One suspects that Joel Gibb’s persistence in describing his music as ‘gay folk church music’ may deter some people from giving The Hidden Cameras a go. One also suspects that releasing singles entitled Underage may restrict the listener’s opportunities to stumble across The Hidden Cameras on the radio too. Either way, if that applies to you, then your loss is tonight’s audience’s gain. Being a fan of The Hidden Cameras is akin to being a member of a secret society.

Look past the fuss and nonsense and what you actually have is a peerless band. The Hidden Cameras make bold, euphoric pop. Be that folky and baroque or electronic, it’s a unique sound with a unique voice (both lyrically and vocally)

Tonight, a half-full Brudenell Social Club gets a run through of the broad spectrum which makes up that sound. From the anthemic crowd favourite Ban Marriage to the tender b-side Pencil Case, through the darker edged Walk On from current album Origin:Orphan.

Gibb is a curious front-man. Dressed in office slacks and shirt, he remains largely static during the early portion of the set. It’s only when he puts his guitar down and is free to roam with the microphone that he comes fully to life, at which point he is both slightly unsettling and joyously compelling. What more can you want from pop music?

The Hidden Cameras MySpace is here.

Never been much of a Michael Jackson fan, other than the excellent Off The Wall album, but this is rather lovely. Canadian off-kilter folkies Snowblink have recorded a Michael Jackson tribute session for Daytrotter.com

The highlight is their version of Thriller which is sung over the tune of their own song, Rut & Nuzzle.

The session is available as a free download or as a loss-free version for only $4.00 here.

Snowblink’s official home is here.

The Suitcase Orchestra review of Snowblink’s Long Live album is here.

Honeybear is naturally nomadic; a few months after moving from Washington State to L.A. he was becoming restless. Pausing just long enough to pick up a ukulele, he was off again and a few weeks later, in Thousand Oaks California, he ran into a band called the Consonant C from Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Both he and the band showed up at the venue at wrong time and the show was already over so they climbed to the top of a hill where the band played an acoustic set and encouraged him to play the first two songs he had written. On the strength of that evening, they invited him to visit Calgary any time.

Back home in L.A. his itchy feet soon returned. Planes, trains, cars, and one speed-freak-trucker later he arrived in Calgary. A few days stop became a few months and one stay became many.

Crazy things happened and he went absent for awhile but now he’s back and is currently applying the finishing touches to his debut EP. A culmination of his development from more traditional folk music to incorporate ambient and pop influences, it opens with a combination of fire crackling and water dripping as one seamless sound and that idea of harmony is carried throughout as he lonesomely croons about treacherous women and feelings of oppression but always finding balance between dark and light.

Take a listen: Honeybear – Pocketful of Stones

As mentioned, HoneyBear is currently working on his debut e.p. Viral Linguistics, a collaboration between musician Honeybear and visual artist Heather Kai Smith. Heather makes drawings calling back to the innocent illustrations of the 1950’s and 60’s.

The fruit of the project will be a 40 page sketchbook with 10 drawings of Heather’s scattered amongst the pages. The cover will be drawn by Heather, then silkscreened and assembled by Honeybear. Included will be two download codes (one for the notebook’s owner and one to give to a friend) for a 6-track collection of music by Honeybear.

To help fund this ambitious project, visit Honeybear’s proposal at Kickstarter.com

Le Loup began as the bedroom project of Sam Simkoff and debut album (deep breath) The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly certainly has that feel; it’s an intimate, somewhat experimental and at times underdeveloped album. But a damn fine one nonetheless.  For the follow up, though, Simkoff extended the band to a five piece, holed them up in a Maryland basement and a remote North Carolina cabin and from that, quite naturally, given their cramped and isolated confines, Family emerged.

Simkoff, quite refreshingly, isn’t afraid to cite current bands and sounds as influences and Family captures the moment perfectly – think Fleet Foxes or Bon Iver remixed by Animal Collective and Here We Go Magic. Banjos, mandolins and pastoral harmonies rub up against sloppy rhythms and the kind of bass lines that wouldn’t have been embarrassed in late-eighties Manchester.

Sounding both rustic yet psychedelic, introverted yet celebratory, instantly gratifying yet revealing itself slowly over repeated listening (and you will want to listen to it repeatedly) this is an album of contradictions. Oficially released in late 2009, those contradictions may have to be compounded by including it in this year’s ‘best of’ list.

Visit Le Loup here.

For a relatively new band, Goldheart Assembly make a remarkable accomplished sound that has seen them hailed in The Guardian as the British Fleet Foxes. They aren’t, they’re the new Hollies, but more of that later. With the kind of praise being heaped upon them by Steve Lamaq and Paul Lester, major labels are bound to come sniffing and if they get hold of them, they’ll polish away all the rough edges and we’ll be left with another band who have been over-produced into oblivion. Remember The House of Love? Best to hide them away then, away from the clutching grasp of the majors and where better to do that than at the Forncett Industrial Steam museum in Norfolk where, curiously they have recorded a large chunk of their debut album, Wolves & Thieves.

Back to the whole Fleet Foxes, do they, don’t they debate. Well, no, they really don’t – if you are desperate for a reference point, you really can’t do better than the Hollies. In fact, without the album ever sounding derivative, there’s something naggingly familiar about the whole album. The songs are so immediately catchy and the strike-rate so high that it feels like a greatest hits collection – not bad work for a group who have been together just a shade over two years. They’re also, according to this evidence, the best dressed band since 1967.

Goldheart Assembly tear themselves away from the steam engines just long enough to play a series of dates. Meanwhile their MySpace, showing their sartorial excellence in full effect, is here.

Mon 29 March Moles Club – Bath
Tue 30 March – New Hero – Brighton
Wed 31 March – Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) – London
Thu 20 May – The Bumper – Liverpool
Fri 21 May – Westgarth Social Club – Middlesbrough
Sat 22 May – The Cluny – Newcastle upon Tyne
Sun 23 May – Nation Of Shopkeepers – Leeds
Tue 25 May – King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut – Glasgow
Wed 26 May  -The Deaf Institute – Manchester
Thu 27 May – The Glee Club – Birmingham
Fri 28 May – Kings College London – London

‘It’s unfair to ask once-precious music to retain its life-or-death significance after two decades,’ asserts David Cavanagh in his re-assessment of Galaxie 500’s three studio albums, due for imminent rerelease by Domino Records. While I have some sympathy for this notion, in the case of Galaxie 500, he is simply wrong. All three of these albums resonate just as intensely as they did when they were first recorded.

Twenty years ago they sounded like no-one else; now, the whole dream-pop movement – Grizzly Bear, Here We Go Magic, Papercuts, Beach House – is built on the blueprint laid down by the New York trio.

It’s easy to forgot how unique Today, the band’s debut, was at the time of its release. Viewed in the context of the two albums which followed it’s tempting to see it as merely a signpost of what was to come. Listening to the cover of Jonathan Richman’s Don’t Let Our Youth Go To Waste is the best way to disabuse yourself of that idea. Nobody else in the late 1980s made music even remotely like this.

By the time the band released On Fire, the sound had changed. It was almost imperceptible but it was there. The album’s producer, Kramer, captured the mood best when he signed off his sleeve notes to the original release with ‘come ride the fiery breeze’, somehow distilling the very essence of the band into those two final words. Their music was as fiery as anything that was coming out of Seattle at the time but its power was expressed gently – a breeze can do anything a hurricane can, it just takes a little while longer.

Dean Wareham’s songs on this album are almost hesitatingly introduced – a single chord strummed slowly, softly and repeatedly before a second, and sometimes final, is introduced. Naomi Yang’s bass meandering through the track with little or no attention to what the guitar is doing and Damon Krukowski caressing rather than beating his drums. Over this are Wareham’s slightly nasal vocals and his taut, tense guitar solos, an essential counterpoint to his hazy rhythm playing.

Live, they managed to almost literally mesmerise an audience. In his sleevenotes for the reissued Today, comedian Stewart Lee describes seeing Galaxie 500 in concert as a ‘transcendental experience.’ I only saw the band once, 14^th November 1990 at the International in Manchester and it was then, and remains to this day, the most absorbing performance I have ever experienced. As we filed away into the Manchester evening, the crowd spoke only in whispers.

By the time that what transpired to be their final album, This Is Our Music, was recorded the band had begun to tear themselves apart – Krukowski and Yang, a couple as well as a rhythm section, pulling in one direction, Wareham the other. The tension and regret, these three had been friends through school in NewYork and then at Harvard University, is documented in the lyrics to the album’s stand out track Sorry, ‘Seems like everything is business, and we’re sorry all the time’. This Is Our Music is a more polished affair than its predecessors but loses none of the intimacy that Galaxie 500 managed to engender in their sparse sound.

All three albums are released with bonus CDs. Today features Uncollected (rarities from the band’s entire career, from pre-Today demos to outtakes from the last recording sessions), whilst  On Fire comes with all collected Peel Sessions  and This Is Our Music comes complete with Copenhagen, a live recording of the band’s last ever European show.

This Is Their Music – Come ride the fiery breeze again.

Hall One at The Sage, Gateshead, is a pretty enough venue, but it’s also pretty sterile. While the acoustics may be the finest in Europe, the atmosphere generally has a gaping hole in it. Sitting down at concerts equates to polite applause and a lack of spark. Grizzly Bear may have just been spared this fate by the inclusion of a small standing crowd, craning their necks towards the stage.

Someone needs to show the stuffy Sage how to put on a pop concert – usually all seated; no drinks in the hall; wait for a ‘suitable break’ in the performance before being allowed back in the hall. When Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor pulls out an old analogue radio to add the sound of radio distortion to the mix, it’s a wonder that a member of the Sage staff hadn’t already tuned it into Radio 3. Which is a huge shame because it could easily be the perfect place to see a band, especially one as sonically potent as Grizzly Bear. One can only begin to imagine what My Bloody Valentine might be able to achieve here.

It’s possible to view Grizzly Bear as an exercise in artistry. True, their songs are unusually crafted with sections which owe more to modern jazz than traditional rock in their construction but the presence of Rossen, who also writes and performs with the Department of Eagles, appears to rein in Droste’s more avant garde urges.

Tonight, Grizzly Bear put the Sage’s famous acoustics through their paces by piecing together an incredibly complex layering of sounds. Daniel Rossen’s crisp, staccato guitar; Ed Droste’s chiming Omnichord and Christopher Bear’s expansive drumming form the backbone while bassist Chris Taylor frantically scrabbles around the floor looping and adding effects to clarinet, flute and baritone saxophone.

It works like a dream; their habit of swelling their sound to a crescendo before stripping everything back to the very barest of bones bringing an ebb and flow the music. Harmony always essential, melody integral to even their most pulsating, noisy moments. Now let us have a beer while we watch them.

Of all of the current crop of bands who could be described as chamber pop, Brighton quintet The Miserable Rich stand out as that which embrace the concept most whole heartedly. While other bands use the chamber pop sound to add an extra dimension to their folky or indie backbone, The Miserable Rich are as pure as they come. Strip James De Malplaquet’s timbrous vocals from the mix and what you have here could easily form part of the soundtrack to a BBC period drama, so baroque is their sound.

Somerhill , a preposterously pretty song about hidden love in a small town, will be the first release from their forthcoming album, the follow up to the velvety 12 Ways To Count.

Somerhill, backed with Bye Bye Kitty is available for download now from i-Tunes and Boomkat. The album Of Flight And Fury will follow in May.

The Miserable Rich MySpace is here.