After the opening challenge of the 33-second field hymnal of “The Clap” (no smirking at the back, Jenkins), with its fists-raised refrain of “If this is how you want it, ok ok“, the album veers between the hip-shaking soul-tinged stomp of “When We Swam” to the Ben Folds-y indie piano pop of “Cool Yourself” to the folky and wryly self-aware pluckings of the title track, which features a mean fiddle appearance from Anderw Bird.

Thao’s voice is a whole story on its own, with its apparent frailties telling sad tales of wounds to the heart, but with an unmistakeable undercurrent hinting at a solid steel core. On “But What Of The Strangers” she almost whispers some of the lines as if a stiff breeze could shatter it all in an instant, but on “When We Swam” she’s back with “Bring your hips to me”, in charge and indomitable.

All that guff aside though, what truly makes this a bit of an event for me is that you can – and believe me, you will – sit down and listen to it over and over again, and it will take some considerable measure of time before you stop taking new things from it. It’s just not predictable – it doesn’t start off on one path and stick to it, it reacts, and gets knocked off course, and has to get itself straight again, mirroring the themes that went into the album itself. It makes it feel human.

Pitchfork described the closing track “Easy” as ‘boogie-shoegaze’ (no, me neither), and it’s here where the punchline to the album comes – surely there isn’t another line anywhere else as evocative, using as few a number of words as “Sad people dance, too“?

Erland And The Carnival – Erland And The Carnival

In hindsight, it makes you wonder why no-one’s not done it before. While there have been plenty of acts – and it’s all Beirut’s fault – who take a chunk of East European folk rhythms and sounds as their inspiration, I can’t think of any who take it via the carnival sounds that also started there, all tremolo organs and House Of Fun. Since I’ve spent the last few years banging on and on and on about Fanfarlo, perhaps it’s no surprise that this slightly creepier 60s-tinged version of their rich and literate pop appeals so much to me. Tingling, in many ways.

VIDEO: ERLAND & THE CARNIVAL – WAS YOU EVER SEE

Neon Indian – Psychic Chasm

I’ve only become tolerant of 80s-sounding electronics in recent years, since X Lion Tamer’s been beating me over the head with DX7s, but I think that even without him, I’d have been digging on this anyway. What I like most is that Neon Indian could have taken these songs and so easily have been an acceptably oddball guitar band – but the buttons and the retro bloops and the Casiotone drums make it sound – bizarrely – much fresher, as if Buggles had secretly always wanted to be in Mercury Rev. Best of all, they manage to do it without making you feel stupid, so often the pratfall of bands trying to be too clever. A recommend, then – even if the title is enough to turn milk sour at twenty paces.

The Irrepressibles – Mirror Mirror

Performace art and music should only ever be attempted if you are a) Bill Drummond, or b) extraordinarily daft. The KLF they may not be, but this group of semi-orchestral nutbars have got daftness in spades, as well as singer Jamie McDermott’s killer soprano . If only for “Splish! Splash! Sploo!”- simultaneously the most preposterous song title and lyric in the history of music – this record should be purchased immediately.

THE ALBUMS SCRAPING THE SLUSH OFF THEIR BOOTS THIS WEEK:
A Grave With No Name – Mountain Debris
Adam Green – Minor Love
Cocoon – My Friends All Died In A Place Crash
Delphic – Acolyte
Erland And The Carnival – Erland And The Carnival
Major Stars – Return To Form
Malory – Pearl Diver
Mariachi El Bronx – Mariachi El Bronx
Mustasch – Mustasch
Neon Indian – Psychic Chasm
OK Go – Colour Of The Sky
Rhys Chatham – Finishing Line
Sonja Kristina – Harmonics Of Love
Thao with The Get Down Stay Down – Know Better Learn Faster
The Amazing – Code 2 / To Ska And Back
The Irrepressibles – Mirror Mirror
These New Puritans – Hidden
Vampire Weekend – Contra
You Me At Six – Hold Me Down

What made the younger Plan B (real name Ben Drew) stand out head and shoulders above the rest of the scene though, was his clear delight in and skill with instruments as well as the microphone and its accompanying electronics – there were proper and muscular songs in there, as well as razor-sharp verbals and the beats from a knife-fight. This was a British Eminem who could also comfortably play a solo acoustic session. That was the Noughties though, and (skipping past his appearance in Harry Brown alongside Michael Caine) we open the new decade with “Stay Too Long” – and if you’ve ever wondered what Justin Timberlake would sound like if he a) was a fucking hardnut from Forest Gate and b) possessed by Satan, then your sleepless nights are over.

With a fizzing jazz organ, gospel backing singers, tubthumping drums and Plan B’s surprisingly soulful and high-pitched vocal, it opens like a glorious wedding finale, a pure slice of Illinois soul – “Cuz I always stay too long / Long enough for something to go wrong“, he almost croons, and twenty seconds in, it’s still innocent, joyful, slicker than the ice on the roads and – you’re thinking – probably about some kind of relationship guff. But then reality bursts into the room, Plan B’s scarred and throaty delivery of old kicks in, and from then on it’s another riot of drinking, violence, sex and assorted other slices of inner-city mayhem, all set to a soundtrack Berry Gordy would slap a seal of approval on. It’s an uncomfortable mix, musically and thematically, but Plan B’s never really been interested in making the listening easy.

When Dizzee started going all proper pop, I got bored and wandered off somewhere else. Plan B’s gone pop and I’m still fucking terrifed of him. It’s straight from the top shelf, a brutal, brilliant start to the decade’s roster of singles, and a whopping great signpost to the flavour of the new album. Will someone please, please just make sure Calvin Harris doesn’t get within ten feet of the man.

Standard Fare – Fifteen

A biscuit off being Single Of The Week this one. This Sheffield three-piece have been together for a while now, although this is the first time I’ve come across them, and with a single “Dancing” out last year (video below) on Thee Sheffield Recording Company and an album due later in 2010 following this single, it looks like they’re finally getting busy. Normally, indiepop can just all blend together in a twitching great pile of steaming vintage clothing. Standard Fare seem somehow to make it all seem a bit more… well, grown up. It’s like a band with years under their belt who have decided to have a bit of fun for a change – there are some astute songwriting chops in here, and no mistake. This single relates an infatuation with a no-doubt pale and pretty teenage indie boy, with short, choppy Housemartins-y guitars, and Emma’s vocal veering between spoken-with-a-raised-eyebrow and a banshee wail, it’s just one of those records that’s fucking right-now immediate. Charming, charming stuff. The album’s called The Noyelle Beat, and it’s out in March – brilliantly for me, they’re also playing SXSW, so you can guarantee we’ll be trailing this lot around like baby bloody ducks.

VIDEO: STANDARD FARE – DANCING

The Fresh And Onlys – Second One To Know

From Sheffield indiepop to San Francisco garage psych, with The Fresh And Onlys. Taking a whopping cue from the 60s – specifically, and to an almost bonkers level, The Who – The Fresh And Only nevertheless still manage to come up with a song that’s catchy enough to cut through the rigidly fashionable wave of ‘cooler’ records this week., despite sounding like it genuinely was recorded forty-plus years ago. I always find bands that ape such an old sound to such a huge degree to be a bit weird – in this case though, it’s actually just plain old refreshing.

Campfires – Stormy Late Fall

Thought I’d listened to a taster of this but – in fact – it genuinely is only one minute and eighteen seconds long. Admittedly, it’s 78 seconds of booming and crashing drums, clanging and vastly distorted guitars and vocals being beamed in by phone filtered through a plane crash, so it’s not exactly light on substance. It is also deeply, deeply addictive. I must have listened to it twenty times today, and it’s genuinely made me question why all songs aren’t this short. Their lo-fi shoegaze (honestly, it’s a good idea),  all comes together like My Bloody Valentine channeling Japanther, which I think you’ll agree is pretty a tasty proposition. The only thing that’ll get annoying is getting up every minute to get the needle back to the start.

THE SINGLES THAT’RE WARDING OFF THE COLD THIS WEEK:
Campfires – Stormy Late Fall
Fresh And Onlys – Second One To Know
Fyfe Dangerfield – She Needs Me
Good Shoes – Under Control
Lyrebirds – Closer
Plan B – Stay Too Long
Standard Fare – Fifteen
Voice Of The Seven Thunders – The Burning Mountain
White Rabbits – Percussion Gun

With the various members of eagleowl sticking their fingers into their various other pies over the last year since the glorious For The Thoughts You Never Had EP, this is the first recorded output of 2009. Since timing is everything though, on this evidence, it’s been well worth the wait. Amid the jingles and Christmas singles old and new that infest everything with a speaker during December, this is a roasting fire, this is friends and wine and quiet and thought. This, thankfully, is about as far from ‘Jingle Bell Rocks’ as you can be.

There’s no musical departure from the eagleowl norm here, just lashings and lashings of their drowsy, dreamy, folk-induced haze, with the title track’s opening strings slowly putting the brakes on the nightmares before Christmas, and settling you gently back into calm. This won’t raise your pulse – quite the opposite – but sometimes that’s what you need, without knowing it.

Eagleowl might have come out from a year’s quiet hibernation just as the rest of us are settling in for the winter, but they’ve brought with them a perfect soundtrack to the dark nights.

Sleep The Winter is launched TONIGHT (Friday Dec 11th) at The Bowery (2 Roxburgh Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9SU) from 7.30. Guaranteed to be the best fiver you’ve spent in a while. Get there early too, there’ll be special guests, and since eagleowl know everyone, they’ll be dead good…

Oh, and the single will be available from select independent record
stores, and to order via www.eagleowlattack.co.uk and www.kilterschmilter.co.uk from Dec 14th with the second eagleowl EP due early 2010. Marvellous.

In case your screen-addled brains have forgotten the dim and distant events of 2005, Comenchi were then currently busy smashing the bricks off the walls all over London with their increasingly ferocious live shows. A boy-girl guitarist-drummer set-up with Akiko’s underwear often flashing in time to her alternatingly childlike/banshee voice attack, I often thought flames were about to start coming from their eyes, never mind the PA. Since then, Akiko was then in Pre, became a fully-fledged member of The Big Pink, and… so much for all that Comanechi fun, we thought. Nuh-uh.

Crime Of Love is, preposterously, the debut LP then, and is made up of a few oldies, but time can’t wither a noise this ferocious, and it’ll chew your hair out and still leave you smiling. From the opening thirty-second doomy squalling chaos of ‘Prologue’, to the dying droning ending of ‘R.O.M.P’, it’s a cataclysmic torrent of wide-eyed mayhem, full of challenge, from the manic ‘Rabbit Hole’ and its schizophrenic line “I want to go down the rabbit hole / I want to feel like a beautfiul girl” to ‘Naked’ and the slightly lunatic “I want to be naked / Wash my body with a toothbrush”.

Parts go doomy, parts just go squalling and savage, lots is straight-up Bikini-Kill-flavoured high velocity punk, and some of it even gets within a spasm’s distance of danceable, but its starting point is animal, visceral release, a firehose of unfettered rage, love, confusion, joy and pain. It’s a towering, towering album that’ll leave you in slightly terrified awe – and absolutely knackered. Wow.

Yorkshire’s Blue Roses – with Laura Grove as the driving force – always makes me think that real, genuine care has gone into the music, not in a calculated way, just a genuine, almost wide-eyed love of music.

The four tracks here are just as sumptuous as the album, managing to be quiet and understated but solid and three-dimensional all at the same time. The opening title track starts off with some charming but probably quite difficult folky guitars, and Laura’s quietly acrobatic vocal and, without harping on about it, is just a delight. If you’ve missed The Sundays, you’ll be bleeding from the ears with joy about now. There’s also a version of ‘Doubtful Comforts’ with The Grammatics, but we also get two songs not on the debut album, with ‘Anyone Who Knows What Love Is (Will Understand)’ seeing Laura covering New Orleans cult soul legend Irma Thomas and going  enjoyably Dusty Springfield in the process, and ‘First Frost Night’ which is way more staccato and offbeat and somehow Scandinavian than the silky smoothness of the rest of the EP but manages not to sound out of place.

Despite the presence of two already-released album tracks on here, this is a real pleasure for the cold nights ahead.

ALBUMS I’D LOOK AT CURIOUSLY THIS WEEK

• Bear In Heaven – Beast Rest Forth Mouth
• Blakroc – Blakroc
• Canterbury – Thank You
• Comanechi – Crime Of Love
• Homostupids – The Load
• Old Time Radio – Sketches For Another Christmas Songbook
• Rain Machine – Rain Machine
• Talons – Songs For Babes
• The Dutchess And The Duke – Sunset / Sunrise

SINGLES & EPs I’D PROBABLY TAKE A PUNT ON:

• As Tall As Lions – The Circles EP
• Blue Roses – Does Anyone Love Me Now
• Frankie And The Heartstrings – 12.09.09 (Live Mini-Album)
• Race Horses – Man In My Mind
• Washed Out – Life Of Leisure
• Boy Of Girl – Hot Chocolate Boy
• Camera Obscura – The Blizzard
• Darwin Deez – Constellations
• French For Cartridge – Oooh!
• Goldhawks – Running Away
• Javelin – Javelin
• Le Corps Mince De Francoise – Something Golden
• Mumford And Sons – Winter Winds
• The Detachments – Circles
• The Drums – I Felt Stupid
• The Lost Soul Crusade – This Is The Blues
• The Notwist – Come In

As a brief (and pretty lazy) introduction, Jail Weddings are essentially a dirty Polyphonic Spree with a love of Berry Gordy, a tatooed and badly-behaved congregation of many parts, making a motown-y, Spector-ish racket that’s distinctly Los Angeles, wide-eyed and in thrall to its forebears, but dressing and talking like its peers. A twitchy and mesmerising Hollywood-based Glasvegas if you like, or a 1950s Distillers. Wait, neither of them sound as good as I meant to – let’s start again.

Basically, having spun through this one more than a few times now, I’m still hearing stuff I love in here – Mekons, Spector, Ronnettes, Arcade Fire, Springsteen – but the more I listen to it, the more I get the feeling it’s the soundtrack to the noir-est of all Chandler novels that never got made into a film. It’s like it fell straight off the silverest of screens, and it’s so rich and velvety and filling it should come with a packet of Rennie.

From the opening jangles of ‘Cheat On Your New Lover With Me’ – which may just be the best opening track for a wedding disco of all time – right through to the last line of the final track ‘I Am Fucking Crazy’ (“And now that you know, what are you going to do?“), it’s imaginative, evocative, and a flat-out great time from top to bottom. Grand, grand stuff.

Sparrow & The Workshop – Into The Wild

This mini-LP’s out this week, and it’s a little cracker, too. Opener ‘You’ve Got It All’ starts off with the gentlest of strums, some delicious ticklish harmonies before exploding into the sort of quietly towering Fairport Convention-isms we’ve come to love from them, with Jill O’Sullivan’s shivering vocal straight of 1960s California (despite being from Chicago), and the faintly martial racket from the rest of the band. It was a bloody close call to record of the week (although Jail Weddings just nick it), but this should be on your shelf right now, and no mistake. Quietly stirring stuff.

Beans On Toast – Standing On A Chair

Despite being right up there with the stupidest names of all time, it makes a certain kind of sense – you know,for example, you’re not getting a Muse record here. It’s refreshingly honest, straightforward stuff, more often than not just the plain-spoken (VERY London) singer and a couple of instruments, ranting in song about whatever’s hacking him off about the world at that moment. This 50-track (FIFTY!) double CD is a collection of all the stuff that’s been put out to date, and is actually a proper hoot from start to end. Mumford & Sons’ Ben Lovett produced it, plus there’s drop-ins from Emmy The Great, Frank Turner, some of The Holloways and so forth, which give you an idea, but it’s no vanity project. Despite the lo-fi strumming, it’s a riot of wit, righteous anger and nonsense. Amid songs that daydream about marrying Emmy The Great, that ponder a US government featuring Mr.T as Vice-President, or that worry about fancying a sixteen-year-old Laura Marling (“if only I was ten years younger and I wasn’t going bald”), the bulk of it is incadescent with rage at almost everything in the world that’s shit – George Bush, obesity, Apple computers, the smoking ban, and the price of rice. If you’ve ever thought how much fun it would be to mate Derek & Clive and Billy Bragg, it’s your lucky day – it’s brilliant, it’ll make you laugh out loud, and (best of all) it’s absolutely fucking spot-on.

The List Of Stuff We’d Have A Shifty At In Record Shops This Week:

Beans On Toast – Standing On A Chair
Beat The Radar – To The City From The Sea
Eugene And The Lizards – Glue
Jail Weddings – Inconvenient Dreams
Jesca Hoop – Hunting My Dress
Mark E Smith And Ed Blaney – The Train Part Three
Memory Tapes – Seek Magic
Mr James Bright – Big Sounds From Small Spaces
Pants Yell! – Received Pronunciation
Pomegranates – Everybody Come Outside!
Sparrow & The Workshop – Into The Wild
The Howling Hex – Rogue Moon
The Tailors – Come Dig Me Up
Topaz Rags – Capricorn Born Again
Various – My Estrogeneration
Wetdog – Frauhaus