I’ve rounded up some MP3s of the bands who are playing at the next Autumn Store on the 22nd July to download. Enjoy.
The Smittens - Stop the Bombs
The Smittens - Party Time
The Smittens - Good Migrations
The Zebras - Science Competition
The Zebras - You Look Ready
Red Pony Clock - There’s Nothing Wrong With Getting High
Red Pony Clock - 12-Color Step
It’s always worth looking at the listings when arranging gigs to make sure that you don’t clash with anything big, and this time round it couldn’t have been with anything musically bigger in Birmingham – as Capsule’s annual Supersonic Festival was taking place just down the road.
It is a bit of a shame as this gig is the closest that the Autumn Store has come to pushing the boundaries of indiepop towards what you might consider Capsule territory - but these things happen. I was mainly glad to finally be able to get Japanese band Andersens to Birmingham, with their co-headliners The Starlets and give The Sunflower Lounge a little night of diverse and lovable music of it’s own.
Local duo Bavarian Country Singers & Comrades kicked off the live music of the night in a perfect fashion. They play their own brand of lo-fi-country-pop using guitars and the occasional banjo and toy accordion.
They also did a great and unexpected cover of Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, which reminded me of the good old days when Autumn Stores Discos used to finish with the Ben Folds cover of Bitches Ain’t Shit.
One of the great things about BCS&C is that they both have really lovely singing voices that made the harmonies utterly spellbinding, and you just can’t help smiling at it all. There will always be a home at The Autumn Store for slightly shy and thoughtful acoustic pop duos like this.
The Starlets on the other hand have a more expansive sound gained from both the clever use of guitar pedals to enhance the arrangements (rather than for the sake of it) and by adding a violin and trumpet to the indie band 4-4-2 of drums, bass and two guitars.
The last few days of gigs left them sharp and definitely on form when they played the Autumn Store and the diversity of the song writing really did come through in the set – switching between quiet and hushed songs with whispered vocals to louder songs with good use of dynamics.
There were four members of Andersens who had come over from Japan for the tour, and at the start of the set they were joined by a saxophonist and the trumpet player from The Starlets to give the songs the type of depth that they achieve on record.
You could never accuse Andersens of not having a bold and unique songwriting vision. The songs often take in the gentler and relaxing elements of pop bands such as Architecture In Helsinki but always surprise you by pushing them in interesting directions.
They also have a very good way of filling their musical landscapes with snippets of melody that remain firmly with you for the day. Christmas Eve in particular has been following me round since the gig, just popping in to my head every so often to remind me that complex and quirky arrangements can be mixed with a sense of tunefulness.
At times Andersens pass through transitional jazzy moments, as a way of changing their songs but they always retaining that playful touch that prevents the songs from ever becoming as tedious as the word ‘jazz’ would usually suggest in a review. Towards the end of the gig, the brass section left the stage and the Andersens were left as a four piece, their last song featuring some clever guitar work over a flute led rhythm section.
It was also pretty exciting to find out afterwards that Andersens were responsible for Jens Lekman’s third favourite gig ever.
The night ended with some DJing and dancing. Remembering my love of acoustic covers of non-acoustic songs from earlier the Jeffrey Lewis version of Punk is Dead had to finish things off!
Make Do And Mend Records is a new indiepop label based in London, and although I think it was set up to put out Pocketbooks releases, they’ve also released an ace Indietracks compilation CD.
If you’re looking for something to put on the stereo to re-live all your festival memories (minus the smell of steam trains and several hundred popkids) then this may be it!
I’ve just spotted that Swedish popsters Billie The Vision and The Dancers have their latest album online for download, including their latest release, *and* the wonderfully titled ‘I Was So Unpopular in School and Now They’re Giving Me This Beautiful Bicycle’.
You can find the downloads on the Billie The Vision and The Dancers website. They’re accepting donations too depending on how much you want to pay for them.
Billie The Vision and The Dancers are a fun band live, swaying away onstage, and it’s worth having a quick nose through some of their tracks. Or just download the ones I’ve linked below…
Billie the Vision and the Dancers - Nightmares
Billie the Vision and the Dancers - Summercat
Billie the Vision and the Dancers - You’re Not Giving Up On Me
The downloads/dontations way of releasing things is something that musicians keep mentioning to me as the way they want to release stuff. At the moment the best way of bands doing this seems to be to put up details for how to do an International band transfer or link to a paypal. If someone could find a way of incorporating the same system that Radiohead used for In Rainbows into a social networking site, or made it easy for bands to set up a page of their own to take donations for songs, I’m sure it’d be well used.
Sunday Bank Holiday Sunday. What a great day. You wake up in the morning, you’ve got to read all the RSS feeds, there’s gigs on all round, you’ve got to go to one, see four bands, and you think Sunday, Bank Holiday, Sunday.
I think that last Partridge-paragraph worked better in my head - but Bank Holiday Sunday can be good for gigs, and this Sunday Wave Pictures were on at the genius Coventry gig venue - Taylor John’s House!
Actually, it was a nice surprise when it started off as I was only expecting 3 bands – but right at the foot of the bill were The Empty Set, who are a little two piece made of a singer on guitar and violinist (the violinist from Honeytrap, to be precise). They didn’t quite launch into the set - but more stumbled into the opening song in a lovely way and it had a genius Belle and Sebastian-esque tune (old school B&S naturally) and the violin used a loopy echo effect to build up the number of violins playing.
I’m hooked.
Low key songs with melodies and general New Scientist style geekery will always make me happy – and here songs cover the topics of love between protons, and Évariste Galois.
We are also treated to a fantastic cover of Some Candy Talking, which is made brilliant by a scratchy violin in the background, it’s about as close in spirit to the original as you can get with a two piece on acoustic guitar and violin.
They’ve got a collection of songs out soon on Tough Love Records so it’s worth looking out for.
Next up were their label mates Honeytrap, I’ve seen them a few times in Birmingham but tonight I caught myself wondering if bands are a bit like football teams… bare with me… in that they play better at home. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not telling you that the times I’ve seen Honeytrap at The Sunflower Lounge they’ve come out all 4-5-1 hoping to pack the midfield and grab a goal on the break, but they did put in a great gig for the home crowd and it was the best I’ve seen them play. Maybe they’ve honed their set over time, as bands do, and it has nothing to do with the home crowd thing?
The singer’s shouty voice had a tinge of Modest Mouse to them also this time (which is a good thing in my book). They’re playing for This Is Tomorrow with KateGoes at The Yardbird on the 4th June which is shaping up to be a good gig.
It was my second four-band-line-up of the weekend so gig blindness was starting to set in at this point. That coupled with *the comfy chair* and a bottle of frankly ace Sam Smiths organic lager is a blatant recipe for lethargy
You probably couldn’t pick a better style band than The Chap to try and get someone off the comfy chair. They’re a three piece band who use a driving bang-bang-bang of the bass drum to keep the music flowing, in a quite robotic sense without letting that restrict them, and they broke out the string instruments at the end for a bit of a crazy fiddle.
To be honest, I remained seated, it was a very comfy chair – but it picked me up a bit and got me ready for Wave Pictures.
The Wave Pictures a solid band, very tight (I know, I know, that’s what you say about bands when you can’t think of anything positive to say – but they are) and they’ve got well written songs that hint towards Hefner-style, and for that, they’re brilliant.
They swapped to electric guitar halfway through the set and played a song about teeth (I think Red Wine Teeth – I’ve not got the album yet) which was a reflective standout, and the single – I Love You Like A Madman was also good to hear.
Assuming I didn’t lie to you in November by half remembering a night in London because of that drunk-haze-of-achievement that you only get after playing a gig, they’ve also dropped the excellent ukulele-ing which made this set a bit more formulaic than the last – but it’s a good formula.
Gig over, we got back at about 1.30am. Monday bank holiday monday.
The debut Arthur and Martha single is out now (and has been for sometime, me done sloppy blogging) on Happy Robots which I’m hoping could develop into a great little label.
So that you can update your big indie-band-family-tree, Arthur and Martha has been assembled out of bits of Saloon and The Seven Inches
Here’s a vid -
I’ve just been added by a lovely band from Manchester called Help Stamp Out Loneliness. They’re a lo-fi dream-pop shoegazy type band, I especially like one of their songs called Lino Heart which has a catchy pop tune and just flows beautifully between the verse and chorus. That and you’re always onto a winner writing songs which involve going to a club and hearing The Television Personalities. *makes mental note to play more Television Personalities*.
They’ve got some songs on myspace for download if you want to add to your collection.
I’ve just realised how weird the first sentence would sound if you’d never used myspace.
I stumbled across a wonderful little record label called Maritime Records recently, they’re based in Indonesia and they have been putting out some excellent music as well as being home to a St Christopher record.
I’ve been listening to Cataclysmic by Perfect Angel on the labels myspace a fair few times these last few days too, it’s that gorgeous mix of shoegazy guitars and soft vocals.
I came across You/Me at Emmaboda festival last year, on the second stage. I’ve just checked their myspace, and they have some… songs for download! Hurrah, free stuff for you.
They put in a really nice set when I saw them and I bought an EP, which seemed to be a bit like an Electro-indiepop Bjork, which can only be a good thing. Heavy use of synths perform the backing for some timid and sincere female vocals, and there’s some nice quiet/loud touches in the backing tracks - it’s really sweet. For something so tuneful, it’s quite nice to see Aphex Twin and Explosions in the Sky listed as influences.
I quite like the lyrical bases covered too. There’s a song called Jean Luc Picard and one called Stockholm City.
Go clicky and download while they’re there.
Was the Betty & the Id gig really 12 days ago! That’s really flown by, at least I didn’t promise you a live review on this blog “soon”, over a week ago. That would have been embarrassing.
A few interesting things about this gig – mainly it was the first time I’ve put on a band from a different country, and it was Liechtenstein’s first trip to Birmingham, and they took the opportunity to spend a few days here.
Actually, I was a bit worried when they first said they were spending a few days here – what do you advise an out of town band to do in Birmingham? The nature centre is closed during the week in the winter (see the otters - it was my first thought) but most other things cost money. Most of the tourist sights seem good for evening events, sports, and shopping - or tell you to go to Cadbury World, which isn’t much good if you have no idea who Cadburys are (in Sweden, they have the worryingly tasty Plop bars).
As it was they had a potter round some canals and went to Ikon Gallery – but if you have suggestions for things that I can recommend to visiting bands on a budget, then let me know.
Betty & The Id sound checked first with relatively few problems (equipment spotting – one copicat, which made the geek in me very happy), though we did have some problems with Liechtenstein and feedback – which sadly lingered a bit into the set too.
Horowitz were on first, and to sum it up in a word they were ace. They’re a band at their best when the guitars are fuzzy and constant, so that the short songs merge. They have a style of innocent melody that’s influnced by C86 music (maybe the bumper book of Razorcuts) but the tunes are also matched by the melody of the guitar work – Sister is a perfect mix of the two.
Liechtenstein provided more influences from that era of guitar music, and it’s easy to see why they’ve been picking up so many fans – and I hope that they made a fair few friends in Birmingham with this visit. I’d compare them to The Shop Assistants, with four vocals adding depth to the songs.
Betty on the Id took us further back in time with 60’s Garage influnces and I have to admit, I’m a bit stumped about how to review them because my references are a bit shaky when you get pre-post-punk so I can’t just throw band names at you in the hope that you get the idea which is what I increasingly do when describing bands.
What I can tell you that without following it up with… “like band X do” is that they use music imaginatively. They accentuate extra beats because they don’t just 4/4 at you all of the time, they break up verses with beautiful little complimentary scales on different instruments – it’s intensely listenable. And danceable, as proved by the happy dancing people down the front.
One interesting thing was the number of good Birmingham bands which members of Betty & the Id have played in – bands that I like too! The list includes L’Augmentation (ace free downloads, follow the link), The Bee Men (they still have some 7” singles left – it’s well worth asking how to get hold of one) and best of all, a pre Pristine Christine iteration of The Sea Urchins, which brings us nicely back round to that C86 in a good old circle.
And thank you to Betty & The Id for bringing a drumkit and backline too.