Wait a minute, a dream pop album that didn’t come out of Brooklyn? Is that actually allowed? Invisible Elephant, a one-man creation which blends instruments ranging from guiros to a toddler’s drum, wouldn’t sound out of place nestled amongst the likes of Grizzly Bear, Here We Go Magic, Beach House and Quiet Lights but may have to be disqualified from membership of that particular scene on account of hailing from Blackpool.

Geographically, Invisible Elephant may be worlds apart from Brooklyn but musically, one suspects a record collection with many similarities to the aforementioned denizens of NYC. The Lights Go Out is a blissed out wash of sound and noise. In this instance, the distinction between sound and noise is an important one to make, for while The Lights Go Out floats along for the majority of its 30 minutes, occasionally an outbreak of heavy distortion and white noise crank up the atmosphere. It’s an effective ploy. You Can Have It All, a synthy wash which eventually ends up shuffling along to a decelerated James Brown drum beat, becomes an overpowering slab of noise, enough to stop you in your tracks.

Elsewhere, the delicacy and almost crystalline nature of songs like Still Falling In The Net provide balance and add to the overall success of the album in being something to listen to rather than something which could all to easily end up as background noise, while Wind-Up Bird is either crying out to be remixed by Massive Attack or is a remix of a Massive Attack track – it’s difficult to tell which.

The Lights Go Out is available as a free download here, or as a Limited Edition hand numbered CD with bonus tracks from here.

Invisible Elephant’s MySpace is here.

Calgary. What’s with the place? Beautiful and intricate music with a dark and menacing subtext like Woodpigeons’ ornate chamber-pop murder ballads which detail disposing of bodies and Chad VanGaalen’s inventive blend of folk, rock and electronica with its tales of hearing the voices of the dead and murder victims who just refuse to die. To that list can now be added Brock Geiger. Invitation is the latest album to dip into the city’s folk-noir style.

Geiger’s velvety lamenting vocals and pretty melodies are at the very least movingly melancholic and frequently convey a slightly more sinister message. Opening track Cliffs, a swooning marriage of Geiger’s guitar and Clea Foofat’s mournful cello, contains the lyric ‘drove them to the cliffs, smashed their heads right in’. Later, Geiger yearningly sings ‘I just wanted to be your man, but I think you’ve heard I’m a murderer’.

Pieced together over a year, Invitation is a glorious achievement which in places, such as the gently meandering I’ll Go Down, stands equal to anything by the likes of Iron & Wine or Sufjan Stevens.

Invitation by Brock Geiger is available now from here.

Taught to play piano by a student of the last scholar of Tschaikowski , Nils Frahm follows up his beautiful album The Bells with this double A-side.

Unter / Uber, which will be be released by Erased Tapes on August 23^rd, serves as a microcosm of Frahn’s music. Fluttering and light, the two miniature pieces, both of which come in at under two minutes, are served perfectly by the accompanying video shot by German film maker Ralph Etter.

The single also features a remix of Unter by Rutger Zuydervelt, the man behind Machinefabriek.

Nils Frahm will be touring with Rachel Grimes and opening for Olafur Arnalds this Autumn.

For those of you who like your record collection to be a little bit special, Brian Records will be issuing a 5″ lathe cut version of the single. More information on that can be found here.

Nils Frahm – Unter (Official Music Video) from Erased Tapes on Vimeo.

Review by Glynn Bird

Arcade Fire are unusual. They are independent in the  true sense of the word; they write their own material, produce their own albums, own their publishing rights and have a self-destrutive attitude to their own profitability. They rebuff offers of lucrative sponsorship and advertising offers. By their own admission, they were skint as The Suburbs hit the shops in August 2010.

The Suburbs is a concept album, with the clue in the title. It is brighter than the bleak Neon Bible and more tuneful than the fêted debut Funeral. It takes a few listens to get the full appeal of the album, perhaps due to it being spread over sixteen tracks but once the songs have worked their magic, it will be on repeat.

The band are doing festivals and large arenas this year, but their sound isn’t stadium-friendly in the way that Coldplay’s is, it just has a grandeur and largesse that a smaller stage can’t contain. Arcade Fire know how to move their audience with musical swells, tempo changes and shifting dynamics. As well as having an enviable live reputation, their songs survive the recording process to produce memorable and moving pop songs.

While the soundscape is epic, the subject matter is deeply personal; family, kids, neighbourhood, streets, housing, growing up and youth are frequently referenced. It is unashamedly sentimental in it’s depiction of small-town North America.

The audio is deliberately unpolished, with each track having been mastered to 12″ vinyl before being played back and digitally recorded before publishing to CD. This is the length our Canadian friends go to achieve an “authentic” analogue sound. Win Butler’s voice is expressive and melodic with shades of John Lennon on Deep Blue.

Crank up the volume and lose yourself.

• Arcade Fire
• Arcade Fire live in New York

Review by Beau Lark

One of the best things about getting to exist in a society that allows for creative expression is to witness someone doing what they love, with undeniable talent and confidence in what they’ve chosen. If you have been lucky enough to see The Mariner’s Children, you’ve bore witness to this. Particularly if you were at the small, cramped Wilmington Arms in London on August 4. Proof? The lead singer’s speech was winded between songs. From his stomping. Imagine for a second stomping long enough and hard enough to become out of breath. You get the point.

There is so much greatness packed into this band. Fluctuating in number, this night they were a 7 piece, snuggling up together on the small stage, comfortable in one another’s space. Each member was key in creating the huge, warm, can’t-tear-your-ears-away sound that came from the stage. At the front and most immediate was Benedict Rubinstein the lead singer. The moment he started singing, you hoped he wouldn’t stop. Ever. His voice has character, personality and depth – best of all, he knows how to use it, from a cooing whisper to a pleading shout.

The rest of the band supported with beautiful vocal harmonies and well-schooled hits of banjo, violin, cello, double bass, and percussion. The Mariner’s Children sound like a big family playing music together in the way they trust each other to do their best to support the song, to honor the music – not an ego in sight. With a nod to traditional maritime music, they manage to construct extremely listenable, dynamic, fresh takes on a form of orchestral folk rock that’s been making the rounds these days.

Mark these words – Mariner’s Children will become a very popular band. Assuming they stay together and catch a break label-wise, you’ll be hearing them for a long time to come. Try and catch them now.

The Mariner’s Children can be found here.

It would be easy to dismiss the field of minimalist music as samey, a sparse soundscape where an almost imperceptible background hum is occasionally penetrated by the odd electronic effect or a field recording of a burbling stream and birdsong. These two new releases on the Home Normal label demonstrate perfectly why that would be a mistake.

By minimalist standards, Whispers, Then Silence by Elian is a positive onslaught of sound. Once you are through the opening three minutes of static, the peace is interrupted by vibraphone and things never return to the dead calm that preceded them. By turns light and serene and dark and insistently intense, the album peaks with Magnification and Minimization, eight minutes of twisted orchestration which totally negates the other commonly held misconception about this type of music; that it is a background noise, something to be heard but not really listened to. Michael Duane Ferrell, the man behind Elian, has warped the strings into something which very much demands your attention. Try carrying on with whatever you are doing when Magnification and Minimization kicks in and you’ll soon realise that minimalist compositions can overwhelm you as much as the loudest rock songs or the most swooning classical pieces.

Engaged Touches by Celer is the flipside of the minimalist coin. Put this on as background music and you probably wouldn’t hear it, you really do have to listen to this. Dreamlike and expansive, this is the kind of minimalism that by rights you should listen to in a specially designed pod. This is the music of the future that played out in 1970s science fiction films. Celer, produce music which has an infinite nature.  At times barely more than a notion, it gently swells and rolls, single notes strung out over minutes. The sweep of Engaged Touches is at times breathtakingly beautiful.

Whispers, Then Silence by Elian is released on August 20^th.

Engaged Touches by Celer is released on August 13^th.

For more information click here.

Next time your favourite band disappear into a studio for three years, scrapping entire albums and taking two months to overdub four bars of bass guitar slip a copy of Piecemeal, the debut album by Chicago’s Like Pioneers, under the studio door. It’s a study on how to get things done.

Made up of former members of Bound Stems, the Narrator and a handful of other Chicago bands, Like Pioneers have only been together 8 months but have already got their debut album Piecemeal written, in the can and ready for release.

Initially, the plan was just for a group of friends to play some music together but their sessions quickly turned into a weekend in a studio and an album was born. No messing about here.

The resulting album may be raw but it isn’t rough, doesn’t sound rushed and captures the sound of a band brimming with ideas and songs which haven’t had the life throttled out of them by fancy studio equipment and over zealous knob twiddling. There’s a feeling of getting stuff down in one take and as a result, the energy levels on this record are infectiously high.

Lead single English Garden neatly encapsulates the whole album; interwoven harmonies and guitars, catchy melodies and driving rhythms. It isn’t all helter skelter though, Some People, Exit Row and Teakettles No 1 all inject a sense of space into proceedings, the latter complete with twinkling xylophone and folky accordion. Where it all comes together best though is the closing track, Crab Candy. Setting out as a fractured piano ballad, it pivots halfway through around some big reverby piano chords before setting off on a lightly psychedelic ramble through swirling organ and treated vocals.

Piecemeal is released on August 17^th. By next Christmas Like Pioneers could already have a Best Of out at this rate.

Click here for more information.

Nothing about Foon Yap is straight forward. She is a violinist yet grew up hating the instrument. She is classically trained yet focuses her energies on working on folk and when with her band The Roar, a ‘disco spandex celebration’. She is tiny in stature – I have twice seen her piggybacked around the room by Woodpigeon’s Mark Hamilton – yet clearly has the spirit of a grizzly bear.

Having found her feet with Calgary folk collective Woodpigeon, Foon is now exploring other avenues. Her Darling EP is delicate to the point of being brittle in its beauty. All three tracks begin tentatively and maintain a sense of almost tangible fragility and precision in their execution, her plucked and sweeping strings work from Woodpigeon combined with more than a nod to her Chinese heritage. It’s beautiful and stops you in your tracks; you fear to move or even breathe, afraid that any movement may cause it to shatter into a million fragments.

Contrast all that with Foon Yap & The Roar. Gone is the label of ‘Chinese Traditional / Folk / Classical’ which her solo MySpace site applies to her work, replaced with ‘Vampire Sex Metal Disco’. Their EP The Mes, The Mys and The Swimming Pool kicks off innocently enough with the short, electro folk of Introduction and then blows your head off with the manic I Come. There’s barely time to recover during the Talking Headsy Kiiimchee before she has you by the throat again in the synth driven La Foon Nikita. All of your perceived notions about Foon are torn down in less than the eleven minutes of maelstrom which the EP contains. Pow! Thank God for Foon Yap.

Foon Yap waits demurely here.

Foon Yap & The Roar are waiting to get you here.

Twin Sister – Vampires With Dreaming Kids & Color Your Life EPs

I need to pay closer attention. Having received many emails about Twin Sister, it wasn’t until Domino Records kindly popped one through my letterbox that I finally got round to giving them any airtime on the radio station in my head.

This double CD neatly packages the band’s debut Vampires With Dreaming Kids EP, previously only available digitally and their current EP, Color Your Life. According to the accompanying press release, Twin Sister make the kind of hypnotic pop I’ve been dreaming about since Galaxie 500 folded. That’s some claim but a single run through the Vampires EP shows that this is a band with a little bit extra. The opening Dry Hump does indeed nod towards Galaxie 500 but the EP encompasses the disorientating wooziness of Ginger, the bluesy folk of Nectarine and best of all the sweet love song I Want A House which meanders through its pop soundscape with effortless and irresistible charm.

Colour Your Life picks up where the Vampires…EP left off, with Twin Sister wandering through the best bits of your record collection, picking up bits and pieces along the way and then spinning  an inventive and irresistible set of songs of their own, even finding time to try their hand at minimalist experimentation in Galaxy Plateau before finishing again with an out and out pop song in Phenomenons.

Turns out Twin Sister do make the kind of dreamy pop I’ve been dreaming about. What took me so long to find out?

Twin Sister’s Vampires With Dreaming Kids EP and Color Your Life will be released in one package on September 6^th. Until then, click here to find out more.

13 Most Beautiful: Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

Originally commissioned by the Andy Warhol Museum and Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, this project began as a live multimedia show featuring Dean Wareham & Britta Phillips performing original material in front of 13 short films selected from Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests collection.

Warhol made the screen tests – short, silent portrait films which each last four and one quarter minutes and focus on a single subject – at the Factory between 1964 and 1966. Dean and Britta selected 13 subjects, including Dennis Hopper, Nico and Lou Reed, which became the inspiration for the project. The films were selected purely on the basis of the personal response they elicited. As Wareham explains, they literally were the 13 most beautiful he saw, “I visited the museum in Pittsburgh and looked at about 150 of the screen tests, without quite knowing what I was looking for. Warhol had shot more than 470 of these films. Some were so immediately stunning—Jane Holzer brushing her teeth, Ann Buchanan crying a tear—that I knew I had to include them.”

With a track to accompany each film, the album is made up of new songs, instrumentals, covers and re-workings of earlier Dean & Britta releases. As you’d expect from a project involving Dean Wareham and the work of Andy Warhol, the sound of the Velvet Underground is never far from the surface. Always an influence in Wareham’s work, this project has allowed him to crank the Lou Reed dial up to max and he has clearly enjoyed the return to this sound as he is about to embark on a US tour playing the songs of Galaxie 500. The presence of the VU sound draws inevitable comparisons with Galaxie 500 and in places this is definitely the closest he has sounded to the original Galaxie 500 blueprint since that band’s collapse.

This is no Velvet Underground tribute sound though. Throughout the album are several remixes by the likes of Sonic Boom and My Robot Friend and the record is supplemented by a second disc featuring alternate versions and remixes of tracks off the main album. Dean & Britta have clearly shifted away from the melodic, languid sound of their previous two albums to produce something altogether different. This record shifts gear constantly, moving through the riff driven rock of their cover of the Velvet’s I’m Not  A Young Man Anymore, through the stark piano and cracked vocal of International Velvet Redux, to the pulsating electronic hypnosis of Richard Rheem Theme, which has producer Sonic Boom’s fingerprints all over it.

Mesmerising and beautiful, nobody does this sort of thing better than Dean & Britta.

13 Most Beautiful is available now. Click here for more information.