Tracks of the Week – 28 November 2011

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Matthew Britton is our human blog-music aggregator, kind of like Hype Machine but with feelings and shit. Every week he goes, puts on his rubber gloves and trawls the darkest sewers of Soundcloud, reporting back to TLOBF with his findings. Sometimes he strikes gold, sometimes just faeces, but one day, maybe, just maybe, a band covered here will play an actual gig in front of human people. We continue to live in hope.

Can you hear that sound? It’s coming – that’s right, it’s just about the time of the year in which every website, magazine, fanzine, television program and blog decides to regurgitate the content that it’s gleaned over the past year, forcing you to endure their pitiful attempts at recycling in the name of nostalgia. Perhaps it’s the one part of the game that the never-ending hype game actually makes sense – anyone who wants to claim to make people’s taste and start some buzz would be far too embarrassed to go back to January and repeat the nu-Electroclash bands they were tipping at the start of the year. So here we are then, another weeks worth of tracks that you’ll download and probably forget come spring, nevermind the 2012 roundups in 12 months time. Enjoy them whilst they’re hot.

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Spectral Park – L’appel du Vide

Being bereft of any sort of musical talent means you view the world in slightly different terms. As well as being deaf to tone and unable to move your fingers quick enough for any chord change that takes under 3 minutes, the ability to understand how Spectral Park is the work of one man and one man alone is utterly bewildering. It’s not so much the depth of the sound – think of kind of texture The Horrors were striving for on their last release – but the amount of ideas that have been packed into the splendour of L’appel du Vide. If he somehow manages to pull it off live as well, it might be time to stick those teach yourself guitar books on the bonfire once and for all.

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Hand Cream – Weird Seance

Fair enough, they do have a pretty spectacularly bad band name, but Hand Cream almost make it up by picking one of the best song names of the year. The fact that it’s a haunting, creepy bugger as well more than helps win over the doubts over an act that could work under such a bland moniker, but if you imagine Pocahaunted genuinely trying to make a pop song, you’re halfway to understand this beauty.

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COLOURS – Drip Haze

One for those who were forced to listen to psych and prog instead of the pop charts by pushy fathers. It’s not difficult to imagine COLOURS being made to discuss dusty vinyl, having to play with gatefold sleeves instead of video games, all watched over by a Dad who had his shot at the bigtime ruined by a mistimed pregnancy. Whenever the video is made, it’d only be right if it was a 6 minute recording of an oil projection, pappa looking on mournfully in the background.

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FOG – Beat for C

D/R/U/G/S made a song for Cruel Rhythm blog’s Jamila (the appropriately titled Mila), and though we don’t know who the C is that FOG made these beats for, they should be honoured. Reminiscent of the muddied glamour of Cloud Boat – Lions on the Beach that still soundtracks the dreams of those who’ve heard it, it’s a stunningly confident track from an artist that, to be honest, has come from nowhere.

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Tropic of Cancer – A Color

Not exactly what you’d expect from a resident of L.A., the downbeat industry of Tropic of Cancer fitting more with the stereotypes you’d associate with the east coast. A Color is the first new work that Camella Lobo – the woman behind the project – has done in a year, and quickly suffocates you with it’s gloom and metronomic pace.

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Sex Hands – Ichiban

One for fans of shouted, brilliant lo-fi and lovers of seminal American sitcoms too. In ‘The One with Ross’ Grant’, Friends viewers learn that Joey has appeared in a Japanese commercial for lipstick aimed at men called ‘Ichiban’. In ‘Ichiban’ by Sex Hands, we learn that the much missed constant repeats of Friends on E4 managed to infiltrate the minds of slackers across the UK to the point where it influences their art. Anyone who can’t fall in love with a chorus that is essentially a man yelping ‘Ichiban for men’ doesn’t love music – or hasn’t wasted enough time watched the hi-jinks at Central Perk.