“Population Density” is the new single from Breton, which comes complete with the bands signature attack and one seriously epic bridge. The UK collective from London will release the track, along with “Governing Correctly” plus Heavy P remix, on November 5th via FatCat Records. The band also recently dropped a new video for the track which you can check out below. One thing for sure, fresh off their successful stint in the States, “Population Density” is one way to keep the momentum going. Keep your radars tuned for more to come from the prolific Breton Labs crew.
Team B3SCI recently got to chatting with guitar and synthsmith K B B from hotly tipped, Oakland based quartet, Trails and Ways. Back-and-forth we went about geography, the band’s explosion to the heights of the blogosphere, and even philosophical aesthetics. For those of you in Los Angeles, you can catch Trails and Ways at The Bootleg on Thursday, October 25th for their first ever gig in town. Tickets and details for the show here, and take a look at our conversation with the band below.
B3SCI: What inspired the formation of Trails and Ways, and is there a particular vision behind the tropical rhythms and melodies that the band explore?
T&W: We all knew each other living in the student cooperative houses at Berkeley; after graduating, Emma and I lived in Spain and Brazil, respectively, and came home full of little skeletons of songs. Quirk and I started playing shows in the middle of 2011, and Emma and Hannah joined us later that year.
B3SCI: You guys have mentioned Jorge Ben and Joao Gilberto as influences. We love Brazilian
music. What can you tell us about the impact the music of that country has had on the band as writers and as people, etc…?
T&W: When I lived there, the music was a way for me to understand something more whole than what I got through the colander of words. If I were to make a list of what really left an impression on me from Brazilian music, that list would start: how the old samba or forro songs are cultural bedrocks to the point where everybody at the street parties sings along to every word; how the music isn’t about a spectacle of famous musicians, but about amateurs showing up at bars and playing the hits as a community ritual; how Joao, in “Corcovado”, says “que lindo”.
B3SCI: There’s so many textures and colors throughout your recordings. What’s the most unique instrument that you’ve ever used on one of your tracks?
T&W: The bass drum on our cover of “Animal” is a sample of Quirk rhythmically dropping a large book.
B3SCI: No secrets that Trails and Ways has taken the music blogosphere by storm. How has this effected the band, it’s career and what’s next?
T&W: Definitely feels like it’s opened a lot of doors to us, and it’s great to have felt that a range of folks out there are touched by what we’re doing. We’re cruising along on recording our album right now, getting our live act super on-point, and getting set for an LA tour.
B3SCI: What else can you tell us about the album?
T&W: We’re working on it now, it’s called Trilingual and it’s about what language can and can’t say, and it’ll be out when it’s ready.
B3SCI: Any more details on touring?
T&W: We’re touring to LA 10/25, with a few other Southern California dates around that. We play SF like once a month, so hopefully everybody here knows that! We aim to do some serious touring behind Trilingual when it’s done, so NYC, we’ll see yall in 2013.
B3SCI: When the band isn’t making sun drenched tunes, what do the members of Trails and Ways find themselves doing to bide their time?
T&W: Quirk and Emma are surfers, Hannah and I rockclimb, also Emma and Hannah urban homestead and paint, Quirk and I also work in the clean energy bizness, ACTIVE LIFESTYLES.
B3SCI: Where does Trails and Ways see itself in five years? Where has the band’s evolution lead to?
T&W: Where we wanna be in five years is feminist socialist utopia.
B3SCI: We loved the Marxicized cover of Miguel’s “Sure Thing” (which is really great song btw). Where’d the idea come from to do that with it?
T&W: I’d been living over the summer at a house full of community organizers who loved R&B and Grace Lee Boggs with about the same heft; we blasted Miguel all the time. I knew if we were going to cover an R&B standard I wanted it to speak more from our Oakland reality than Miguel’s LA original.
B3SCI: Troy from our crew studied aesthetics in college. Theodor Adorno’s notion of pseudo-individualization is pretty apt in describing the current indie milieu. Any thoughts?
T&W: Shit, you’re trying to get me to write an essay. Indie music has become part and parcel of the culture industry; it’s a DIY outsourcing of the formerly-studio-centralized songwriting/recording process, and it just leads to nominally quirkier pop music that is no less challenging to the capitalist reproduction of art than is Katy Perry (much respect to her though, she worked damn hard to get what she’s got). This makes me think about something Mike Davis asked in regards to the crass commercialization of NWA; “If the dream factories are equally as happy to manufacture nightmare as idyll, what happens to the oppositional power of documentary realism…?” Indie music does documentation of cool subcultures and bizarre minds, and the culture industry has found a way to package up and resell nearly all of it, from Nirvana pitch-dark or Bombay Bicycle Club sugary. In deep ways, the music business model is changing to make advertising the most lucrative source of revenue for most young indie artists. Advertising becomes dependent on indie music to do its social networking—to make you say, “Whoa cool song, this product must be targeted towards people like me.” And the artists become slyly dependent on the ad revenue, and maybe unconsciously start to make pseudo-individualized hooks and safely quirky production choices that suit 30-second TV spots. In the long run, there is only one solution; public financing of art, like Sweden and Brazil do already in a limited way. In the short term, what’s a band to do? To come back to Mike Davis (can you tell I’m transfixedly reading City of Quartz right now in preparation for our LA tour?), I think we need to make art that is not “advertising art that advertises itself as art that hates advertising”. I don’t know exactly how to always do that, but I think you start by making music that is explicit and proud in its politics, and then by setting clear lines as a band as to what kind of advertising and business bullshit you will not ever take part in.
This near-perfect garage pop tune stormed Australia last year and wound up #7 for 2011 on the highly-watched Triple J Hottest 100. San Cisco are uber-young and come from the Aussie town of Freemantle. If you are hooked on hooks, you will probably love the clean guitar intro as well as the boy/girl interchange on the vocals. Awkward is the title of their EP, which drops in the US October 23. They will be at CMJ this week and then will celebrate their record release next Tuesday at The Echo in Los Angeles. By Bruce Rave
*Check out Bruce’s Moheak Radio “Go Deep” show on Sunday nights 7-9 pm Pacific, 10-12 am Eastern, 3-5 am GMT. Also, for the benefit of you Europeans the show will now be replayed Wednesday mornings 2-4a Pacific/5 -7a Eastern, so they too can hear it at a civilized time. Listen to past shows at Bruce’s blog and follow Bruce on Twitter.
With their signature blend of R&B fused guitar pop, it’s no secret that this Manchester based collective are causing a stir of excitement in the indie rock world. Title track and new single, “Sex”, from their upcoming EP release, has been in rotation here and across the blogosophere for the last year or so in it’s demo form; with the official single version recently debuted by famed BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe. More so, the rest of the band’s new Sex EP is equally infectious, with highlights including mid-tempo grooves on “Undo” and the melodic climax of “You”. The Sex EP sees release on November 19th, it is the second installment of the band’s current three EP release cycle, culminating to the band’s debut album with release expected sometime in 2013. Check out our Q&A with the band below.
B3SCI: How did The 1975 form and come to be, and for how long has the band been playing together as a whole?
The 1975: We met at school. We kinda started out of boredom. There was no real scene in our town at that time and we were all looking for some way of expressing ourselves I suppose. Some woman called Sheila started this run of gigs for underage kids (I think she was like a hippy council worker) and they soon turned into a riot. We would go and play there, doing covers of punk songs and ghostbusters etc. It was so drunken and personal. After doing that for a while we wrote a song and thought ‘Let’s just do this! This is well better than going to school or work. So we went under loads of names, made loads of different music and now we’re here – as The 1975.
B3SCI: Manchester has a legendary history of influential bands, was there anything in particular about this history that was influential to The 1975 in it’s formative years?
The 1975: Not really no. We met at school around Manchester – but I was born in London and George in Brussels etc. so our personal affiliation with Manchester and our understanding of it’s tribalist attitude towards music came quite late on. I grew up on R&B and Soul for example, as opposed to New Order. But as a city, it is the setting to all of our music in my head. It was the girls and endless gigs and general vibe of the place that bled into our music.
B3SCI: In the new video for your single “Sex”, your rehearsal space is dressed everywhere with iconic posters of artists. Did you guys play any role in the selection of what we see?
The 1975: Yes, all of it. That’s our rehearsal room and has been forever. We’ve never left it. We just thought it would be cool to shoot it in that room because it is essentially a visual representation of what we’re about. It wasn’t a contrived idea – just thought it would be real.
B3SCI: Some lyrical topics from The 1975 seem to explore concepts of new experience and discovery, yet the name of the band itself, and even musically, the band seems to hint towards a maturity beyond its years. What does the concept of time mean to The 1975?
The 1975: I think people are obsessed with time. That sounds a bit under revised – but what I’m talking about is our obsession with decades. We like everything to fit into our predetermined timeline of what we know and expect. It makes things easier to digest and helps us see cultural movements as ‘that time’. This can breed a lot of predictable art though – be it music or whatever. So our band take the attitude of ‘all bets are off’. That’s why we never really take contemporary music into consideration. Not to say we don’t listen to it, of course we do, we just don’t worry about ‘what’s going on’. I reckon timeless music is created by people that aren’t thinking about time.
B3SCI: The band is in the process of releasing a series of three EPs leading up to the release of your debut album in 2013. Is there a story behind these initial releases, or a story that you are trying to tell with them?
The 1975: I wouldn’t say that there is a narrative running from the first e.p. through to the last. But there is a definite theme. Sex, Love, Drugs and Fear I suppose. The songs on Sex are all about passing moments. Moments that we don’t analyse at the time – only to understand them retrospectively. Where as Facedown has a more assertive attitude. I think that’s what separates those two records. For the third, we’re not quite finished.
B3SCI: Is there a story or reason that the band has decided to collaborate with producer Mike Crossey on the forthcoming full-length album?
The 1975: He got in touch with us and said he really wanted to do our album. We were initially a bit apprehensive because we had always said that we were going to produce our debut album – same as we did with the E.p.’s. But we went over to Liverpool to meet him and shook hands on the whole thing that day. It was very easy. We are now in the studio with Mike as a co-producer and it seems to be going well. Very, very well.
B3SCI: Both your new Sex EP and it’s predecessor Facedown EP explore ambient rock concepts. Is there a philosophy or perspective that The 1975 has about ambient composition? Are there any particulars about ambient or atmospheric music that the band find inspiring?
The 1975: I suppose it was Sigur Ros who first really blew me away. I remember hearing their first album and then totally emerging myself in all things Eno. Ambient music really speaks to me. I think it’s because I first fell in love with music through film at a very early age – John Hughes movies etc. Ambient music at it’s best commands you how to feel without the use of words – I think that’s really powerful. More powerful in fact.
B3SCI: The band seems to have a strong affinity for a great pop melody. To you guys, what makes for a great pop song?
The 1975: Well that is something we’re really trying to explore at the moment. Sometimes you release a piece of music, or maybe play it to a friend, with the opinion that is really left field or something you’ve created with no intention of it being accepted as a ‘big’ song . And then it is. I used to think it was just all about structure and chords, but it’s really not. A good pop song is about how it makes you feel at face value – on the first listen. If it doesn’t take you some where immediately – through its message or instrumentation or whatever it is – it will simply be lost on you.
B3SCI: What artists or influences do you have which fans might find as a surprise? Any guilty pleasures you’d like to share?
The 1975: Well my iTunes at the moment is pretty much mid 90’s R&B. D’angelo, Boyz II Men, TLC, Brian Mcknight etc. But I’m not guilty for any of that. We find it hard to dislike music because it’s soppy or not perceived as ‘cool’. If you’re a good song writer you can find influence in any type of music whether it’s cool or not. But to be fair, Dixie Chicks just came on as I was saying that. I do feel a bit guilty about that.
B3SCI: If The 1975 could tour with any band, who would it be? (PS…you can hop into our B3SCI time machine if you like for any artist past, present, or future..)
The 1975: It would be : Michael Jackson – History Tour 1996. I was at that show in Wembley. I would have been about 7 years old. It was one of the most memorable and important experiences I think I’ve ever had. Seeing him perform catalysed a real drive within me from an early age. So that show would be awesome to fly back to and be part of. But also Talking Heads – Stop Making Sense Tour. Just cos they’re the fucking coolest. And David Byrne with that huge lamp was genius.
B3SCI: When will we finally get to see The 1975 performing in the US?
The 1975: Next year, if everything goes according to plan. We’re looking to get out there for SXSW. We might stick around and play some shows. We can’t wait actually.
B3SCI: What else should fans expect to hear from The 1975 in the year to come? Any surprises that you can share with us?
The 1975: If i knew, I would tell you. But I’m locked away in the studio. All I do know is that there is going to be A LOT of shows. And an album. A big album.
Last week UK songstress Ellie Goulding released the anticipated follow up to her massively successful 2010 album, Lights. The new sophomore album Halcyon continues it’s path down the familiar road of introspective pop and hopeful emotions that we’ve grown to love from Ms. Goulding. Recorded near Ellie’s home town in Hay Valley, songs on the release reflect heavily on the loneliness, inspiration, adventures and transitional experiences of the past few years in the songwriter’s life. Of course, during this time of which we were all hearing about Ellie’s performance at the Royal wedding, her constant tours and collaborations, and kicking it with new boyfriend Skrillex, but her soul has been with this creating record. As Ellie puts it, “loneliness has been the biggest influence on this record; I feel like what I do is lonely,” yet she says, “I still feel like there’s this force, pushing me to do this.” Halcyon is a gem of 2012, just take a listen.
B3SCI is giving away a shiny new copy of the Halcyon LP on vinyl to one lucky reader. To enter the contest, simply hit our inbox and let us know that you’d like to be entered in the Ellie drawing. We will be picking our winner at random this weekend, so keep an eye on your inbox! Godspeed madscientists!
Ellie Goulding performs to a sold-out crowd at the Troubadour in L.A. tomorrow night (10/16) and will also be performing at Amoeba Records in Hollywood on Wednesday (10/17).
This new UK band just emerged from the studio with Alex Kopranos of Franz Ferdinand. Their Here We Are album will be out in the US this coming week. This fun tune is retro, dancy, and hooky. The title alone got me. Haven’t we all really wanted to be with the significant other of a good friend? By Bruce Rave
*Check out Bruce’s Moheak Radio “Go Deep” show on Sunday nights 7-9 pm Pacific, 10-12 am Eastern, 3-5 am GMT. Also, for the benefit of you Europeans the show will now be replayed Wednesday mornings 2-4a Pacific/5 -7a Eastern, so they too can hear it at a civilized time. Listen to past shows at Bruce’s blog and follow Bruce on Twitter.
London UK act Peter and Kerry deliver a pop tune of the finest quality in “Lay Me Down”. The song’s sweet & breezy dual-sung melodies (both of them sing! and sing well!) are a really nice complement to the more complicated (awesome) business afoot in the rhythm tracks. Give “Lay Me Down” your attention below.
If you have any sort of affinity towards the brilliance of rock music in the early-mid 90s then you can’t deny “Penny Arcade” by new London collective Victor Talking Machine. These young lads certainly know their way around the last great guitar rock era, and most importantly know so with a great tune. We’re especially loving the Smashing Pumpkins style arrangements and Oasis’ Definitely Maybe tinged vocals. The psychedelic indie rock group have genuienly found themselves a recipe that’s been known to rule charts. Be sure to keep Victor Talking Machine on your radar of bands to watch for and check out the band’s debut EP Had Enough which drops this November.
Welcome to Lily and the Tigers, the six-piece haunted folk band I met at a house party in Echo Park. Lead singer Casey Hood was strumming some good stuff when a skinny chick in a white dress started cranking Pit Bull on the communal iHome. I grabbed an album from Casey and bounced. It’s called Hiding ‘til Dawn, their sophomore release, and has been my folky go-to for the last couple weeks. Check out “No Whiskey in My Coffee”, and read my full-length interview with the band over at Cardboard Smile. By Alex Mitchell
Check out the haunting folk tune “Stinging Nettle, Honeysuckle” from Wisconsin duo Blessed Feathers, excerpted here from their upcomin “Peaceful Beasts in an Ocean of Weeds”, due Oct. 16. We’re into it.
Big day today for the young and much lauded electronic producer Zedd. The German maestro seems top of the world, and today not only unleashes an epic music video for new single “Stache” (see below) but also his brand new and debut album, Clarity drops via Interscope Records. The album we should mention is incredible, a sheer EDM knockout that also features highlighting collaborations from the likes of Foxes, Ellie Goulding and Bright Lights to name a few.
If this isn’t enough excitement for you in one day, then B3SCI is adding to the celebration with a giveaway to one lucky reader for a copy of his new Clarity album on CD and a pair of tickets to see Zedd perform with Porter Robinson live in NYC this Friday, October 5th! To enter the contest, simply hit our inbox and let us know that you’d like to be entered in the Zedd drawing. We will be picking our winner at random Thursday morning, so keep an eye on your inbox! Godspeed madscientists!
Montreal-based quartet Tops is modern day AM gold. In “Easy Friends”, from the UK/EU release of their debut album Tender Opposites, vocalist Jane Penny cuts through a hazy, synthed-out dream calling back to the disco of the 70’s as she slowly builds from a gentle buoyancy to what you would have to call – and affectionately so – an almost shrill climax and then dexterously drops back into a balmy bossa nova to ease you out of the track. Tops has an uncommon way of blending accessible pop and the avant-garde into a seamless coupling. The unadorned, pastoral attitude of the band is what I find most attractive; it doesn’t make you like it, it lets you like it. By Aaron Meyer
