20 year old Katy B is suddenly becoming an iconic British musician for the sound of 2010. It feels like she’s blown up onto the Radio 1 A-List from nowhere, but in fact she’s been a-toiling via a Brit school education for a few years and having teamed up with Rinse FM and their label, has been working with the likes of Zinc and Benga on her new tracks.
‘Katy on a Mission’ is her first single proper out August 20th, but I’m much more about in love with ‘Louder’. I like a popstar who can enunciate, and here her warm yet scratchy tones couple with wobbly dubstep basslines (which I think I’ll always find a bit amusing’) on this tale of an unwillingness to stop the party.
‘I’ve been awake for a day now, 24 hours, yet still I want it louder’
Love her.
Also I mention DJ Zinc like I have an idea who he is. I don’t, but Ed just sent me this other production from him. Total party anthem.
I have very little idea who TV on the Radio are. I know they don’t make stonky electro-pop though, so it’s a bit of a woop woop to discover 1/3 of the band, David Sitek, has popped off to make just that with solo project Maximum Balloon.
The forthcoming album is 10 songs described as ‘thick, noisy and funky, with glam’ by Spin with each featuring vocals from different artists, including Little Dragon, Karen O and David Byrne.
Two tracks are out there so far: ‘Tiger’, whose funky afrobeat sound, you might have heard on the Daisy Lowe for Esquire pant moistening promo; and the Little Dragon featured ‘If You Return’ which combines a stuttering drumbeat with some chilly electronica. I’m really looking forward to the album, but for now here’s the pretty promo for ‘If You Return’. I’m assuming it’s a teaser rather than the whole thing?
There are certain songs I’ve heard so many times that I feel like I never need to hear again in my life. This might change when the burn has healed but Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ is certainly one of them. Or at least her version.
Now there’s a new version of the single being released in a few weeks by The Jolly Boys, a mento band from Jamaica who’ve been making music for over 60 years. Back in the 1940s they used to be quite the name on the Hollywood party circuit playing in particular for Errol Flynn after he bougth Port Antonio’s Navy Island and turned it into a party zone. His wife, Patrice, is the lady in the red hat in the video.
Just how much fun were they having making this video. there’s no way you can’t break into a grin watching the hugely charmismatic 72 year old lead singer Albert. He’s even the youngest member of the band. Brilliant.
‘Rehab’ is out 20th September on Wall of Sound and they’re playing a couple of live dates in the UK next week.
Homemade videos need to have that special something to make you filter them out from your everyday norm. Hurts had the eyebrow raising dancing lady on their first £20 video and now Lana Del Ray weaves together old movies, bottles of drink and herself wearing a movie star wig in black & white.
The movie star image is what Lana’s rocking. Her real name is plain old Lizzy Grant and according to her press release she’s been roaming the musical world for a little while. Who hasn’t though? Here’s an old interview with plain old Lizzy from a couple of years ago. Now though she’s in London and spending time songwriting with pop legend Biffco. There’s a slight hint of Paloma in her voice, but an altogether much darker, sometimes sulkier, sometimes realer sound. ‘Kinda Outta Luck’ sounds like it belongs straight on a Tarantino soundtrack and the sinister elements to her voice remind me a lot of The Pierces. This one could go anywhere from chilling, sexy acoustic to sultry pop. Exciting.
Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs certainly have their google technique nailed with that name. This is the video for their new, totally huge sounding, single ‘Garden’.
Louise of jaunty folksters Lulu & the Lampshades probably makes music I’d never listen to but sounds great here as the female vocalist. Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs is though just one man – the brilliantly named Orlando Higginbottom – who I’m told does ridiculously fantastic things live.
The new Horse Meat Disco album is out, but I’m still massively enjoying edition 1. The ultimate disco floor-filler moment on it comes from Sheryl Lee Ralph with ‘In The Evening’.
The lyrics are brilliant and make me do all kinds of inside my hair music video construction. Who cannot relate to, “In the evening, the real me comes alive.” Maybe my current weary nature can’t, but me at 19 definitely can.
Best of all though is the music video. It’s full of totally mental face pulling. I could watch it again and again open-mouthed at the mass insanity of it.
Warning : serious amounts of ‘acting’ follow.
[For non London people - Horse Meat Disco is a gay club night in Vauxhall where men, primarily ranging from the slightly hairy to very hairy style, dance about to disco music in a dark room. It is amazing.]
I don’t know a huge amount, in fact not even a tiny amount, about dubstep. I know when I hear it, I tend to like it and I know that Skream’s remix of La Roux’s ‘In For The Kill’ was a bit of a tipping point last summer. I’d not paid much attention though to the news of a ‘dubstep supergroup’ coming out of Columbia records.
Magnetic Man consist of Skream, Benga and Artwork (no idea) and you’d probably expect them to make full on raving it up noise. Their first real attack on the mainstream however is instead a twinkly electronic pop song. It’s probably total disgusting to their old school, hardcore fans, but as far as I go it’s almost perfectly tailored.
The vocals (and presumably top-line) come from American singer-songwriter Angela Hunte who not only sounds delightfully robotic and cold here, but, FACT FANS, is the writer behind ‘Empire State of Mind’, ‘Do Somethin” and best of all, various Mis-Teeq album tracks.
French DJ Martin Solveig has just released a new video, the first from his brand new, slightly secret, project. It is totally insane but perfect for the current Wimbledon frenzied lifestyle.
Starring the vocals of Dragonette’s Martina, the song is nice enough, but it’s worth watching regardless. The one and only Bob Sinclar stars as Martin’s opponent in a tennis match where the players seeds are determined by their DJ Mag rankings and real life tennis man Nocak Djokovic does a comedy turn.
Fingers crossed for a Solveig vs Gaga rematch soon.
So finally to two down and out pop moments. Shakira wowed the Glastonbury audience on Saturday afternoon with her perfect blend of pop and world music. From the off it was an incredible sexual performance with fun moments where we howled along to She-Wolf and tried out the Waka Waka dance to emotionally intense ones like my favourite Shakira song ‘Underneath Your Clothes’. In the perfect sunshine, this was pretty special. Shakira later humped a speaker so violently we were all driven to staring at the floor.
Shakira was always on my Glastonbury to do list but the other amazing highlight for me wasn’t. I’ve seen the current Pet Shop Boys show twice now, and was seriously tempted to head to the Pyramid for Muse as I hadn’t seen them in about 5 years. In the end though, the PSB won out and I had the immense joy of the show totally converting some of my hating friends into total PSB lovers and felt like I was cheating on Colin going to see them with Daniel.
Annoyingly the moment isn’t on YouTube so I can’t show it, but ‘It’s A Sin’ hit me hard during this show. It somehow transformed from AMAZING pop song to BLOODY INTENSE EMOTIONALLY DISTRAUGHT UP GAY RIGHTS pop song. I know it always was that, but I hadn’t quite got it until standing about in the cold with lots of people off their face while Neil was bathed in demonic red lights.
CHE GUEVARA AND DEBUSSY TO A DISCO BEAT INDEED.
p.s. amazing (AMAZING) pop fact – Helena from ‘Frank’ is one of the PSB’s dancers. I thought it was her, then I chastised myself for being racist by assuming a girl with an afro who I could only see from far away was another girl with an afro, for no other reason than she had an afro. BUT THEN, it was her. So there.
Moment two came thanks to the combination of The XX and Florence and the Machine. Two bands who’ve had a lot of hype over the last twelve months.
I’ve never quite been bitten by the Florence bug, but once I’d finished yawning at the amount of hype round the XX and actually listened to them I was totally in love. I saw them at a Jools Holland play two songs, and then excitingly caught their SXSW set in a Methodist Church in Austin. There the audience was very quiet and polite, at Glasto they couldn’t have been more different. This was an audience who was obsessed with the band and stomping, clapping and cheering along at a moments notice.
Even though the band members normally have a very controlled stage presence, the excitement in the John Peel tent for their show meant smiles were trying to break through the serious faces just about cracking at the side of their faces. This felt big.
To close the set they said they were going to play a song they hadn’t done live before and the familiar harps from the start of Jamie XX’s remix of Flo’s ‘You’ve Got The Love’ rung out. At first it sounded like Florence’s vocals were just being scratched in but then out she came and everything went mental. Candi Staton was on a different stage at the same time. Poor Candi Staton.
