She might not have made any “Sound of…” lists this year, but I’ve been hearing about Marina and the Diamonds quite a bit over the last few months. And on Valentine’s Day 2009 (14th Feb to fellow non-romantics), Marina will drop her debut single Obsessions on the world.
The word most people are using in connection with Marina is “eccentric”, and it’s hard to argue with that synopsis.
Orange unsignedAct finalists the Scarlet Harlots have been tipped for greatness in the new year by The Wombats.
The members of The Wombats were impressed when they mentored the Scarlet Harlots for the Channel 4 talent show. Wombats singer, Murf told them:
I thought you were going to be good before you even picked up an instrument.
Now, you all know that I’ve been a big fan of The Wombats over the last year, so this endorsement by the band interested me. I decided to check out the Scarlet Harlots. They’ve got their own profile on the Orange unsignedAct homepage, and of course the ubiquitous MySpace presence, although there’s more music on the MySpace page, including the essential This Is How We Do It.
Blur have confirmed that they have reunited for a huge gig next summer in London’s Hyde Park.
“It just felt it was right again,” Albarn told music weekly NME.
“It somehow feels like there’s something for us to do again, we’re not completely useless or pointless, we’ve got a reason to exist.”
Oasis are releasing the second single from their Dig Out Your Soul album – I’m Outta Time – on 1 December.
Throughout their career, Oasis have been criticised for sounding like a lot of other bands. If I’m Outta Time sounds like anyone else, it’s Urban Hymns-era The Verve.
This isn’t a criticism, merely an observation. It’s fully possible that this is one of the most beautiful songs Oasis have committed to tape.
If you want to get a not-so-sneaky listen to the new Oasis album, Dig Out Your Soul, the whole thing is streaming live on MySpace right now! In fact, this is so fresh, most of the tracks have a play count of zero as I write this!
I’ve been listening to the much hyped Bag It Up, and it sounds brilliant. Can’t wait to get a chance to listen to the rest.
If you listen to the album on MySpace today, be sure to pop back here and tell us what you think, okay?
OK, for those of you not familiar with Those Dancing Days, you should probably check this out. It’s their new single, Home Sweet Home.
What do we like about it? Well, those cute Swedish accents for a start – that kind of drawling but musical delivery. Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s a simple pop song about being back home and among one’s creature comforts?
The video’s cool as well – a series of postcards from far flung places, just to hammer the song’s point across :) There’s no point in trying to rationalise everything that’s fun about this song. Listen for yourself, and we dare you not to like it…
Oooh, if you’re a fan of CSS, you’ll no doubt like their latest single, Move.
We can’t claim to be experts on the Brazilian six-piece, so Move comes as a welcome introduction to the group. It’s a quirky slice of electro-pop, and a breath of fresh air.
Is this what we’ve been missing all this time?
We’ve been saying it for a while now – the Indie music scene is a joke and bogged down in all-too-similar bands flogging the same dull by-the-numbers music.
How fitting that The Independent newspaper should be laying the smackdown on Indie music:
John Niven was an indie fan in the 1980s, an A&R man in the Britpopping 1990s, and is now the author of Kill Your Friends, a sadistic satire of the record industry of which he was once an enthusiastic member. “I was in Gap a few weeks ago and there was some sort of generic indie music playing,” he says. “I was with a friend who’s a promoter and a bit younger than me. After about three or four tracks I asked him: ‘Whose LP is this?’ And he said, ‘No, it’s a compilation.’ Every track sounded identical. The guitars, the production; all these bands sound like they’re made in the same studio with the same producer. It’s such a ball-less, soulless, generic whitewashed indie sound. You could probably take a member from each band and throw them together in a new group and no one would be able to tell the difference. They’re completely interchangeable. Scouting for Girls are like the sound of Satan’s scrotum emptying. They’re abysmal.”
Another excellent quote about the new wave of Indie bands choking the charts…
When I glance around the bands that are supposedly ‘indie’ today, I don’t see any attitude. I don’t see any content in their records, any political interest in the band members. They’re a terrible generation, unfortunately, but they’re becoming famous overnight and selling a lot of records.
Plenty of scathing remarks about Scouting For Girls, and an impressive history of the Indie scene and its slow death (culminating in another scathing remark about Scouting For Girls), this article makes a lot of sense.
But there’s one question remaining – who will reclaim Indie for the people? Or should we just give up now and pre-order the new Britney album?
Luke Pritchard, the frontman for the Kooks has been gurning to the Daily Star about the state of the Indie music scene. He claims bands like The Pigeon Detectives have ruined it by diluting the ‘movement’.
When we first came out it was a cool time, with the Kaisers, Arctics and Bloc Party on the same circuit. I don’t think many people would place us with those acts, but at the time I really felt part of that whole movement.”
It’s funny what’s followed. Bands like The Pigeon Detectives took what was there and slightly diluted it.
We don’t know what it is about this pairing of Alex Turner and Miles Kane, but Standing Next To Me and previous single The Age Of The Understatement are in a different league to the Arctic Monkeys altogether.
There’s a retro 60’s feel to this music, but with a dark intensity that underlies the song. The video reinforces this with the guys decked out in early Beatles-era suits and surrounded by dancing girls in equally 60’s style costumes. Everything is shot in a low light, and the only splashes of colour are the girls’ tights.
