Tag Archive for "Arcade Fire"

HEART-SHIPS

This is why we love The Great Escape Festival. This is also why bands are wise to play at the three day event. Ultimately the weekend is a showcase for emerging bands and finds such as the one we provide for you today are precisely what the event is really all about. Make all the plans and schedules you like for the city festival, but with over 300 bands, at thirty venues, last minute changes and unavoidable queues, it is perhaps advisable for visitors to prepare for the unexpected and assume you’re gonna have to alter your intentions at some point. This chaos often leads people to make plans B and C, walking into shows at times they didn’t expect, in venues they didn’t know existed, regularly resulting in them catching a live performance that can totally side-swipe you unawares. We’re not suggesting that these punts are always winners, but it often enables you to uncover the occasional magical set, from a band you’ve never heard of. Before The Great Escape Festival we’d never heard of Heart-Ships. Now we have. Now you have too. That, in a nutshell, is the festival’s entire purpose.

We remember the heart-warming story of how our step-father saw a relatively unknown band, with a spotty but confident frontman, in a basement, in the 70s, play some new brand of punked indie music whilst stood on a stage made from upturned milk crates. That band are better known to us now as U2. The Great Escape festival is set up to provide plenty of these ‘I-was-there‘ moments. Sometimes the importance of your discovery can only be revealed years later, as you see the band fulfil it’s potential, but in Heart-Ships we think they’ve bottled the kind of rare magical promise that could see them really flourish in due course. This six-strong band, based in Leeds, who started out approximately 18 months ago, are now currently looking at all the offers that sit upon their table and they’ve informed us that they hope to make a decision and have their first big release ready by the end of the summer. Having seen them live last weekend, we’re going to be listening out for that debut album with keen ears.

This is a band who write the kind of rousing, contagious indie music that will no doubt produce a fantastic album, but it’s with their live show that their potent tonic seems to truly grab you. If this were the 1500s then this band would be a group of pirates sailing the high seas, clashing tankards as they sang their stirring tales. It’s with this imagery that we consider the choice of band name to be even better suited, although we’re not sure that was their intention. Either way they’ve nailed the live experience, giving it everything they’ve got, as the frontman, Ryan Cooke, summons a spirited performance, whilst the guitarists are seen to turn and closely play to each other nose to nose behind him. There’s something about the moment at a live show where you notice all of the band members are singing along with the main vocalist, even though they don’t actually have a mic in front of them. It shows how into the music they are, it shows they’re wrapped up in the moment, and it’s impossibly infectious. Arcade Fire do it to brilliant effect as you watch the two violists singing with heads thrown back, entirely un-amplified, at the side of the stage. It’s also something we witnessed at a recent We Are Augustines show. It’s utterly irresistible.

Tracks such as Spraypaint have the kind of emotional call to arms that gets the people at the BBC falling over each other to apply it to a sporting-based television montage. It leaves you breathless, properly breathless, as if you just went ten rounds in a ring you shouldn’t have stepped into. This is emotive indie music that aims straight for your pulse and confidently raises it with every thudding crescendo. It’s more in evidence with their tune, A Lake, which also begins softly with Cooke’s vocals slowly appearing out of the illuminated mist created by the guitars, but before long the tankards are once again crashing. That same ability to triumphantly climb upwards is once again on show with their song, Heart Of A Wrestler, but this time it’s magnified, as it wonderfully breaks at 3 minutes and 45 seconds to a dramatic Adam Ant-like drum slam, before Cooke’s voice begins to break as he calls out. The whole thing reaches it’s peak over the last couple of minutes, as they shout out the appropriate line, “a heart of a wrestler never submits“. This is the kind of extraordinary defiant music that’s played with a metaphorically clenched fist.

The Recommender does it’s best to position itself as part of your music discovery. We want you to genuinely locate at least something on these blog pages that you can take away with you. It’s our altruistic nature, our reason d’etre. At it’s heart, The Great Escape’s magic carries the exact same rewards. With unfortunate queues shutting you out of a popular showcase you’re forced to improvise a plan B and it’s this process that allows the festival to deliver hope at the exact moment when you’d thought it had been taken from you. Heart-Ships are still in the pre-debut album stages and although they’ve been steering themselves into position for over a year, they can be considered as an emerging band, so it’s unlikely that many of the Great Escape festival attendees circled them as one of their ‘must-sees’ as soon as they opened their schedule planners. However, the rewards on offer at the tiny venue showcasing this act were as bountiful as any. The huff and puff of this hard-working band mean they could easily expand the experience into a much larger venue, and if there’s any justice then by the next festival it’s those bigger stages that they’ll be appearing on. You just never know, but there’s a possibility that in years to come we could be regaling anecdotal stories of how we saw Heart-Ships with just forty others in a tiny upstairs bar in Brighton. (MB)

HEART SHIPS – SPRAYPAINT

HEART SHIPS – HEART OF A WRESTLER (A YOUNG MAN’S STRUGGLE FOR STRENGTH)

HEART SHIPS – PINHOLE OF LIGHT

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Published: May 20th, 2012
Author: Mike Bradford
Category: The Recommender
Tags: A Lake, Arcade Fire, Heart Of A Wrestler, Heart Ships, Pinhole Of Light, Spraypaint, The Great Escape Festival, U2, We Are Augustines

WE ARE AUGUSTINES

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We write from our hearts, which happens to be something that we strongly demand from any bands that are covered on these blog pages. There are few rules to earn your place on The Recommender, except that you have to be bloody good and write your music with integrity. If we like you then we write you, and today’s recommendation has our hearts properly hooked. We’re certainly not the first online commentators to point this duo out to people, because they’ve enjoyed a building swarm of online coverage as we lead up to their debut album. They’ve earned the jump from our queue to our pages, because in this particular case the hype is well deserved and so this is one giant swarm that we can be seen sprinting into the centre of. You can expect this duo to start owning 2012 as their debut album, Rise Ye Sunken Ships, finally got released this week delivering their special brand of authentic, mature song craft.

The duo used to be in the now-disbanded group, Pela, who only managed one and a half albums before giving up, but rather than lay defeated and dormant they’ve clearly picked up the lessons and two of it’s members reformed as We Are Augustines to realise their obvious talents. The whole album has the feel of one last chance, a final leap, a last bullet fired from a shaking hand, but they’ve absolutely hit their target. In all honesty, much of America’s alternative rock music is best avoided, drenched in macho sweat and over-sized posturing, often seeming dated, although admittedly often selling millions of albums, but mostly to housewives in the mid-west. Nickleback anyone? What is interesting with this new Brooklyn duo is that at first glance you might consider them for that same mid-rock shelf, as you get the same over-sized, epic scale, with open guitar chords and Billy McCarthy up front delivering familiar husky, smokes-way-too-much vocals synonymous with mid-rock. And yes, just like everyone else from that genre (that we just made up for the convenience of this article) all roads seem to lead back to Bruce Springsteen, but in this particular case it’s a positive attribute, with tales of broken lives, the underdog fight and steely grit, but where most bands blindly deviate upon paths of masculine cliches, We Are Augustines actually channel Springsteen as if they were drunk from gallons of his bottled spirit.

Sure it’s aiming high, fist-pumping and stadium-sized even, but they never lose sight of the melody and craft, realising, much in the same way Arcade Fire have, that the trick with Springsteen is that his songs have grip and they drag you along with them, usually by your heart. Try out the exceptional Book Of James and you will witness just how strong their traction can get, it’s impossibly good and their most Arcade Fire-induced moment on the album. This is rock music that also has deep roots in americana, with honest, soulful, lugubrious artistry that’s often found in that genre. Songs stir you at your core, rousing your inner spirit as if listening to a religious preacher, which may be in part due to them having recorded some of it in a church – another trick utilised by Arcade Fire. McCarthy’s lyrics often expose his heart to the listener, as he sings of personal experiences, such as the death of both his mother at a relatively young age and the suicide of his brother, as he screams of “brotherly love” on Philadelphia or “You’re losing the shape that your in” on Patton State Hospital. He also paints touching images with words, as he sings of “tearing up photographs” having missed out on the girl, on the tune Chapel Song, or “Fell asleep with a cigarette, to the flicker of a tv set” on Augustine. This is an album for the wordsmith as much as it is the songsmith.

The instrumentation is also packed with wonderful ebbs and flows, with brass and even electronic touches darting in and out, and with their cover of Crooked Fingers‘ New York Drink For The Old Drunk, or with Patton State Hospital, we see them knocking out the kind of racing snare drum rattle that is designed to raise the heartbeat and leave you breathless. Some songs sprint, whilst other meander beautifully, with Strange Days feeling more like a Tom Petty pop song. Sure they often sings of heartache and of loss and of misusing drugs, but they otherwise miss the obvious minefield of cliches, instead treading cleverly through common topics without putting a foot wrong. By the time you reach Barrel Of Leaves, you even get their most Eels-esque moment of melancholy sadness, as they offer a final out-stretched helping hand, whether it’s to his brother, or to this reformed band is unknown, but it’s suitably touching either way. Essentially we have a vulnerable story and the protagonists deliver on both ends of the spectrum – whether wide open and brave or introspectively dark and heartfelt. We applaud their ability to produce a rock album, of a kind that usually has us Brits running from the overweight scale of it all, but if you want musicians to write from their hearts then you won’t get many albums cut as wide open as this. (MB)