Weird Dreams have been confirmed as support for Steve Malkmus and the Jicks on their forthcoming November European tour. All dates are listed below, alongside the band’s single release show in London on 4th November.
November
4th – Holding Nails Single Launch @ Shacklewell Arms, London w/Childhood and Novella
9th - Button Factory, Dublin w/Steve Malkmus
11th – The Arches, Glasgow w/Steve Malkmus
14th – KOKO, London w/Steve Malkmus
15th – Trix, Antwerp w/Steve Malkmus
16th – La Gaite Lyrique, Paris w/Steve Malkmus
17th – Den Atelier, Luxembourg w/Steve Malkmus
18th - Abart, Zurich w/Steve Malkmus
19th - Magazzini Generali, Milan w/Steve Malkmus
21st – B72, Vienna w/Steve Malkmus
22nd – Postbahnhof, Berlin w/Steve Malkmus
Guided to me by the ever-reliable ears of Weird Dreams, Burger Record’s latest recruits Gap Dream share more than just a similar name.
A slow-mo glam blow-out, as if T-Rex were saddened to a pause, this is beautifully symphonic timeless pop, making grand gestures that belie the quality of its recording. It’s in that respect that it finds parallels with their east London almost-namesakes, where ambition and craft flip a finger to financial restrictions, and reassemble into a patchwork Brian Wilson slowjam.
And it’s also perhaps worth noting that there are many other equally affecting songs on Gap Dream’s Soundcloud, posted under the unusual moniker, Eddy Grapes…
Following the release of their debut album, Dead To Me, in May, Belfast-trio Girls Names return with their first new material since that record was written. ‘Black Saturday’ was recorded earlier in the year, and represents the band’s increasing gravitation towards melody without losing any of the strange darkness that has characterised their work to date.
Released as a digital single on 31st October – Halloween! – it coincides with the band’s tour of Italy. All dates below. Download an MP3 of the track from Pitchfork here, or stream below.
“Born Under A Bad Sign” feels a lot like an antidote, or an indirect response, or perhaps just an inevitable result of too much of something else. But not because it’s wildly out of step. There are common signifiers that remain. There’s a sleepy-eyed longing shrouded in the requisite new-band-on-the-internet mystery which isn’t exactly rare right now. But the subject matter itself is a little less zeitgeist and as such, the main source of intrigue.
Possessing a lyrical directness increasingly absent in much new music, Fairewell evokes winter here in the UK right now, not summer on the west coast sometime late last century, built under the swell of a less vivacious OMD. There’s specific moments and places – petrol station forecourts, automatic doors, supermarket ennui and blankets of snow – constructing the contours of a personality, of a person not hiding away in a bedroom, but one trying to engage with the world in all of its wonder and absurdity and shitness.
There isn’t a clear breakaway from current trends. Fairewell, as the name would suggest, is nostalgic, like many of its peers. But unlike said peers, it’s not for another era they long. It’s for the real lived moments of the immediate past, slipping into tomorrow’s jokes and regrets and just being alive. I’d call that looking backwards to progress.
