We Stood Like Kings
There’s a post-rock soundtrack to a 100-year-old Communist silent film, a song about noses and… something else in Getintothis’ Patrick Clarke‘s most abstract introducing column yet.
Something strange has been happening to my musical tastebuds this week. Perhaps its the hangover from a weekend of psych-induced emotion comas, or maybe it’s the fact I booked the train ticket back for the wrong day and had to shell out my last £30 of panini money to get back to North London. Maybe I’m just tired of being mugged off by National Rail.
Either way, things are a bit more left field than normal this week, for which I don’t apologise. We begin with the new EP from New York noise pair YVETTE, Time Management. Out tomorrow (October 2) on GODMODE records, it’s the perfect antidote to anyone miffed with HEALTH‘s new slant towards stadium-pop.
Ushered in by the perversely-monikered Calm and Content, machine gun rattles and industrial screeches cascade the brain like a boxing glove on a wheel, Morning Light adding desperate screams of music at its most vital and Rotten Animals teetering at the brink of collapse. Sell it Off is one hell of a closer, relative breathing room put on edge with distant feedback wails before plunging back into juxtaposing intensity.
Belgium’s We Stood Like Kings are a more ‘pleasant’ listen, but backed by a plunging well of depth on new album USSR 1926 (Volchovstroy). With the blend of left-field instrumentals and modern history already brought to the fore thanks to the marvelous Public Service Broadcasting (whose Green Man set was perhaps the best thing I’ve seen all year), the European foursome take similar ideals, yet in place of the unbridled joy of their contemporaries simply layer on the intensity.
A captivating blend of piano-led post rock and bleakly evocative black and white visuals, the two come in undeniable tandem. The tune’s not on Soundcloud so last year’s Berlin 1927 takes its place (I’m sure you get the premise), but both simply have to be seen. You can find the video here.
If that’s not enough conceptual beauty for one week, however, BBC DJ Gemma Cairney celebrated her Body of Songs project with a live broadcast on Radio 3 last Friday, a 10-track compilation of music’s brightest and best contributing a piece each about an organ.Certain parts of the body seem tailor-made for artistic endeavour of course – Bat For Lashes got the skin, Goldie got the brain – but Mercury-nominated Sam Lee decided to plump for the nose.
I’m not even sure if the nose is an organ, but what’s more interesting than even that eons old debate is that Nose Song, created alongside acclaimed composer (and nailed-on copy and paste job) Llywelyn ap Myrddin, is a piece of quite magnetic beauty.
Gently swaying around a sumptuous, rich minimalism of keys and strings and topped by Lee‘s magnificently warm vocal, with help from some intense scientific investigation the pair make the hairiest of nostrils feel utterly, substantially gorgeous.
