Befreckled British newcomer Chlöe Howl is one of those great up-and-coming 2013 artists that I’ve been meaning to post about for a while now, but until now I was unfortunately thwarted in one way or another by laziness. It’s gotten so bad that I’ve spent half my time on this post just looking for the other post on Chlöe Howl that I thought I wrote, but apparently never did. Luckily her excellent new breakup song, “Paper Heart”, had just enough gleeful pulsating synth work to wake me from my state of procrastination apathy.
“Paper Heart” is a brand new song that hasn’t been officially released as a single yet, but she has already put out a three song EP entitled Rumour that’s pretty darn good too. Probably my favorite track off of that EP is “I Wish I Could Tell You”, a gentle, synth-heavy ballad filled with longing and regret, guaranteed to hit you right in your emotional sweet spot.
“No Strings” got the unique distinction of being her debut single and it’s a fun, fresh song about the dangers of having only casual relationships. The end of the chorus says it all: “You can’t win at all / The trouble with no strings is you can only fall.”
[BTW, for those keeping track at home, this isn’t the “official” version of the video. Videos for “Rumour”, “No Strings” and “I Wish I Could Tell You” were all filmed and released at the same time when the Rumour EP was released on her website. An “official” video was released after “No Strings” was released as the debut single and if you’d like to see that version of the video you can check it out here. I decided to include the original video here because it’s the one I’m most familiar with and the one I should have posted way back when I originally discovered Chlöe Howl.]
Chlöe Howl was giving away her Rumour EP away for free on her website for a while, but if you go there now she’s just giving away two remixes of “Rumour” by Unicorn Kid and YACHT. I’m guessing you can still probably find the EP online pretty easily with a simple Google search, but if you’d like to get the complete picture of what you’d be looking for before you go out searching, here’s the song that started it all, “Rumour”.
I can’t stop listening to this fantastically subversive pop song called “TTYN” (which I believe stands for “Talk To You Never”) by SCRNS, a brand-spanking-new duo from Minneapolis. The satirical lyrics suggest conformity and mindlessly working for the Man:
Set your goals/ Get your cash/ and forget all your friends.
But the explosive beat, playful melody and the party-like atmosphere of the video suggest that doing the exact opposite is way more fun. I love the breakdown after the chorus. It takes the gentle lullaby-like melody that starts the song off and shakes it from its slumber, suggesting that if you or your friends start acting too full of themselves you should remind them what it is that makes life really worth living.
If you were to ask me at any given moment what my favorite album of all time is and I don’t answer Bent’s Ariels right away, well, then you’ll just have to sleep easy knowing that at the very least it’s absolutely in my top five. And what I find the most crazy about having Ariels as my favorite album of all time is not how much I love it, (I do, I really do love it) but how few people are actually familiar with this record, even among those already familiar with Bent. It sometimes feels like it’s a pretty obscure album, especially over here in the States, and it’s become one of my life’s goal to change that. If you downloaded all of my mixtapes then you’ve probably noticed that Bent songs pop up pretty frequently. If you’d like to know why I love Bent so much, then you have to go back to 2004 and my obsession with Ariels.
Ariels was and is an unique album for Bent in their overall discography. Bent had created their own individual style in 2000 with Programmed to Love by generously sampling their own record collections, (which they themselves described as “dodgy”), thus creating beautiful musical collages that mixed pre- rock-and-roll recordings with modern electronic sounds to breathe new quirky life into post-War sounds. What made their third album Ariels so different from their others was that while it kept the same overall sound that they were known for, for the first (and it turns out, only) time they recorded nearly everything you hear in the studio with live vocal performances and lots of acoustic instrumentation instead of the usual sampling. It was immediately obvious that this was a much more mature album, missing some of the quirky humorous charm of their other work, but making up for that with a lot more complex, emotional substance.
Listening to Ariels is a bit like being in love. The album is magical, gentle, dreamlike, warm and fuzzy and geared towards late night relaxation. I’ve always said that the ideal place to listen to this album is in your car late at night on a warm summer evening with the sunroof down and a bright full moon out above your head. But it’s more than just a chillout album. It’s about Love in all its splendor and euphoria while dealing with the depression and agony that comes from being away from someone you love.
The album opens with the bouncy and energetic “Comin’ Back”, a song that bursts with life and joy through bright brass horn blasts and an overly-enthusiastic rhythm section, and it’s only after you really start listening to the lyrics of the song that you realize that there’s a lot of complex emotions boiling under the surface here. At second glance this song is not as bright and cheerful as you might have originally been led to believe. Here’s the chorus to the song:
Feeling so alone
Along a lonely road
Feeling so alone
Well I’m comin’ back
Rachel Foster’s weighty voice drives these words right under your skin. Even if you didn’t originally pay attention to the words of this song, subconsciously you’re aware right away that there is something about this that makes it a really interesting song. As you’ll discover, the whole album plays with these feelings of joy and melancholy in a way that’s completely subversive and unlike most anything you’re used to hearing.
If you hadn’t picked up on those themes of loneliness in the first song, it’s made pretty obvious that loneliness is a common theme in the album by the time the second song, “Sunday 29th” starts off with the lines,
Here in my room all alone
with a love that I can’t see
These walls are so bare
And I close my eyes to see you
When I’m lonely
But before you pull out the straight razor this isn’t at all an album about being alone or depression, even though it deals with those feelings quite often. It’s really an album about being in love and all the positive and negative things that go along with being in love. Katty Heath is singing here about missing the love of her life and the deep longing she feels for them. There’s a real sweetness and romanticism to the song that’s not immediately apparent if you were to just read the lyrics as if they were a poem. It takes complex layers of pedal steel and the flute in this song to deliver the songs full impact.
While the first track is about turning around from bad decisions and going back to something good and decent in your life, and the second track is about the romantic longing for someone dear who is far away, you can probably tell by the title that “I Can’t Believe It’s Over” is absolutely a breakup song. Sian Evans of Kosheen pours her heart out and really sells the emotional devastation one feels after a breakup, but again the focus of the song isn’t on the pain of the breakup, but the shock that the love isn’t there anymore. Again there’s a longing to go back to those deep, positive emotional feelings.
Probably my favorite song on the whole album is “Now I Must Remember”, featuring vocals by the amazing Katty Heath, who is for me one of the real shining stars of this album. I actually don’t really have a clue as to what half of the lyrics to this song mean, but you don’t have to be a genius to get the general gist that the themes of this song are memory and nostalgia. One of the most amazing aspects of our memories is how quickly, richly and deeply nostalgia can take us back to another time and place and instantly flood us with intense feelings of emotion.
As if they know “Now I Must Remember” couldn’t be topped, it’s followed by “You Are The Oscillator”, the perfect cool down track after that rich emotional tour de force, featuring vocals by Katty Heath and Rachel Foster. There’s that fantastic magical dreamlike bit of harp at the beginning, drawing you back into this musical journey, with the deep, warm tones of the upright bass lulling you into sleep as the pedal steel and piano wraps their notes around the pleasure centers of your brain with a tight embrace. I can’t really think of anything else that reminds me of what Bent’s doing on this album.
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There’s so much here to love with this album. It’s a record that works well both as a cohesive whole and as independent singles. It manages to be fun and playful while still hitting your hard right in the gut. I haven’t even had a chance to discuss “Exercise 4”, a gorgeous, mischievous instrumental, or the album closer, “The Waters Deep”, a song which exemplifies as much as, if not more so than any other song what it is that ties together all of the common themes and tones of the album, a sort of beautiful, joyful yet melancholy, dreamlike feeling of pure nostalgia. This album has such a unique ability to put a smile on your face while at the same time a tear emerges in your eyes.
To me great art is something that can work you over on multiple layers. “Silent Life” has such a dopey, bouncy beat to it and yet there’s just something about the song that gets under your skin and hits you deep in the gut. It pushes buttons in you that you didn’t even know you had. You’re not really sure why, you aren’t really aware of what’s happening to you emotionally. You start to feel sad when you hear this song, like many of the songs on this album, but in a strange way you’re happy you feel that depth of emotion. It’s extremely cathartic in that sense, a pure cleanse of your emotional baggage that melts away any of the troubles of your day and places you firmly in the moment, while at the same time digging up emotional memories you’d long thought you’d forgotten and kinda wished you hadn’t.
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Bent haven’t put out a new album as a band since their Best Of album in 2009, but Neil “Nail” Tolliday and Simon Mills are still making new music in their own side projects. I was inspired to write this post after noticing that Napoleon, a solo act by Simon Mills, was giving away their self-titled debut album for free this weekend until midnight GMT Sunday. Do yourself a big favor and pick that up while you still can. While your at it, check out and buy Napoleon’s second album, Magpies. And for the love of God, if you don’t already own it, go to Amazon and buy yourself a copy of Ariels. I promise you that you won’t regret it. At only $5.99 right now for the mp3 album it’s a steal!
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This is the second installment in Influential Media, a semi-regular column where I explore the various forms of media that have made the biggest impact on me over the years.
This video for Toro Y Moi’s spaced-out, loopy jam “Rose Quartz” is just too cool not to share. Filmed using rotoscoping animation and copious globs of paint, this video has such a unique look to it totally unlike anything else you’ve seen before. Even if you aren’t digging on the song (even though you should be), you’ve got to admit that this video is really fun to watch.
Continuing with tonight’s trend of downtempo music we have the smooth R&B of Janelle Monáe’s “PrimeTime”, which sounds a bit like they got Prince to shred guitar over a sample from the “OooOoo” part of the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind”. The video tells the story of a girl who works in a retro-futuristic android bar (reminiscent of Blade Runner or Total Recall) who falls in love with a boy who blah, blah, blah… Who cares? You can read the YouTube description for the overly complicated explanation of the video, or you can just sit back, relax, and enjoy this killer track.
The more I hear it, the more I think HAERTS’ “All The Days” is an incredibly strong contender for Song of the Year, if not one of my most favorite songs ever, and “Wings” is right up there with “All The Days” in terms of sheer auditory amazingness. I’m actually surprised that this video for “Wings” was originally released in April, because both the song and video feel like they were made for the crisp weather of Fall, and since their Hemiplegia EP (which features both “Wings” and “All The Days”) came out this week, now seemed like the perfect time to share the video. When I hear HAERTS’ music, I for some reason think of those girl bands you’d always see playing in the background of some dive roadhouse in an 80’s movie that sounded so good you’d momentarily forget about the crap B-movie you were watching and want to know more about the band. Their music just has that uniquely epic, small town, salt-of-the-earth quality to it that, like the changing of the seasons into Fall, nostalgically reminds me a lot of growing up.
The video for “L’amour naissant” (roughly translated “the budding romance”) features a priest and a woman running towards each other on a beach as if to romantically embrace (think: The Thorn Birds), but camera tricks and editing make it so that they never actually reach each other. Every time you think they are about to connect, they’re suddenly the same distance away as when they started, as if the editing is a visual metaphor for how his priestly responsibilities prevent them from ever truly being together, a symbolic distance that they cannot cross. The video is really well done, and reminds me a lot of something Michelangelo Antonioni or Luis Buñuel might have dreamt up. The song, a beautifully moody and elegant track off of Tellier’s upcoming Confection (out November 8th), works extremely well with the imagery and the track is very reminiscent of Serge Gainsbourg’s classic Histoire de Melody Nelson. With outstanding influences like these, what’s really not to love?
True Blood‘s Alexander Skarsgård stars as an Iggy Pop lookalike cult leader in Cut Copy’s weird new music video for “Free Your Mind”, the official single and title track from their forthcoming album ‘Free Your Mind’ (out November 5th). Seeing Cut Copy in concert was the closest I’ve ever come to a religious experience in my life, so I guess the whole cult motif works pretty well for a song about opening your mind up to new experiences. The track is the real highlight here though, a psychedelic banger filled with bongos, Jungle-style samples and an uplifting chorus that will wash over you with plenty of good vibes. November can’t come soon enough.
Even though Charli XCX just released her debut album ‘True Romance’ a little bit earlier this year she’s already working on the next album with “SuperLove” being one of those new songs that we can look forward to. As you probably now know I’ve been a big fan of Charli XCX for a while now and to me it seems she can do no wrong. Amazingly each new song she releases somehow seems to be better than the last. And if “SuperLove” the song wasn’t colorful enough with its handclaps and catchy sing-song chorus, the video, shot in Japan’s Harajuku district, only amps things up to 11 by having Charli sing with robots in one of Harajuku’s more colorful local watering holes (there are so many different colors and flashing lights going on in the background that it was really hard for me to get clear looking screen grab for this post).
Wow, Lulu James’ “Sweetest Thing” is one of those perfect contemporary pop songs that gets right under your skin in the best way possible. The catchy, soulful chorus comforts you like an old friend while the wobbly, bouncy, sped-up and reversed rubber-band beats sound uniquely fresh and new. This is unbelievably good stuff and you’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t take a listen.
“Sweetest Thing” will be released November 3rd, with a full length album hopefully soon to follow.
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