TLOBF :: Now Playing

Another month and another addition to our Now Playing feature, where we find out what’s been dominating the ears of our regular contributors!

Simon Tyers :: Nosferatu D2 – We’re Gonna Walk Around This City With Our Headphones On To Block Out The Noise
Last year I nominated as my unsung album of the year Superman Revenge Squad’s This Is My Own Personal Way Of Dealing With It All. One man from Croydon, Ben Parker, an acoustic guitar and a bitingly tragi-comic worldview. He’s self-released an equally fine second album, We’re Here For Duration… We Hope!, this year, and now new label Audio Antihero have for the first time properly issued the record he made two years ago as half of a duo with drummer brother Alex as Nosferatu D2, whom Gareth Campesinos! has called “one of my favourite bands of all time”. Anyone coming to them following the Superman Revenge Squad path might be surprised by the bitter vitriol laced through Ben’s vocals and staccato riffs, more attuned to the American bands he now namechecks, but the lyrics are just as stream of consciousness and wryly self-lacerating, pitched against their surroundings and determined to get their resignation to life through against the pace set by Adam’s full tilt drumming. Anyone coming to them fresh will hear nods to everyone from Mission Of Burma to Pavement to HEALTH, but at heart they sound like nobody but two people with a lot of records making music that doesn’t sound exactly like any of them.

Joseph Knowles :: Summer Camp
Distant wobbly synths, honey-dipped melodies, warm twilight in the Nordic countryside, warped colour photography from the 70s… what is there not to like about the sound of Summer Camp? The somewhat mysterious group, claiming to be Swedish transplants recently set loose in London (and presumably not the youths of yore pictured here), splashed into the digital ether in October with a woozy, Heathers-quoting cover of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ that made me prick up my ears. But it was the sun-kissed, Say Anything-sampling melancholy of their own ‘Ghost Train’ that had me wondering what these low-fi indie poppers with a vintage teen movie fixation will do next. The Myspace-only track ‘Why Don’t You Stay’ wins too. Whoever they are, these kids are 3-for-3 and bloody marvelous.

Matthew Parri Thomas :: The Last Dinosaur – Hooray! For Happiness
It’s not quite post-rock. It’s not quite folk. It’s not quite electronica. It’s a little of everything and a lot of “the-best-album-that-could-go-criminally-overlooked” this year. This entirely self-recorded debut — the band used no computers, just a 16 track recorder at home, giving careful consideration to each available track (just two mics for drums, harmonies relegated to a loop station) — contains a selection of orchestral widescreen soundscapes, intimate odes and euphoric noise. Seven minute instrumental builds are followed by thinly plucked acoustic melodies and cinema projector samples. Liner notes reveal song influences of unfinished Gilliam films and late night musical ‘accidents’. Complete with blips, bum-notes and false starts the band acknowledge that it’s a little rough around the edges, but there’s more pride than apology in their admission. As the night’s draw in this lush tapestry of Explosions In The Sky meets Bon Iver meets Broken Social Scene really, really hits the spot.

Rich Hughes :: Pomegranates – Everybody, Come Outside!
Who ever says radio is dead is wrong. If it wasn’t for those wondrous folks over at WOXY and my lovely new Internet Radio, I’d never have heard Pomegranates. Which, in itself, is bad, as we reviewed the album a couple of months ago and loved it. For some reason, it past me by… but there we go, I’ve rectified that now. This album title track is a perfect slice of pop music. Jangly guitars and swirling rhythms with shout along lyrics bathe your ears in beauty – think if the original Pipettes covered Phoenix whilst listening to Camera Obscura. Oh yes, that’s why I’m talking about… Why isn’t this huge? Very strange…

Andy Johnson :: Tina Dico – A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending
Even though I reviewed this upon its release last year, I feel compelled to mention it again since I’ve rediscovered it. Rather than releasing a conventional fifth album, Danish singer-songwriter Tina Dico put together a trilogy of connected tour EPs. A Beginning, A Detour, An Open Ending is a compilation of these, consisting of twenty alarmingly consistent songs. Dico’s voice is wonderful and the acoustic-with-occasional-electronic-touches approach to the music is soothing, but what really makes this a brilliant set is how interconnected these songs are. Rather than a narrative, several of the songs reference each other as they explore Dico’s personal philosophy, offering thought-provoking advice on the subjects of love, loss, moving on and making the most of life. Each of the EPs has its own subtly different style and flavour, but they form a stunning whole. Well worth seeking out, this is a set of songs which desperately deserves more recognition.

Matthew Britton :: Internet Forever – Cover the Walls
Despite the fact that I’ve listened over and over again to various different versions of both the songs on this release, I can’t help myself but put on Internet Forever’s debut single ‘Cover the Walls’ at least once a day. It’s the perfect step-up for the band – over the past year or so they’d been toning up their act, moving away inch by inch from the ultra lo-fi tag they earned their selves through early demos, and both the new recordings on this prove what a great pop band they are. Laura Wolf’s lyrics are inspired and incredibly pretty, and the title track and b-side ‘Pages of Books’ just fizz with energy. God knows how far away a proper album is, but hopefully support slots with Johnny Foreigner will speed up the inevitable waves of fandom. Brilliant.

Simon Rueben :: Pet Shop Boys – Tonight is Forever
A good music documentary should send you scuttling off to your record collection, like a harassed clerk looking for an important file. BBC4’s Synth Britannia was possibly the greatest 90 minutes of television this year, with the clip show that followed equally brilliant. My conservative guesstimate is that 50% of all males over 30 who watched that programme felt contractually obliged afterwards to make a compilation, which indeed I did the very next evening. And even at my age, there is unconscious compulsion with a compilation to want to impress the cool kids at school. Sure, make it approachable, but not too obvious. Open with a belter but not ‘Don’t You Want Me’, go for a rarer Human League track. And for goodness sake, don’t bung ‘Cars’ on there; go for ‘I Die You Die’. Even though it was solely for an listenership of one, I still felt the need to go for the tracks that burned bright and were then forgotten, rather than 20 repetitions of ‘Tainted Love’. So instead of ‘West End Girls’, I went for ‘Tonight is Forever’ by The Pet Shop Boys. There are no brittle synth’s to be found here, no chiming electrics or fat, rasping bass-plops. Instead, a track that is effortlessly smooth, the perfect introduction to the second side of their debut Please. Neil Tennant’s enunciation is crystal clear, his lyrics carried along by a curious mix of crashing drums and a beautiful melody, a song that sounds like a ballad yet still manages to soar on a disco lick. Buried as an album track, it is every bit as compelling as the singles from this album and the crowning jewel of my shiny mix CD.

Simon Gurney :: The Twilight Sad – The Room
It’s dark when I leave work now, and for the past week there’s been a certain part of the road I drive along to get home, and serendipitously for four days in a row The Twilight Sad’s ‘The Room’ has started to play as I drive along it. It’s national speed limit, a big climb and then a winding drop. Lights from other cars make it difficult to see, but you can still easily do most of it at 50mph. It’s the perfect moment for James Graham’s bluff voice to come belting out, and I can happily shout along. The lyrics are fairly opaque, you get the feeling these are ciphers of ciphers being used as metaphors, even if the general feeling is that of heavy expectation or a tipping point being reached. I like that ambiguity, there are twining threads of imagery (‘Holy’, ‘son’, ‘boy’, ‘grandfather’s toy in the corner’, ‘tree’) and phrases (‘look what you have done’, ‘don’t tell anyone’, ‘You’ll never know Thursdays gone’, ‘I called you every name from her son’), but no handhold. There is one in the music though, pretty much put in a repeating piano note or chord into any song and I’ll fall in love with it, some kind of rotating lighthouse beacon, a heartbeat, a jabbing pain, the intermittent flash of a moving car’s headlights. So you get that at least, as guitar crashes down and around like surf, as drums ring out with plenty of echo and space, as I descend that hill, negotiating turns, realizing I’m going too fast. That’s all really, just a song that appears in a certain place at a certain time, every day.