Free Words Among Friends Playlist 7

Dum Dum Girls – Lines Her Eyes

With the release of last year’s EP, the tricksily named Dum Dum Girls (at the time consisting solely of songwriter Dee Dee, to the bane of users of pronouns everywhere) gave the impression of having stumbled on to the coattails of the Zeitgeist, before finding herself(/themselves??) being dragged haplessly along. You see, Ms Dee appeared on the scene with an instantly appealing proposition: a wish to update the sounds of late 80s groups like Shop Assistants and Vaselines, ramping up their fuzzy punk overtures but throwing out the wistful naivety for a more mannered aloofness. So appealing, in fact, that at the same time bands like Vivian Girls and Crystal Stilts were gathering a lot of attention making similar gestures, as a bloated appetite scoured the internets for more, more! Queue their first ever show finding its way onto Youtube. The problem of a being seen as über of the moment though, is that when that moment passes, people tend to think it the height of rudeness if you don’t just move along now, there’s a good chap. There are few things in music uglier to watch than the modish community awkwardly waiting for someone to get out of the room so the party can carry on with the new kids.

Happily, the recently released debut full-length, ‘I Will Be’, has nimbly avoided this trap. By being really bloody good.  Not only showcasing a great leap forward in penning a catchy hook, it also rings out with a new level of production that means Dee Dee (and new line-up) can no longer be dismissed by witterers as a some kind of contrarian pastiche, using the advanced means of our tomorrow’s world to create a sound more lo-fi than that of idols who bought their equipment from Tandy. Add in a new foregrounding of influences from 60s’ girl groups (they were probably there before but now we can actually hear them), and what you’ve got there is thirty minutes of cavernous, heartfelt pop, thankyou very much.

‘Lines Her Eyes’ has a Ennio Morricone (see below) style snakey guitar riff swinging its hips forward as all around it enthrals with perfectly realised Ronettes style throwbacks: percussive gallop, gunshot drums and powerful, self-assured vocals. The result is far from emaciated homage, more compelling entry into the canon. Listen, that bit where it suddenly all comes into focus and Dee Dee’s voice gets more and more strained and tinny as she repeats ‘If she somehow beats me/ Gets to the top before me/ I can’t deny how angry/ I will be”. It’s perfect.

[I can’t find a sufficiently legal link to Lines Her Eyes, so here’s the single, ‘Jail La La’. Which is good too.]

I Feel Bonnie – Hot Chip ft. Bonnie ‘Prince Billy’
If I’m honest, I’ve always found Hot Chip a wee bit restrained and utilitarian. But with this reworking of their recent single ‘I Feel Better’ by folk superstar Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, I find myself gratefully able to say that they’ve at last managed to elicit a proper emotional response. Even if it is blind terror. Playing on the aura of unshakable menace that only years of ostensibly basing your public persona on a character from the Hills Have Eyes can lend you, Oldham in a stilted, distracted prose prognosticates “We are… a violent….race” in a way that’s part cracked Adam West, part sinister William Shatner. I believe those in the know call that the serial killer cadence. In such suspiciously flushed hands the previously adorable sentiment of the song becomes somewhat creepy and Misery like. Why, exactly, do they ‘only have one night’? All the while the a-bit-wet and overwrought original mix has been stripped down to it’s most vital components then reassembled in a more sleek, urgent form, giving it new dancefloor heft. It’s the aural equivalent of dad dancing. If your dad was a proper psycho.

Florence & the Machine – Dog Days Are Over / David Byrne & Fatboy Slim ft. Florence Welch – Here Lies Love

Florence has gone and made a new video for the thrillingly full-throttled Dog Days Are Over, complete with surprise guest appearance of two exiled Navi fashionistas. Poor gals, they just wanted to dress up and dance about a bit when the rest of their tribe were plugging their braids into anything that moved. Shoreditch will have you. Get ready to shout ‘I see you!’ when they pop their heads up and put a smile on their little faces!

I should probably have given the above space to the gently stirring new collaboration Ms Welch has done with David Byrne (he of the Talking heads), with it’s subtle mix of nostalgia and the avant-garde, perfect use of the bombastic qualities of Florence’s voice and instantly familiar quality, as unlike ‘Dog Days’ it’s a song that hasn’t already been in the charts for 53 weeks running. But it doesn’t have a video with blue people in so I don’t know how it expected to keep my attention long enough for me to write about it.

Dog Days Are Over

Here Lies Love

Holy Fuck – Latin America

With their debut album the Vancouver boys were the cause of some rather worried looks, as people instantly clocked that the sheer size of their oscillating instrumentals may verily cause the world to whip off it’s axis like a Victorian spinningtop. An eccentric apocalypse sure, but an apocalypse none the less. Professor Brian Cox almost had to call some people twats again just to calm us all down. Thankfully they’ve been considerate enough to show some restraint on their new single, relaxing and dissipating their sonic muscle into a pool of Neu! style aural murk big enough to get lost in. Its jaws glisten with sleeping potent and whirling melodrama. Like putting your ears in a comfy washing machine.

MGMT – Brian Eno

As you’re probably aware, the band have long trumpeted the fact that they have transcended the earthly frivolities of your ‘Kids’ or ‘Time to Pretend’s, and that their new album will consist entirely of recordings tracking singer Andrew Wingard’s progress in telepathically co-ordinating Brookyln’s pigeons to muster something resembling a frowny face at people who drop litter. Those who’ve now heard it may have been surprised to find out that what this actually sounds like is quite similar to the album tracks off Oracular Spectacular. If you’re disappointed with the newish direction it’s possible you may still have God on your side in the final judgement (the NME are yet to review it), but what we’ve got is good for now: an album of relatively un po-faced, wizardly psycadelica. Have it on standby as a quite lovely soundtrack to sleepy summer evenings. The chosen track is one of the more immediate and upbeat, with a flighty melody and circus-style bells and whistles. Though it still finds time for a silly breakdown bit with burpy keys. Interestingly enough, the chorus’ refrain of always being ‘one step behind Brian Eno’ isn’t a reference to the band’s aspiration to release increasingly inaccessible records with an eye to one day baffling plebs like you and me as successfully as the Roxy Music wunderkind, as has been widely inferred, but to his uncanny ability to always beat Andrew Wingard to the last sausage and bean slice in Greggs. Huh.

Brian Eno

Ennio Morricone – The Ecstasy of Gold

I know, I know, you’re probably getting sick of me banging on about octogenerian Italian film composers. But this is the last one, promise! Most famous for providing music emotive enough to fill in the blanks left by Eastwood’s heroic levels of stoicism on early Spaghetti Westerns, more recently you might have heard Morricone’s compositions racketing up the tension like no original score could in a slew of new action-fests, the likes of Inglorious Bastards, Kick-Ass and…The Boat That Rocked. But more to the point, he’s been appropriated by popular music in a way that almost no other film composer can lay claim: from his avant-garde use of sound effects to incongruously punctuate grandiose arrangements to being as much responsible for defining the sound of early fender guitars as Hank Marvin or the Beach Boys. That’s his otherworldly, mourning harmonica quivering all over the best parts of Beats International’s ‘Dub Be Good to me’ and his  influences kicking sand all over the last Doves and Arctic Monkeys records. Overall his music’s an impossible blend of the militaristic, incidental and quasi-spiritual. With a nice line in guttural chanting. Here’s a video from his recent performance at The Royal Albert Hall in London.

With the release of last year’s EP, the misleadingly named Girls (at the time consisting solely of songwriter Dee Dee) looked set to join the burgeoning ranks of bands who were busily updating the sound of late 80s groups like Shop Assistants and Vaselines. Ramping up their fuzzy punk overtures, they threw out the wistful naivety for a hip aloofness.Happily, on the recently released debut full-length this trap has been nimbly avoided. Not only showcasing a great leap forward in penning a catchy hook, it also rings out with a new level of production that means she (and new line-up) can no longer be dismissed by witterers as a some kind of contrarian pastiche, using considerably advanced means to create a sound more lo-fi than that of idols who bought their equipment from Tandy. Add in a new foregrounding of influences from 60s’ girl groups (they were probably there before but now we can actually hear them) , and ‘I Will Be’ is thirty minutes of cavernous, heartfelt pop.

‘Lines Her Eyes’ has a Ennio Morricone style snakey guitar riff swinging its hips forward as all around it enthrals with perfectly realised Ronettes style throwbacks: percussive gallop, gunshot drums and powerful, self-assured vocals. The result is far from emaciated homage, more compelling entry into the canon. Listen, that bit where it suddenly all comes into focus and Dee Dee’s voice gets more and more strained and tinny as she repeats ‘If she somehow beats me/ Gets to the top before me/ I can’t deny how angry/ I will be”. It’s perfect.