SINGLES ROUND-UP:
2010 Thus Far, Part # 1.


The Blanche Hudson Weekend –
Letters To Daddy EP (Squirrel)
Rats In The Cellar EP (Oddbox)

You’ve got to love people who stick to their story. When The Manhattan Love Suicides split up last year, Caroline (vox) and Darren (guitar) seem to have scarcely batted an eyelid before ploughing on regardless as The Blanche Hudson Weekend. That The Blanche Hudson Weekend sound exactly like The Manhattan Love Suicides with a slightly less driving rhythm section can scarcely be seen as a surprise, but the continuity is welcome. You know just what you’re getting here; a tumultuous mixture of C86 melodicism, vicious fuzz, exploitation movie imagery and an endless series of pop readymades with the DNA of the J&MC’s ‘Darklands’ sunk deep into their bones. The trash affectations are cute, the noise is great, the tunes are killer - it’s always a good time.

Each 7” features a different portrait of Joan Crawford as the eponymous Ms Hudson in 1962’s “Whatever Happened To Baby Jane?” on the front, but otherwise they’re near-identical, so make sure you don’t buy the same one twice. By way of differentiation, the Squirrel disc is black and the Oddbox one is red. If you’ve only got £3.99 to spare, “Letters To Daddy” is probably my pick, simply because it’s got more fuzz. “Rats..” concentrates more on the quieter numbers, but it is certainly not without its charms, particularly the longer cut “Only Snow”, which brings in some dissonant Cale/Conrad style viola for a low-key drone/jangle blowout. Very banana album, very nice. We’re in safe hands.

http://www.myspace.com/theblanchehudsonweekend
http://www.squirrelrecords.co.uk
http://oddboxrecords.com/

Flight - Feels So Good b/w In The Morning Light (HoZac)

Another welcome pat on the head from Hozac, Flight sounds like the ghosts of some muscular ‘70s rock radio hits with distant hints of Knack/Huey Lewis era new wave, fed through a hazy ketamine vortex of slowed reactions, tape hiss, decay-heavy distortion and underwater wobble.

If you’d told me five years ago that Ariel Pink was gonna be such a massive influence on the sound of the next generation of American bands, well, I just wouldn’ta believed ya. I bet it must speak of something all deep n’ sociological, the increasing prevalence of this whole ‘familiar tunes / dislocated sound’ thing? The way it’s gone from being regarded as some bizarre affectation to sounding completely natural, just in space of a year or two? I think I can see it, somewhere, out of the corner of my eye; instinctively, it all makes sense.

I bet as far as the guys in Flight are concerned, they’re just making cool songs, and recording them the way they think sounds good. And indeed they are. I wish I had the brains to figure these trends out on advance – I could clean up making bets with, I dunno, Byron Coley or someone. Anyway, listening to this Flight record is extremely pleasurable. Whether it will be so in five years time remains to be seen, but I’ll listen to my eerie, prefabricated nostalgia in the here and now and enjoy it, damn you.

http://www.myspace.com/inflighttunes
http://www.hozacrecords.com/

French Kissing – Oh Suzanne (Sleep All Day)

With one foot in the whole reverbed-out beach-trash aesthetic and the other dancing ‘cross the mildewed shores of ol’ fashioned garage revivalism, London’s questionably monikered French Kissing knock it outta the freakin’ park with the A-side of this debut 7”. An absolutely perfect nugget of catchy garage-pop craftsmanship, mixing a bubblegum early Beach Boys vibe with just a touch of surly Medway Beatles worship, I loved it on first myspace play and pre-ordered the single immediately. Come the third play, I wasn’t so sure, but by the sixth play I’d had to time reflect on how fucking awesome and weird the guitar solo sounds (solo of the year thus far??), and how swell the group’s effortless “I Get Around” groove is. Great song, great sound, great playing. Chug-a-lug!

Flipside “The Lonely Streets of Cairo” is a bit of a bummer by comparison, a rather fragrant novelty item hinging on endless repetition of the old ‘belly dancing theme’ music (y’know; da-da-dow-dow-dow, da-da dow-dow dow-dow-dow etc). It sounds a bit like if the grandchildren of all the guys from The Downliners Sect got together and formed a band inspired by all their granddads’ *worst* songs. Still, only the B side to a cracking A.

Oh, and while I’m needling them, that girl-kissing-dog cover is pretty gross too, and not even an art credit to help shoo away the suspicion that they just grabbed some picture of a girl in an embarrassing-out-of-context pose off flickr and stuck it on the front of their record – tsk, kids today.

http://www.myspace.com/frenchkissingband
http://sleepalldayrecords.bigcartel.com/

Hanoi Janes – Across The Sea b/w Skeleton Girl (Captured Tracks)

I picked up this one up momentarily thinking that it might be a solo record by Oneida’s Hanoi Jane, conveniently forgetting that I’d heard no mention of such a thing existing, and that he’s gone by ‘Baby Jane’ for about a decade. But it looks cool, and it has a song called ‘Skeleton Girl’, so I bought it anyway, cos that’s the kinda crazy guy I am.

Turns out The Hanoi Janes are a bunch of German Phil Spector obsessives, doing what modern day Phil Spector obsessives do best and sitting in their basement with the laptop trying to make their indie guitar band sound like him. Well it’s a damn sight better than sounding the way most indie guitar bands sound these days I suppose.

To their credit, ‘Across The Sea’ takes the Spector pastiche thing well beyond the realms of the standoffish, incorporating chiming bells and a ‘do daa do….’ chorus line to rather nice effect. ‘Skeleton Girl’ meanwhile tones it all down a bit, but wins cos it’s a better song – a real good one actually, a veritable stormer even. With so much great, ragged, classically-informed pop-rock kicking around at the moment, it’s hard to anything more to say about it beyond the Spector thing, but it sure is great.

So that’s Hanoi Janes for you I guess. Take it or leave it. I’m gonna take it.

http://www.myspace.com/thehanoijanes
http://capturedtracks.com/

The Manhattan Love Suicides – Dandelion Radio Sessions CD (Oddbox)

Lovingly presented by Oddbox in both stereo and mono mixes (instant props for this brilliantly impractical gesture of music geek dedication), these sessions for internet radio station Dandelion are chiefly notable for presenting what I guess are maybe, probably, the Manhattan Love Suicides’ last recordings. They are secondarily notable for establishing the band as maybe, probably, the first to ever cover “I’m Not A Young Man Anymore”, the ‘lost’ Velvet Underground song included on the Gymnasium ’67 bootleg. And if The Manhattans don’t quite manage to nail Sterling Morrison’s sick central guitar riff or match the gloriously fucked Lou/Sterl interplay of the instrumental sections, they do at least capture the churning, circular groove of the piece perfectly, and prove that a little bit of faux-Rallizes feedback goes a long way.

For thoughts on the other five songs here, see my Blanche Hudson Weekend write-up above, but needless to say, they’re all really good. How many songs that sound like ‘Head On’ is it possible to write before those chords collapse in on themselves? Who cares. Just keep ‘em coming. I prefer the mono, but then I would, wouldn’t I? The in-the-red bleed around the edges of the guitar sound on the loud bits is SWEET. I suspect maybe the constant feedback arcs are a bit contrived, but then what do I know about recording cool feedback? (Not half as much as I’d like to know, unfortunately.)

http://www.myspace.com/themls
http://oddboxrecords.com/

Myelin Sheaths – Do The Mental Twist EP (HoZac)

Whammo! That seems like the natural way to begin a review of this one. I don’t know what a ‘myelin sheath’ is, but I bet it’s something horrible. As for as Myelin Sheaths the band are concerned, I know they come from Alberta, Canada, and I know they’re something wonderful. I guess they’re not really doing anything special here, except, y’know, just plain ROCKING, flying the flag for rampaging, female-led punk rock, utterly blasted compression/distortion, good vibes and a gleeful love of fun songs and chaotic noise.

“I Don’t Wanna Have An Operation” is the kind of pure Ramonery that never goes out of style, while “Do The Mental Twist” veers more toward that ‘psychotic garage’ kinda vibe the title would suggest and “Drugstore/Pharmacy” gives us a more sustained burst of gut-busting racket, with an unexpectedly pleasant dose of stand up drumming and repetitive jangle at its core, emerging not unlike an uglier, strung out Shop Assistants.

Myelin Sheaths’ guitars have a certain Sonic Youth quality to them – a thick, dissonant, mid-heavy blurt - and their bass rumbles like a rockslide. Maybe think ‘Eliminator Jr’ or something, stripped of any art world pretensions, reinvented for a beer-sozzled provincial punk scene. With most conventional, album-orientated “indie-rock” in such a moribund state at the moment, it’s always a thrill it is to hear stuff this beserk and fun, happy just to be itself. Any old punkers/grungers still not sold on the new world order of inarticulate kids making no-fi noise-pop on overpriced boutique 7” labels are advised to take a listen to this and try to write me some reasons why it’s not totally great.

http://www.myspace.com/myelinsheaths
http://www.hozacrecords.com/

Labels: Flight, French Kissing, Hanoi Janes, Myelin Sheaths, singles reviews, The Blanche Hudson Weekend, The Manhattan Love Suicides