These New Musics

The Observer Music Monthly tells me that quite a few bands I really liked a couple of years ago when their debuts came out have their second efforts released this week. There's Vampire Weekend and Yeasayer, as well as an older love Four Tet. There's also a very intriguingly-good review of a new album by a band called These New Puritans, who I've never heard before.

First Vampire Weekend. I really liked the first album; I'd been listening to a lot of West African music and I liked how VW incorporated these sounds into a pop record. I liked the literary-student-about-town lyrics about Oxford commas and Mansard roof architecture. After a while though, once the songs had been played a bit too much, it all began to sound a little stale. I haven't listened to them for quite a while. This new album seems quite a step forward, it's more sonically inventive and more interested in creating new textures, it moves away from more straight (chart-y) pop songs without losing the exuberance they had before. It's more confident, too. Here's some songs:








I saw Yeasayer with Al just after getting back from San Francisco in February 2008. I was rather grumpy about being back in Glasgow, and didn't really want to go out to the gig. But I was glad I did; it turned out to be one of the best gigs of the year. At that point I didn't know much about them, and their use of African rhythms (like VW) interested me. The album, when I got it, underwhelmed a little at first, but after listening to it again and again I came to love it. There's a very particular atmosphere to it which I love to get into and explore. So it's funny that I'm again a little underwhelmed by this new single:



I had my Four Tet moment when I first moved up to Glasgow in 2006. I remember listening to the album Rounds over and over as I wandered around a new city. But like Bonobo and artists on the Tru Thoughts and Ninja Tune labels that I was listening to at the same time, I began to get a bit bored by it; it all got a bit too "loungey" and affluent-sounding. It didn't have any edginess to it, it was the sound of comfortable London media types going to the Big Chill. I haven't really thought about Four Tet since, though I did like his collaborations with jazzer Steve Reid. But I really like the house-y stuff on his new record:



I had assumed, in the brief moments where I'd seen the name, that These New Puritans were some fairly bland emo-rocky-something-y band that I didn't need to bother about. But the review I read today describes their new album Hidden as "one of the most confounding, pretentious and self-consciously intellectual records I've heard in years". Now I like a bit of confound-ance/ity, I actively seek out pretentiousness, and I love intellectualism in music, so this seemed right up my street. The album is apparently influenced by "Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, Steve Reich, and 'the plastic textures of modern US pop'". You can definitely hear the first two in this song, as well as a bit of Radiohead I think. It's fascinating. I can't imagine listening to it very often, but I think it's incredible. The video is superb too: