tue June 17, 2008, 02:40:01
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Reply #2 on : Fri June 20, 2008, 18:47:59