The Last Royals - review

Update: The EP is available free on noisetrade for this week, go download it.



You'll remember The Last Royals from their cover of EMF's Unbelievable I posted just over a week ago.

Signed to Ooh La La Recordings The Last Royals are Eric James on vocals, synths and guitar and Mason Ingram on drums, percussion and samples. I described the Brooklyn based duo as producing catchy music that's full of hooks. That's not just true of their cover but of their EP.

Catchy indie pop at it's best, The Last Royals craft songs that spend all day stuck in your head. Backseat Lovers sound like an exceptionally talented updated take on late 90's indie. Obviously all band have influences, but that's not to say The Last Royals are solely derivative and offer nothing on their own merits. Crystal Vase is just full and bouncy and fun and catchy and about the desperation, isolation and discord that happens in the aftermath of a marriage breaking up. It's not exactly easy to write a song that combines those elements. Always, To Belong is again steeped in late 90's indie, but much better. Had the indie scene actually been this good in the late 90's bands like The Strokes wouldn't have seemed so necessary. Come Take My Hand is a demo that certainly doesn't sound in anyway unfinished or under-produced. Backseat Lovers (Crayon Remix) sounds less like a remix and more like a complete re-imagining of the original, with a large serving of tenderness.



The track listing for the EP is:

Backseat Lovers
Crystal Vases
Always, To Belong
Come Take My Hand (Demo)
Backseat Lovers (Crayon Remix)

On the off chance you missed their cover of Unbelievable here it is again:

Unbelievable by The Last Royals (originally by EMF)

and you can download Backseat Lovers (Crayon Remix) here:

and listen to Crystal Vase here:



You can visit The Last Royals myspace and youtube

And then you can, and should, go and buy the EP. It's only $2.99 and you can get it from bandcamp and The Last Royals webstore. I've got no vested interest in you buying the EP, I just think you might fall in love with it like I have.

Covers for Sunday

All of the songs, bar one, in today's blog are covers that have been sent to me by bands and agents. I have now, I think, finally caught up with my e-mails. If you've e-mailed me and haven't got a reply just resend your original or e-mail me again and I'll get back to you. Sorry for all the delays.



Unbelievable by The Last Royals (originally by EMF). It's hard to pin down exactly, but I get a vibe of The Cure in this cover. I've mentioned before that I particularly enjoy listening to duos, to see how they overcome the limitations caused by the lack of band numbers. These New Yorkers do it by making their music catchy and full of hooks.



Don't Fear The Reaper by Bobtown (originally by Blue Oyster Cult). Bobtown play traditional Americana folkand still make it sound fresh and new with an original take on an old genre, the perfect soundtrack to Southern Gothic.



California Gurls by Lloyd's Garage (originally by Katy Perry). It goes without saying that I'm not a fan of the original version of this, because I have a 10 year old daughter I've heard it a few times. This version is very good, another duo more than making up for the lack of members. In the week when the White Stripes officially called it quits it's lazy but not necessarily unreasonable to look to Lloyd's Garage as a spiritual successor.



So Freely by Snow and Voices (originally by Tir Na Nog). Snow And Voices have been featured before, back in June 2010 with there cover of Mistress by Mark Kozelek (here) and as much as I enjoyed that I think this track, especially Lauri Kranz's vocal, is even better.



Jealous Guy by The PepTides (originally by John Lennon). Last week it was Okkervil River covering this song, now we have Canadian duo The PepTides. Even though it's the same song the two covers are very different, where Okkervil River's cover was very heartfelt and down to earth there's something grand about this.



Toxic by Yaron Herman (originally by Britney Spears). This is the only cover that wasn't sent to me, sadly I don't live in a universe where jazz musicians of the calibre of Yaron Herman e-mail me. One day though.

On Shuffle

The point of the On Shuffle posts is to feature music that just pops up on iTunes. Maybe it's something that's been sitting their unheard for a while, maybe it's just under-appreciated. Of course sometimes at least one of the songs is something I want to blog about and the rest of the songs are then chosen at random. But not this time, all of these songs were chosen randomly from shuffle, just like they should be.

Unconscious by The Silencers. A rather excellent but unheard of Scottish band that have been around going on 25 years now. This song is excellent, and not just because it features bagpipes.

Sunday Morning by The Blackhawks. This is lovely, dreamy music, not too far away from a mix of Girls and Beach House. Sadly it's almost impossible to find any concrete information about the band because they share the same name as a war, a long-standing country band and a professional sports team. Still, they're good and worth the effort.

Broken Arrow by Brandi Emma. Something that turned up in my inbox that I didn't really know how to describe. And I still don't. It's very laid back and she has a lovely voice. But there's more too it than that. Guess you'll just have to listen and make your own mind up.

Downtown/Union

Some more new music for you, Downtown/Union from LA this time around. I've been listening to Keep The Engine Running for a couple of weeks now, but circumstances have conspired to stop me from posting it until now. Keep The Engine Running is from the EP Astral Turf. The full EP is available to stream and/or buy from their website and I recommend you spend some time listening to them. They're an indie/garage rock band that sound like Pavement with Kevin Barnes on vocals with little bits of The Henry Clay People, Dinosaur Jr and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion mixed in. or, to put it another way, they sound very good. Enjoy.

Keep The Engine Running by Downtown/Union.

Visit their website and their Myspace. The Myspace page has a few other tracks to listen to and some videos.

Record Review - 8mm

As I've said before one of the things I like about this blog is discovering new music. Bloggers have trouble with DMCA notices and it can be extremley frustrating but when somebody gets in touch with you and shares music with you because your blog is a good way for other people to come across their music then that's very rewarding.

A couple of Sunday's ago I featured 8mm's cover of Bad Moon Rising, which was pretty popular until a DMCA notice killed it. There's a new link to the file, so chances are if you're reading this you've heard the cover. If you haven't, here's the link again:

Bad Moon Rising by 8m (originally by Creedence Clearwater Revival). Even if you haven't heard the cover, chances are you've heard them on the various TV and movie soundtracks they've featured on in the last few years.

8mm have released an EP called Love And The Apocalypse, and that's what I'm reviewing.



Firstly, the cover of Bad Moon Rising was good, but it's not really that much like the music on the EP. As good as the cover is Love and The Apocalypse is better. A lot better.

8mm have been described as a mix of Tricky, Portishead and PJ Harvey but I don't think that describes this album. To me Tricky and Portishead produce music that's dense, it's the sound of inner-city England but 8mm, despite still being down-tempo, have much airier sound, much freer and almost carefree. It's the perfect music to listen to on a sunny day, the sort of music that brings happy memories to mind. It's pop music in the very best sense of the word.

That's not to say that it's in anyway disposable, throwaway music. The lyrics aren't carefree but they sit perfectly with the contrastingly mellow music. And the comparison of vocalist Juliette Beavan with PJ Harvey is a fair comparison. Mostly they remind me of Viva Voce when they were still a two-piece.

8mm are vocalist Juliette Beavan, her husband and multi-instrumentalist Sean Beavan (who's almost guaranteed to have mixed and/or produced something you own) and drummer Jon Nicholson.

This EP's full of songs that get stuck in your head and is well worth adding to your collection, I highly recommend it.

Here's a couple of videos of Deep Blue You from the EP:



The track listing is:

Los Angeles
Deep Blue You
Mean (my favourite track from the EP)
Never Go Back Again
Life Is Good
One For The Road.

Buy it here from iTunes.

Visit 8mm's website and myspace.



As a bonus here's the video for Stunning from their 2006 album Songs To Love And Die By:

The Enthusiasts

I've probably mentioned before but one of my favorite things about writing this blog is getting bands or their representatives sending me music that I might like to put on the blog.

This time it's The Enthusiasts.

I know the people who read this are fairly diverse in your musical tastes. But you're reading a blog named from a Velvet Underground lyric, there are some things almost all of you like. So I feel fairly safe saying that pretty much everyone that reads this on a regular basis will love the Enthusiasts.

If you like The Strokes, MC5, Jon Spencer Blus Explosion, The White Stripes and basically and garage rock or garage revival band you will love them. Need more evidence? Here's a live version of In The City:



See? Told you you'd love it.

Here's the studio version of the track:

In The City by The Enthusiasts

In The City is the A-side for their new single, the B-side is My Two Worlds. You can order the single from their label here.

Go and check out their myspace there are more songs and videos there for you to enjoy. I know you will.

Stamper Freon

Remember The Plastic Pals? They're a Swedish band I featured back at the beginning of March. (Check the post here if you missed it first time around)

After I posted that I got an e-mail from someone who'd done some backing vocals on The Plastic Pals album. So here we are, here's his solo project Stamper Freon.

I've just got to say first that this is really, really good. Stamper Freon came about after a couple of years break from recording and general involvement in the music industry. He's got a really distinctive voice that sometimes reminds me of Paddy McAloon and other times of Alex Kapranos.

Here's the first song: Wish You Were Here. This song was inspired by something his daughter said to him about her grandfather, I think it's the sort of thing any parent will recognise. Also the drumming in this is phenomenal.

Normally I don't post covers unless it's on a Sunday but I'm making an exception here. This is Clap Hands, originally by Tom Waits.

Check out his myspace page, there are another 7 songs to listen to and some videos to watch. In fact, here's one of the videos to watch now:


Safe in grey

STAMPERFREON | MySpace Music Videos

I accept, he sounds nothing like Paddy McAloon or Alex Kapranos in this song, you'll just have to download Wish You Were Here to check it out.

But that's not all. As you probably guessed given his association with The Plastic Pals he's Swedish as well. And he's in a Sweish language band called De livslevande Fågelmännen which I'm told roughly translates to The Very Much Alive Birdman. I asked for a song from them as well because there's nowhere near enough non-English language music on this blog. So here's my first step towards correcting that Ingen Djävul (Not A Devil) This was recorded while jamming and then worked on in the studio. It's a great song, very catchy even if you can't speak a word of Swedish.

Here's the myspace for De livslevande Fågelmännen. There's plenty of songs and a video on there as well.

That's it for today, I hope you enjoy the music from today's post as much as I do.

Black Grape reform

As you'll have noticed I don't normally do upcoming gigs here. But when I got an e-mail that Black Grape were going to be playing live for the first time since 1997.

That's right. Black Grape are playing live. So you can understand why I made this my first upcoming gig mention. One of the great British bands of the mid-90's they never really got the attention they deserved, despites their debut album getting to #1.

They're being supported by, among others, The Sunshine Underground. I guess you'll have heard quite a bit of them recently as they released their second album, Nobody's Coming to Save You, last month.

The gig is on 1st April at The Coronet, London. More specifically it's at Elephant and Castle (which I swear is a real place with a tube station and everything), in south London. I can't think of a better way to spend April Fools Day.

More information here.

Of course, here's a couple of tracks from the bands:

Kelly's Heroes by Black Grape, my personal favourite Black Grape track.

Panic Attack by The Sunshine Underground, from their debut album Raise The Alarm.

The Plastic Pals

One of the best things about writing this blog is getting e-mails from bands. Mostly they're new bands I haven't heard off, but not always. Generally they want me to listen to their music and feature it here, but again not always. Either way it's nice to see bands that don't treat blogs as the enemy.

Which brings me to The Plastic Pals. I got an e-mail from them and immediately liked them. They're from Stockholm although the songs are in English. They've got a sound that's hard to describe, for me at least. They appeal to the part of me that enjoy Loaded era Velvet Underground (that's a large part of me) and Television, but with a popier touch.

The lead vocalist Hawk Soold has an awesome voice with a bit of John Cale and just a touch of Jon Spencer mixed in. If that hasn't got you eager to listen to them then I don't know what will. Here's a track for you all:

She's Going Back

and here's a live video, you can really hear the Loaded-esque guitar playing:


There's A Wind On The Moon


Go here to download another couple of free tracks as well as buy the album (First track Here Comes The Sun is my personal favourite). Visit their myspace here and lastly, here's their homepage. Enjoy.