New Sounds to My Ear

Whilst in Seattle I asked for some suggestions of bands to listen to and one of them was The Secret Machines , not a new band but I took home the album Now Here is Nowhere and they have a new album released on 14 October according to their web site as well as a free non-album track, Dreaming of Dreaming, available from here .

Back home in the UK the Peeblemeister mentioned Pete and the Pirates and their album Little Death which has gone down well with me. The aforesaid Peeblemeister went to school/college/hung around with Pete in Winchester (presumably sans Pirate at that stage) - they rock along pretty well and have already found favour with the Lad at home.

Paging through my RSS feeds I came across a post from Mike Smiths really rather excellent blog Nothing But Green Lights and his mention of Spolkestra as Mr Smith says ‘Pop music mined in the Broken Social Scene vein. Scottish-folkster speed-jazz? Sure. It’s paced for the marathon, and glides in and out of cavesin search of brass and freshly cut grass to roll around in.’ Definitely worth a listen is the track posted on the blog as well as other material on MySpace.

Finally for now Steve Lamaq mentioned the Summer Sundae festival on his blog and a few people flagged up Project Notion from Melton Mowbray as being the band of the festival. They are indeed very fine judging by their Myspace and if you ask them really nicely they will send out a EP free, gratis and for nothing…just vote for them on the Orange Unsigned web pages from the start of September – seems like a small price to pay. Oh and by the way the free EP duly turned up super fast and is really rather fab

Vampires up the Coast

The sound track (or at least pat of it) to the family trip from San Francisco up the Oregon coast to Seattle was provided by the Vampire Weekend album . I know I am a bit late to the party here but none the less it’s all jolly good stuff. The African-esque guitar work recalled (a tad unfortunately methinks) the Paul Simon/Graceland guitar, and perhaps more positively 1980’s era Zaire music and more recently still the Extra Golden boys. Tracks like Campus and Blake's Got A New Face always caused a sing-along in the hire car.It was one of those rare albums that satisfied us all including my fourteen year old daughter who prefers the likes of Adele (whose album also accompanied us on our trip…) and whilst this really isn’t my thing a couple of tracks like Hometown Glory stood up to repeated listening.