2012 March Archive - The Recommender

THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR

We get a lot of requests from artists, PR, managers and labels asking us to post music from bands that have already released several albums. We tend to turn them down, as this blog and the service it’s trying to provide is all about delivering new, emerging music to people. What good is it to recommend an artist you’ve already heard of, right? On the flip side, we’re not interested in desperately being first either, more that we’re only trying to be early to new music, so the readers genuinely discover something. Anything else makes the purpose of this blog a little bit redundant otherwise. However, today’s recommendation blurs the lines of these guiding rules, as they’re by no means new, yet we imagine there’ll be plenty of visitors to this page that have never discovered them. Additionally we think they’re pretty awesome too, which happens to be a slightly stricter rule we apply to anyone trying to get onto this blog’s posts, so they qualify on that front with ease.

The Polyamorous Affair are the duo, Eddie Chacon and Sissy Sainte-Marie, who used to live in Berlin but are now back living in their home town of Los Angeles. Beyond the questionable moniker – especially when you consider that they’re actually married – the American duo make music that is fixed on a brand of excellent moody disco that can pitch it’s tent alongside the likes of Goldfrapp, The Golden Filter, The Phenomenal Handclap Band and Escort. They’ve only enjoyed two low-key self-releases of a couple of albums previously, but none of these have enjoyed any kind of push over here in the UK. For their new album, The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be, we are set to see a fresh approach to Europe, which is fair and right, as their music should easily translate kindly to the ears of us Brits as much as anyone. Bobb Bruno of Best Coast has helped produce the new album, and as we know, this style of disco is always better off for having a tidy production involved.

They’re second single from the album is Whoever Controls The Groove which is due out on April 6th through Winter Palace Records, with remixes from Ghosting Season, Enjoyed and from fellow Recommendees, Bright Light Bright Light, the latter of which is provided below as an exclusive. The single stomps and claps as you would imagine a good contemporary disco tune should, although the opening vocal refrains wonder a little too close to The Scissor Sisters on occasion. What they do fantastically well is to hold onto the good bits for a decent section of a song – they let quality mantras and uplifting synths drive for more than 16 beats at a time, allowing the listener to hook onto the tune. Their songs follow similar templates throughout their albums, with Chacon and Saint-Marie sharing out the lyrics between them, but with the latter often offering up a huskier sexualised tone, much in the same way Goldfrapp or Fan Death do. We would grip them up for their lack of originality, as they add very little to any other modern purveyors of the genre, but fortunately they write so consistently well that their hypnotic powers seem to set up camp inside your brain and put up a sign saying “We shall not be moved“.

Older tracks, such as the low-key plod of Softer And Softer or the racing tap of tracks like Eastern showed us they have range to their armoury, but we fear they don’t push their horizons quite enough. Much like The Golden Filter they suffer from a singular tone which results in the kind of feeling you might associate with trying to go shopping for food when you’re full up – it’s simply impossible to decide what to like once your appetite has been satiated. It’s a lesson they could all learn from Goldfrapp, where light and shade is applied with far more contrast, to good effect. However, older highlights, such as the tune, New York, delivers a timeless class to their work, and it’s that quality that they’re now channelling with their new songs. Here’s a duo that seem to have learned from past successes and we now see them applying those lessons to the new album. Sticking to what you are best at may not herald much new ground, but it at least seems like a fair rule of quality. By applying a set of unwritten Recommender rules we are able to keep the blog’s aims on track and continue to be a useful service, but what’s perhaps been learned from today’s selection more than anything else is that some rules are more strictly applied over others – yeah sure, it helps to be new, but it helps so much more if you’re awesome. (MB)

THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR - WHOEVER CONTROLS THE GROOVE

THE POLYAMOROUS AFFAIR – WHOEVER CONTROLS THE GROOVE (BRIGHT LIGHT BRIGHT LIGHT REMIX)

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Published: March 31st, 2012
Author: Mike Bradford
Category: The Recommender
Tags: Escort, Fan Death, Goldfrapp, New York, The Golden Filter, The Phenomenal Handclap Band, The Polyamorous Affair, The Scissor Sisters, Whoever Controls The Groove, Whoever Controls The Groove (Bright Light Bright Light Remix), Winter Palace Records

ELLIPHANT

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Last month, the BBC 6 Music radio station had their inaugural Blog Awards, in which they asked a selection of UK blogs and music sites to select the award’s categories. The Recommender was one of the nine sites asked to contribute. They requested we choose an alternative category to all the other ‘normal’ awards, so we selected ‘Best Tease Of The Last 12 Months‘ and put up a range of music videos for the public to vote on. And vote they did, in their hundreds. It was a massive success, leading to the eventual winners, IAmAmIWhoAmI, taking the award for their stupendously lengthy viral video campaign, which is now into it’s second year! One of the other nominated videos on offer was the most recent tease of them all, from an artist who had designed a teaser video so totally awesome it simply had to be included. Whisper it, but it was secretly The Recommender’s favourite from all of the nominations.

These days, with a plethora of online chatter constantly buzzing around the globe, it’s absolutely essential for new artists to excite people with your initial launch campaign. Not only do you have to write great music and be fantastic live in this extremely competitive environment, but you also need to have impact and traction from the outset, commonly caused by the online chatter hyping you up. How do you do that? Well, one excellent way is to create a viral video, offering up a taster of what the public is about to receive. The video that arrived from Elliphant a few weeks ago dished up an excellent example of this, with their two minute clip playing their track, In The Jungle, which was blasted out over a rather random, but punchy video of a young boy being wheeled along by policemen in a shopping trolley(!), like a protected king, (see that video below). As odd as that sounds – and oddness also gets people chatting, as you can’t help but exclaim “what the FUCK was that!” at your screen – it had the desired effect as the blogs and Twitter went into a frenzied overdrive. In this instance, awesome music + awesome video = viral success.

NME hit on them, lots of the key online music commentators reacted and the ball was rolling. The question is, who are they, where are they from and how dare they be this awesome!? Unfortunately those questions remain, as very little additional information is at hand as we ‘go to press’, but snippets and rumoured gossip has been passed around. This cock-tease of an artist is apparently one solo female, name unknown – although if that’s her in the photos then, yeah, she’s hot – comes from Sweden and is apparently under the charge of Company Ten, the management team who delivered us Icona Pop and Niki & the Dove – both are Swedish artists due a very busy year as their own debut’s arrive. That might help explain the clever campaign. Aside from all the viral obsession and marketing there’s substance with the tunes though, as In The Jungle delivers an electric shock over the kind of tribal drumming not heard since Crystal Fighters‘ arrived with their song, Xtatic Truth. Elliphant deliver the kinds of thumps perhaps most associated with their namesakes’ footsteps, but they also add a multitude of warped layers that harness rave chords as vocal mantras build up to fantastic crescendos throughout. It even breaks after a couple of minutes to wind in the light guitar riffs from Eye Of The Tiger. It’s at this point you give up any resistance.

The new tune arrived today to continue the campaign. The track is called TeKKno Scene, featuring Adam Kanyama (who is apparently an exciting prospect within the Swedish hip hop scene), and it continues the madness. More off-beat tribal drumming skips you up to the kind of song that Big Freedia would be happy to bounce to. This has roots in all sorts of music, although it shares ideals with the Bounce genre and all it’s unashamed insanity, repeated vocal sampling, and crash-and-bang impact. Elliphant stir in plenty of other elements though, reminding us of the kind of Afro soup that either Santigold or MIA served up in the past, with all it’s multi-layered web of roots. It’s another spaghetti junction of sounds and messes so much with the common pop blueprint that it feels impossible to untangle at first, but their best trick seems to be the ability to excite and inject an addictive rush directly into your brain. It’s music that is impossible to ignore, demanding attention like a loud Caribbean parade passing through your ears. Although it reflects the aforementioned artists, this can still be held up as the kind of original music that’s full of sparks, igniting fresh ideas with every new release. It’s this kind of bravery that pushes things forwards and so we applaud Elliphant for fearlessly ripping open the envelope. What it didn’t win in blog awards it will gain in continued online coverage with a campaign that’s just as exciting in it’s delivery as it is it’s music. (MB)