Weekly Column - The Hot Five
- Written by Tom Fake
The Hot Five – My views on five tracks that have attracted my interest in any given week, usually with an older track thrown in the mix for something a bit different. Tracks usually concentrate on pop/rock releases, but really focusing on anything and everything that comes my way.
Royal Canoe - 'Bathtubs'
Okay, so this is a song that has its fingers in so many musical pies. Even in the opening exchanges you get funk, folk and soaring violins and synths before the song really settles. Despite all these different musical styles and influences Royal Canoe (terrible names fellas, and don’t even get me started on the name of the track…) have created a surprisingly cohesive song. Its refreshing to see a new band have the guts to try something different from the word go. Thanks to all these different influences it might need more than one listen… Not that it bothers me…
The Veils – ‘Through The Deep, Dark Wood’
One particularly amusing comment in a review for Time Stays, We Go, the latest album from seemingly little-known band The Veils, stated of this track: “only the strong-willed won’t succumb to air-drumming before this bastard is done with you”. I have to say that I agree, and add that there might be a bit of air guitar too… Singer Finn Andrews has a fantastic vocal timbre that really makes this track. Given that his father, Barry Andrews, was a founding member of XTC and played with David Bowie, I suppose this is hardly surprising. From what I've heard so far of the rest of the album so far that might be worth a go too, so fingers crossed for more tracks like this one.
Jack White – ‘Love is Blindness’
Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby seems to be everywhere at the moment. This isn’t even the first track that I’ve included from the film (See Florence + The Machine’s ‘Over The Love’), and there’s no doubt that when it comes to movie soundtracks Luhrman and fellow director Quentin Tarantino are in a league of their own. This U2 cover from Jack White was originally recorded for a 20th anniversary compilation album tribute to Achtung Baby, but is played over the film’s trailer, and is a classic example of why Luhrman is so good at choosing his music. White puts his own twist on the track, including a Raconteurs-era screeching guitar solo and his own unique and emotive vocal line. I certainly hope the film is as good as the music.
Stornoway – ‘The Great Procrastinator’
Beachcomber’s Windowsill is one of my favourite albums, but I must admit it’s taken me a while to get into Stornoway’s new album Tales From Terra Firma. Listening to ‘The Great Procrastinator’, however, I find myself wondering why. There’s a seemingly timeless quality to Stornoway’s music, and their wide use of instrumentation on their new album is a bold step in a new direction. There are suggestions of Dixieland jazz in a woodwind instrumental intro before the mesmerising vocal of Brian Briggs enters over the more typical folk instrumentation that we are used to from Stornoway. They manage to merge this nicely with their Dixieland interpretation in a great middle eight that ralentando’s back to the chorus in a beautiful passage of music that reminds me of George Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’. Maybe I should be giving Stornoway’s latest album another listen!
I can’t find the studio version of the song to embed, but here’s the band performing it at Rough Trade East in March 2013:
Hidden track of the week: David Bowie – ‘Sound And Vision’ (Sonjay Prabhakar Remix)
Most people will have heard this particular track. It is a remix of the classic track from Bowie’s 1977 album Low. As a remix, it’s not really structure as a song, but all the same fits the purpose that it was meant for – as music for the most recent Sony advert. There is a simple beauty about this arrangement of Bowie’s original vocal over a reverberating piano part that is just so listenable… Enjoy!
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