Singles of the Week

Unable to find a suitable tree, Igor squatted in a meadow while his hiking buddies politely averted their eyes.

Mew

The Zookeeper’s Boy

(Sony / BMG)

Musically, Denmark has given us the good (The Raveonettes), the awful (umm, Aqua) and the ‘how come we haven’t heard of them before?’ (Dizzy Mizz Lizzy – thanks, Google).

Now comes indie-art-rockers Mew, the next Scandinavian band-most-likely. The Zookeeper’s Boy introduces itself with unsettling jabs of mechanical, staccato guitar over an ominous synth drone and pounding toms – then, all of a sudden, it’s Queen-stylee harmonies and chimes taking over with suitable operatic pretentiousness. Weird, but good weird.

The resultant cacophony of falsetto threatens to go too far, but the darkness of the intro lingers under the mix throughout, leading one to believe that this is pretension paying off.

 
The Audreys

You And Steve McQueen

(ABC Music / Warner)

The banjo has never sounded so relevant (and hick-free) than in the hands of The Audreys, as they provide another sweet cut from their Between Last Night And Us debut. With no percussion instruments, that wacky, round, five-stringed instrument acts as the song’s looping motor, allowing fiddles, upright bass and Taasha Coates’ sultry vocals to meander on their own accord, immediately conjuring wholly pleasant images of bourbon and brown tweed.

Thankfully, no sign of Ashton Kutcher.

The Butterfly Effect

A Slow Descent

(Modern Music / Roadshow)

Whilst I remain convinced that the New South Wales central coast (and Tool) is somehow to blame for this whole booming, industrial rock sound, The Butterfly Effect are strangely able to rise above the realm of hard-rock cliché and wacky-beard-angst.

Produced by Joe Barresi (yep, Tool), A Slow Descent is a generally interesting slab of hard-rock, with the propensity to have you unconsciously doing the slow head-nodding thing, and possibly air drums. If your air-drumming can cope with roughly two-dozen time signature changes.

End Of Fashion

The Game

(Capitol)

The release of The Game signals the point where more than half the tracks from End Of Fashion’s debut have been released as a single (6 out of 11 – high school maths: still serving me well).

Between them, there have been no more than two musical ideas. That said, The Game is the best one since Too Careful, for what it’s worth. It’s just that it’s all sounding kind of irrelevant now.

The band's exhortations to booze on and behave indecently shocked the deeply conservative rock and roll industry.

Hell City Glamours

White Trash, Hot Love

(Independent)

Hell City Glamours (yep, they’re from Sydney) would work best as a purely satirical take on hard-rock stereotypes. Well, perhaps they are.

Let’s have a quick squizz at the accompanying video to this single: four piece (check); play gigs with band name and logo featuring prominently in the background (check); guitarist in Iron Maiden t-shirt (check); significant portion of vocalist’s arms tattooed (check); majority of fans clad in tight black garments (check); scenes featuring excessive consumption of spirits with shot-measuring device still attached (check); lyric reference to said spirit consumption (check); the general sense that an important aspect of rebellion is looking the part…

Death Cab For Cutie

Crooked Teeth

(Warner)

Certainly not the best track from latest album Plans, this has me cynically wondering the effect of recent market testing, which proved beyond all doubt that fans of The OC prefer their indie music inoffensive and easy to swallow.

Death Cab For Cutie (Seth’s favourite band, so I am told) are masters of thoughtful, dense indie-pop, and Crooked Teeth has them working at less than half-power. A squealy guitar solo perks things up a bit, leading into the soaring, harmony-laden final chorus, but I’m an impatient fucker, and I don’t want to have to wait to enjoy my Death Cab, goddammit.

Boo-hoo.

SINGLE OF THE WEEK

Princess One Point Five

Turnaround Or Thereabouts

(Pharmacy)

Sarah-Jane Wentzki goes pop (kind of) on this, the lead single for her second album as Princess One Point Five, and the results are sublime.

Her background as an instrumentally inclined artist serves her well, with her subtle, breathy vocal line taking the role of lead instrument in this organic melt of understated guitars.

Whilst it trades on the same dynamic throughout, it creates a lullaby effect, gently enveloping the listener in a steady crescendo of lush, dreamy harmonies and innocent, childlike melodies.