It’s nearing the end of the year, affording us one last chance to cast an eye backwards to the past twelve months.
We released a number of records this year, some of which are long sold out, some of which we repressed and are still available. Below, we’ve compiled ten tracks from these releases into our Soundcloud player and provided buy links in the chance that Christmas has somehow left you with some disposable income.
Thanks for the continued support. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. 2011 is rife with plans.
TLV035
Fair Ohs/Spectrals split
7″ Sold out Buy iTunes
TLV036
Seams – Nightcycles +Rmxs
12″ Sold out Buy iTunes
TLV037
Girls Names – You Should Know By Now
12″ Sold out Buy iTunes
Goodbye to permitted dilettantism, bloodless nostalgia and competitive hyperbole. Hello to the end of the world.
1. BLANK & KYTT – “WHO YOU ARE”
Internet evangelists are wrong. Location is still everything. Who an artist actually is remains significant. You see, Blank & Kytt could have been from anywhere. But they’re not. They’re from Coventry. And that’s a fact that turns my knees to reflections of knees in water. Anyone who has felt Coventry’s sludge of indifference and television screen gray nightlife will understand. They’ll know the romance in geographic transcendence. Location is still everything when you’re running away from it. I can’t wait to see where Blank & Kytt end up.
2. WELCOME BACK SAILORS – “LOVE’S THE ANSWER, BLAME IT”
Why is it always assumed that love is a good thing? I only ever remember it ruining everything forever. Because love a second time around is a prisoner of its past. A welcome back sign in inverted commas.
An ode to not forgetting. To creeping back in. To believing in the face of it all. To self worth. To hating the world and somehow, inexplicably, having it love you back in spite of itself. Outnumbered, but still Radio Dept knew they needed no-one else.
Step through TV screens onto rain flecked suburban petrol station forecourts. Stand in the freezing half light under neon technology. Stare into the kaleidoscope of oily water refracting forever amongst the pull of parallel dimensions. Wait for the car to start. Shut your mouth and drive. Lay me down. Take me to another world. Feel the elemental rush of consciousness. Feel yourself fade into nothingness.
9. ONEOHTRIX POINT NEVER FEAT. ANTONY – “RETURNAL”
I never thought I’d hear Antony Hegarty say the word ‘internet’. That word wasn’t meant for that mouth, but on “Returnal” it made sense. The exact point where the inertia of technology dissolved into human form, Antony somehow, paradoxically, the face of post-humanism; an avatar of a utopian future in which people still ache like people even when they no longer look like them.
Is Northern Ireland just a factory line of brokenhearted boys with impossible desires?
Because, like Girls Names, newly formed Belfast three piece Charles Hurts shake with the fear of being left on the shelf, that vocal warble the grain of emotional discontent. There’s a voice here to be swept along by, even as it swims in its own desperation.
If that sounds a little familiar, then I’ve sold it short. It’s the singer not the song. But when allayed with this song too? Well that’s very heaven itself. Heaven left on a shelf.
Call it pastiche. Call it parody. Call it Prince. Either way, Dent May assumed a pseudonym that was pure amyl nitrate and disco paranoia, opening his ass and letting his mind follow. I just wouldn’t like to see those text messages in the morning, no matter who’s paying for them.
In the future, this is what the past really sounds like. Which is to say that Jam City futuregaze so hard they caught themselves from behind. Everything is a motion.
Two Worst-kept Secrets In Pop: 1. Daniel O’Donnell’s “proclivities”; 2. Ariel Rosenberg’s genius. All it took was a nah nah nah to make the world see. (LPM)
Oh to live in a world where the undeservingly over-privileged suffer greater indignities than a vehicle coated in cheap emulsion. Until then, dream of living inside this song. (LPM)
Brilliant Colors‘ Jess Scott made a 10 track mixtape for Tough Love. It features the Close Lobsters and is therefore rendered ‘essential’ by default. Someone come canonise that band quick!
Follow the link below to download the zip.
Brilliant Colors also feature on a split 7″ with Girls Names that we released in conjunction with the peerless Slumberland a few weeks ago. Of the 300 copies we had, there’s now about 30 left. Click here to purchase.
Tracklisting:
1. Jesse Garon and the Desperadoes – “Splashing Along
2. Vic Godard and the Subway Sect – “Stop That Girl”
3. Close Lobsters – “I Kiss The Flowers In Bloom”
4. Felt – “Sunlight Bathed The Golden Glow”
5. Razorcuts – “80 Times Around The World”
6. Look Blue Go Purple – “Cactus Cat”
7. The Great Unwashed – “Hold On To The Rail”
8. Livin’ Sacrifice – “Mentalsjuk”
9. La La Vasquez – “Buoy”
10. Proper Ornaments – “Recalling”
If only the world were as soft as lace, Catwalk wouldn’t splinter into a million pieces at the very thought of it. Every lovelorn sigh a gale force bone(r) crusher.
Don’t fuck with Jai Paul. Ignore the Chelsea shirt and knock off DVD aesthetic, this boy will kill you with the sweetest threats whispered through gritted gold teeth.
When hyper-precocious teen hip hop collective Odd Future made their UK debut in October this year, it wasn’t their cartoon violence or swagged out confidence that shone brightest. It was their borrowing of the Flying Lotus beat “Camera Man” that Killer Mike lazed over on “Swimming”. Women to Killer Mike were like milk to Cleopatra: the guy was bathing in excess. But it was FlyLo that really kept it fluid when the sweat bubbled like champagne.
Leonard Cohen and Mick Jagger are to excessive sexual conquests as Bradford Cox is to ruthless bedroom based songwriting efficiency. But final track from Halcyon Digest was a nose in front of even himself, 8+ minutes of elegy and indecision in tribute to Jay Reatard. And fittingly, Cox’ prolific music making does feel like a fuck you to death.
It’s easier to love the beach when you don’t have to endure its grit and toxic waters. Unlike most others who chose to look inwards and/or back to nostalgically fetishise the coast, for Korallreven the beach was more a otherworldly means to escaping yourself. On the wings of tomorrow’s dream, Korallreven just had to believe to get out. And as such, for all its blonde glamour, Sweden never sounded so golden.
October’s very own delivered this jam on the birthday of May’s very own – AKA yours truly. And just as the lines drew deeper on my face throughout the year, this stayed resolutely, defiantly box fresh. Then Thank Me Later dropped along with the scales from my eyes. Before you release another hugely boring album Drake, remember one word: Wale. And then revisit “9AM In Dallas”, just like I have every day for the past seven months.
If you’ve ever spent an ATP lost in between the endzones of night and day massaging away fragments of self with alcohol and coastal wind, you’ll have already heard “Preseli” before. Destined to soundtrack faintly horrifying memories you’ll spend a lifetime trying to pretend into rich experience.
When I retire, I’ll buy a chair. A recliner at a size incongruous to both my body and the rest of the room. And the rest will be sitting. Only then will I be both as chill and weighed down by the impossibility of competing against the ravages of time as Ducktails.
They’ve found glitch house on abandoned mobile phones in the Sahara, music distributed via taxi in African townships is released on Warp and Russia becomes a clubbers Mecca.
Geographical isolation is now obsolete, as concept, as reality.
But internally, psychologically, we’re more lonely than ever. As technology sleekly advances, humanity shrinks in on itself. Digital communication is the simulacra that reforges ties that didn’t survive for a reason, while we cannot look another person in the eyes when attempting to hold a conversation. Our mobile networks are more resolute and wider reaching than ever before, and our human form slowly d/evolves into rudimentary compounds of amino acids and proteins.
The body disappears as the mind grows on, humanity a collective head in a jar.
