Blondes – ‘Spanish Fly’
(via RCRD LBL)
If you filmed an anonymous man curb-crawling one night and played it back in slow-motion, stretched a minute or so of footage out across five, chances are you’d better notice the emotions flickering upon his face like a fireworks display – all the longing, the fear, the excitement, the shame, the clear but muted compassion. If you wanted a track that was as slowly spectacular, that managed to be simultaneously heated and frigid, as sullen and hopelessly sexual, you’d do well to crawl the way of Blondes. Zach Steinman and Sam Haar met last year at the same Oberlin College Teengirl Fantasy hail from and their sound is a similar one; kraut and house synths blurred into bedroom club washes like the flushed ‘Spanish Fly’. Now ensconced in the Brooklyn studio they share together, a five or six song EP is as imminent as your adoration.
Ghost Hunter – ‘Barbados Island’
(via No Pain In Pop)
Rob Verrecchia’s formative musical experiences came as a be-wigged ‘George Harrison’ in his father’s Beatles tribute band. Is that relevant at all to Ghost Hunter? Perhaps not. I’ll ask him next time he’s online. ‘Barbados Island’ certainly doesn’t sound like anything The Beatles ever let us hear, but then it doesn’t sound like very much else at all, the cool calm of its insular ear candy shattered by slung-down beats and bass globs. A couple of Ghost Hunter releases – one self-titled, the other In The Early Months – are available now at the archives of Enough Records.
Tangles
(via MySpace)
This week’s three are all gentle, but Glaswegian duo Tangles are perhaps gentlest of all, ‘Momo’, ‘Tingaling’ and everything else they touch dissolving into something far more intangible than things you can touch. They say they’re influenced by Saturday night action movies and Vangelis but they remind me more of Vini Reilly and the pastel blues, greens and pinks they used to colour children’s cartoons with, until animators set their crayons to BLARE for the sake of the dead attention spans. Tangles care not for your attention span – instead of trying to capture it, their drift sets about quietly dismantling it. Head to their MySpace, press play and tell me by the end that you’re still anchored somewhere mundane… you will not be. You shall be dismantled.
