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.

Frustrated by too much of the same old same old, and inspired by childhood memories of listening to his dad play the White Album and Harvest, James Riggall decided to make some music of his own. The Broken Broadcast is an alias for that music; fractured, melancholic and blurry.

Soya Milk Sea, The Broken Broadcast’s debut mini-album, recorded in a friend’s basement, has just been released by Pilot Records and documents a burgeoning song-writing talent. By track four, Dead Leaves, Riggall has managed to inject an impressive sense of space into his music.  By track 5, Nurse Your Swollen Limbs, a sparsely strummed guitar, a repeated two-note piano refrain and an occasionally hit snare drum, you get the feeling that Riggall has begun to capture perfectly what he set out to achieve. His voice only adds to the slightly unsettling feel of the music, being at once desolately mournful and sweetly melodic.

By the end of the album, you’re wishing you had a recording studio and a string section on hand – if this album was orchestrated, it would be massive. As it stands, it is a remarkable debut. Imagine a stripped back early Grizzly Bear and you’re well on your way.

Soya Milk Sea is available now here.

The Broken Broadcast MySpace is here.

In 1994, Elliott Smith was joint lead-vocalist with forgotten indie rockers Heatmiser when he decided he had songs which were best recorded as solo material. Recorded in hissy lo-fi, on a four-track Roman Candle was born. With four unnamed songs and a distinct home made feel, Roman Candle contains song demos that we’re never given the full studio treatment.

Two further “acoustic” albums were to follow, marking out Smith at the vanguard of a minimalist, singer-songwriter movement where artistry and song-craft trumps studio gloss every time. His delicate songs, deftly picked on acoustic guitar, harmonica and occasional brushed percussion have been carefully and sympathetically remastered to lessen noise and fretboard squeaks without altering the original mix.

Smith would later be nominated for an Oscar for a song he contributed to the Good Will Hunting soundtrack, adding two more studio albums before tragically committing suicide during the production of  From a Basement on the Hill, awash with substance abuse problems and depression.

Roman Candle, remains an Elliott Smith classic with trademark double-tracked vocals, virtuoso guitar and low-fi chic.

More folk than tronic these days, the new Tunng album is a decidedly more pop orientated record than previous affairs. Don’t be surprised when opening track Hustle crops up on a mobile phone advert; such is its chirpy, skipping like a stone on the water charm.

This is very much a new Tunng – founding member Sam Genders has departed leaving Becky Jacobs to take on a more prominent vocal role. A period of inertia followed this seismic shift as the band struggled to redefine themselves but the shackles of the past are well and truly cast off by track 3 – Don’t Look Down Or Back – an anthemic song in both title and sound.

In fact, such is the confidence which spills out of every song on their fourth album that they could have just as easily titled the thing And Then We Saw The Light.

While many of the bleeps and squeaks of the earlier albums have been filtered out, none of the adventurousness and willingness to experiment has gone. October begins life as the very essence of sweet English folk, pivoting around a strummed chord which hangs in the air before the whole song turns into as freaky a slice of freak-folk as you’re ever likely to hear – all chopped up rhythms and looped vocals.

For those of you who miss the bleeps and squeaks, have patience; there are plenty of tracks on here that re-mixers won’t be able to resist getting their hands on. Expect a revival of the lost art of the ‘remix album’ before you can say ‘Hot Chip’.

And Then We Saw Land is available now on Full Time Hobby.

Tunng’s website is here.

Tunng’s video for Hustle is there ↓

The uber-prolific (he recently announced that he was set to release 50 free ‘bootleg’ albums, each comprising improvised songs) Devonte Hynes returns with an impressively expansive record and UK tour.

Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You is the second offering from the former Test-Icicle in his Lightspeed Champion guise and pushes his sound into new territories.  The big production and melodramatic sound (Hynes doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve, he positively staples it to the cuff and reaches his arms out to you, all the time serenading  you with his pleading voice) mark this album out as being like Mika, but for music-lovers.

Hynes has been hugely ambitious with his sound, boldly chucking all sorts into the pot to create a genre-defying record – where else could you find the country-funk of recent single Marlene? Where else could you find the pairing of jaunty Eighteenth Century harpsichord and sci-fi keyboards of The Big Guns Of Highsmith? Somehow, he’s pulled it off. Life Is Sweet! Nice To Meet You is an almost maddeningly addictive record.

Not content with that and his self-bootlegging, Hynes and friends have put together what they call a  ‘TV show trailer’ featuring a medley of Lightspeed Champion hits and popular b-side 69 Année Erotique, a cover of the Serge Gainsbourg classic and announced a string of UK dates. (Details below)

Hynes will also find time on May 10^th to release a single, Madame Van Damme. ‘Kill me,baby won’t you kill me?’ he implores in the song…chances are he’ll have already worked himself to death.

Full tour dates are:

1          May           Leeds - Live at Leeds at Stylus

3          May           Nottingham – Bodega

5          May           Glasgow - King Tuts

6          May           Manchester -Deaf Institute

7          May           Newcastle - Cluny

9          May           Birmingham – O2 Academy 3

10        May           London - Heaven

11        May           Portsmouth - Wedgewood Rooms

13        May           Norwich - Arts Centre

14        May           Bristol – Academy 2

15        May           Cambridge- Haymakers

Although these are all the songs of Tim West, the guest list on The Climbers’ debut The Good Ship (there are appearances by members of Shoreline, Sons Of Noel And Adrian, The Leisure Society and The Laish Quartet , amongst others) gives the album something of the feel of a Willkommen compilation. Which, of course, ain’t necessarily a bad thing.

With almost half of the songs featuring Nick Hemming on lead vocals, and an additional track with vocals provided by Christian Hardy, listening to the album, it’s difficult to avoid drawing comparisons with the Leisure Society but to do so would be to do it a disservice. This is not a Leisure Society record and to be fair, at no point does it attempt to be. The instrumentation gives The Climbers a more muscular sound than many of the bands which make up their composite form and the songs lack the ornate prettiness of Hemming and Hardy’s main vehicle, offering instead something with a darker, more brooding edge to them. A sort of lush folk-noir if you will.

This is no more evident than on Uncommon with Sharon Lewis singing ‘you turn all the lights out before the party is over, you beat me, police me,’ while Dan Michaelson growls along huskily. The guitars are drenched in reverb and distortion and there’s a menacing sea-shanty chorus for good measure.

The decision to hand responsibility for so many of the vocals over to Nick Hemming is easy to understand. His presence brings a sweetness to set against the melancholy of In A Circle, while his performance on the gentle country ballad I Will Never suggests that Hemming has it in him to one day record an out and out country album in full Merle Haggard style.

The Good Ship is released on Willkommen Records shortly. In the meantime, catch them on Marc Riley’s BBC 6Muisc show on 25th February or visit their MySpace here.

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 , 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 will be released 8^th March on Humble Soul Records. The album Of Flight And Fury will follow on 31st March.

The band have also announced the following UK tour dates.

February

25^th Cellar, Oxford

26^th Folk House, Bristol

27^th With the Willkommen Orchestra, King’s Palace, London

March

2^nd Cluny, Newcastle

3^rd The Yorkshire House, Lancaster

4^th Glee Club, Birmingham

5^th The Black-E, Liverpool

6^th Red Rooms, Glossop

7^th The Deaf Institute, Manchester

The Miserable Rich MySpace is here.

Portland noise-pop trio Quasi’s eighth album, their first since 2006’s When The Going Gets Dark, sees them walking the line between the dirty guitar sound of the Stooges and the spiky melodies of Sonic Youth.

American Gong is a battle between sprawling noisescapes and catchy pop riffs, best captured on Bye Bye Blackbird, a slice of sixties Mersey Beat which jangles along nicely before repeatedly collapsing into a snarling maelstrom of distortion and wailing guitars. It’s wonderful stuff.

Elsewhere, Little White Horse is a helter-skelter paced sonic explosion and Rockabilly Party sounds like a Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton duet rewritten by a Bandwagonesque-era Teenage Fanclub.

The band have also announced European tour dates which include a performance at All Tomorrow’s Parties, curated this year by Pavement.

14/05/10 : All Tomorrow’s Parties – Minehead (UK)
16/05/10 : Paradiso – Amsterdam (NL)
17/05/10 : Tsunami – Köln (D)
18/05/10 : AB – Brussel (B)
19/05/10 : C-Halle – Berlin (D)
20/05/10 : Hafen 2 – Offenbach (D)
21/05/10 : 59:1 – Munich (D)
22/05/10 : Rocker Fest @ Covo Club – Bologna (I)
24/05/10 : Point Ephemere – Paris (F)
25/05/10 : The Freebutt – Brighton (UK)
26/05/10 : Hoxton  Square Bar & Kitchen – London (UK)
27/05/10 : Night & Day – Manchester (UK)
28/05/10 : Captains Rest – Glasgow (UK)

American Gong is released by Kill Rock Stars in the U.S. and Domino in the UK and Europe on 22nd February.

Quasi’s MySpace is here.

Early February,  the sky is uniformly cardboard grey and the first big chunk of summery pop music has plopped through the letterbox of Suitcase Orchestra HQ.

In The Sun by the deceptively confusingly named She & Him (Is it Him & Her? He & She? His & Hers? Hers & His?) is two minutes and fifty four seconds of shimmering sunshine pop. Aided and abetted by Tilly and the Wall, the result sounds something like Carly Simon sings Badly Drawn Boy, with pretty piano, subtle orchestration and an immediately catchy melody.

In The Sun will be the first single off the second She & Him album, Volume 2, the ingeniously titled follow up to their 2008 debut Volume 1, and will be released on March 15th with the album following on April 5th.

The summery feel is continued with the single’s second track, a cover of the Beach Boys‘ I Can Hear Music.