This year, I’m going to try something new with The Breakdown and dedicate one column a month to some of the more decent or interesting releases of the previous four weeks, or just stuff I’ve been led to online or stuff people are talking about elsewhere. That way I don’t have to try to cram them down the bottom of each week’s column and come up with some ludicrous tie-in to that particular week’s rant, like, for instance, working a plug for Melbourne’s excellent Absolute Boys into a column about lap swimming.
In the spirit of that, let’s start locally. Brisbane’s Kitchen’s Floor (pictured) last year released their debut album of thick, thorny no wave, Lonelieness Is A Dirty Mattress, and at the beginning of January stuck a cut-together live clip of a new track up on their MySpace, the song from which – Regrets – will be on a 7” coming out on RIP Society Records in February. It’s a minute-and-a-half surge of amp noise moved up and down by a melodic chant and interspersed with jarring guitar-string rubs.
Exo Records have released a seven-track 10” from Melbourne squealers Teen Archer, who excel in brash, primitive but maxed out garage punk. If you’re looking the band up online, there’s not a whole lot of info or sounds out there, but they’ve been kicking around since October 2008 and have played shows with Useless Children, Children Collide and all the bands who regressed into childhood (albeit a drunken one) at Flip Out.
Then there’s Crumbs, the solo project for Agents Of Abhorrence drummer and Brain Children (and Catcall) beat guy Max Kohane. Brain Children’s EP was one of the finest Australian dance releases of 2009, a lo-fi kosmische disco blend, and Crumbs steps even further into the hypnotic beats with glitch and snippy trip-hop effects. You can download it free from his Bandcamp.
LA and Brooklyn seem to have some kind of surf pop rock exchange program going on at the moment, and two bands who are getting some attention are LA’s Dum Dum Girls and Brooklyn’s Frankie & The Outs, both all-girl bands making gritty yet tropical, ‘60s-bent guitar pop. Dum Dum Girls have already signed to Sup Pop (and have a song titled Catholicked, so they gotta be good, right?), while Frankie Rose and her band are on Slumberland and have shows with Kurt Vile and The Primitives and spots at SXSW coming up.
This week sees Midlake’s new album of beardy folk that takes on more traditional forms (though not in a bad-sad ‘trad’ way), The Courage Of Others, out here through Speak N Spell, wrapping up a month that’s been largely about doped up, minimal folk pop on the bands-making-albums-that-are-
Basia Bulat’s oscillating warble does its thing over another album, out last week through Rough Trade/Shock, while Mistletone gave us Beach House’s new Teen Dream record, an album so sensitive and pleasurable it might well be an undiscovered erogenous zone. (And I realise sexualising an album titled Teen Dream is a bit wrong, but hey, I didn’t do this to society, I’m just going with it – gasp.) While we’re here, this Friday sees the release through Mistletone of an album by South Carolina 23-year-old Toro Y Moi, titled Causers Of This, a wash of bright psychedelic harmonies and keys with hip hop beats and enough bassline grooves to turn him into next summer’s most anticipated live experience.
But if you’re looking for something more on the gothic-glitch-dance side of things, check out We Are Like The Spider from Missouri, who I may or may not have found by looking at the Facebook groups of some New York hipster who was in a photo with Ssion and Jonny Makeup. Shut up, it was worth the shame.
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