The Recommender

Ahh, good old computers. Aren’t they just great? These days it’s so much easier to get to stage one of your career as an ambitious musician by tip-tapping away at your desk. Do-it-yourself is a phrase that’s been taken away from the out-of-town hardware stores and bestowed upon a new breed of bedroom producers. It’s now possible to use a computer to lay down a multitude of ideas in a song. You can produce it right there on your laptop, even adjusting for any lack of real skill, and record it with some pretty smart equipment, at least to a level where you can fire it out to the music blogs. Oh yes, now for those bloggers, the next group to utilise the computer, who then get get busy scribbling to move you even closer to that all-important stage one. You can gain some pretty serious traction once the right blogs hype you up, helping you to be picked up by NME, radio stations, record labels, booking agents and the wider media. Then it gets serious, you might even have to start, you know, playing live and, well, get out from behind the computer.

Today’s recommendation is a lesson in doing it yourself. The Focussed Distraction is solo artist Jon McLeod, who was Canadian-born but has been living in the UK from the age of six. He’s self released two EP’s to date, EP Uno and The Gravity EP that scored him some useful blog coverage and eventually earned his music a bit of airplay on radio shows by the likes of Huw Stephens on Radio One, Radio Two’s Steve Lamacq, and Tom Robinson on Radio 6Music. It just shows how far he’s already reached from his keyboard’s humble beginnings. He epitomises all that’s great about self-produced, alternative pop music, with a small catalogue of sublime tracks that twist and turn in the kind of ways that can only happen when someone is able to directly connect their ideas to their creations. At it’s heart it experimental, which means it can contain moments that are misses as well as hits, although in the main it is a success throughout.

Originality is a difficult thing to obtain in contemporary music, with so many people now having the ability to get started, but McLeod sets out a stall fresher than most. As Joe from the A New Band A Day blog brilliantly describes him, this truly is “outsider pop“, with a broad range of tones and shades on each EP. The only folks you might get close to comparing him to is the likes of Chad Valley in that same DIY layering, where any sampled electronics are purely organic and often made from the vocal noises coming from the protagonist, or Beck, if he had done all his early albums by simply using his beatbox voice and a set of loop samplers. Just take the track, Frictions Fractions, from the EP Uno, and you get the missing song off of Beck‘s Mutations. The EP clearly holds a few more acoustic highlights on it’s four songs, against the more electronic trends that are found on the releases since.

That’s not to state that the first EP is all unplugged guitars, no no no. Misery Jukebox has a tub thumped throughout it’s five minutes. In fact the opening tracks on his EPs are often the strongest, which can eventually mean they run out of fuel by the end of the four tracks, but there’s no doubt that the launch tunes give it enough momentum to maintain your attention for the duration of what follows. On The Gravity EP each tune contains a superb Mr Soft-plod to it’s pace, particularly on the opener, Getting To Know Gravity, but a drummer or a fully-produced drum machine may just work wonders to add more oomph to the beats. No real worries here though, as it transcends any bedroom production, for what it lacks in real power, it makes up with cunning and charm. This is a writer trapping ideas like wasps in an upside down pint glass, as sounds, samples and melodies dart all over the place, but just like those wasps they’re temporarily drunk and confused.

The pair of new tunes he has recently uploaded to his Soundcloud continue to show off his ability to write in light and shade, but he’s at his best when all his engine’s cogs are busy. The tune, The Karaoke Show, seems like he’s removed the keys from the ignition entirely, making the musical equivalent of one of those calming deep breaths the ambulance men tell you to take, but new tune, The Surface Sound, huffs and puffs enough to blow your house down. It’s perhaps his finest work to date, showing us that this inventor may yet unearth the idea that will eventually make his name. Doing it yourself isn’t easy, no matter how much of a wizard you might be on computers. There’s still impossibly tough additional skills required, such as ambition, skill, drive and good taste, plus a touch of luck, but overall any musician is marked by their ability to write excellent music and we believe McLeod scores highly on that front. This multi-layered, multi-instrumentalist may switch on and off like binary, blowing from hot to cold, but by finding successful ideas at both ends of such a broad spectrum we think he typifies talent in the modern age. Computers perhaps give you too much choice, too much freedom, and people often don’t quite know what to do with it, or how to reign it in properly. McLeod used to exist in a trio, but over time he developed into the one-man-band that we get today, so we believe The Focussed Distraction’s success will be determined by how he lassos his many ideas, for this self-produced artist doesn’t need to master his computer, he needs to harness himself. (MB)

THE FOCUSSED DISTRACTION – THE SURFACE SOUND

THE FOCUSSED DISTRACTION – GETING TO KNOW GRAVITY

THE FOCUSSED DISTRACTION – MISERY JUKEBOX