Tag Archive for "Escort" - 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

ALPINE

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Right at the close of the year we come across one of the tidiest finds of 2011. We have fallen completely head over heels in love with this new band and predict that once you too have hit play on the below buttons, you will also be devoting a little piece of your hearts to them. It’s been another good year for discovering new music, with a multitude of interesting finds, so topping it off with this new group seems like the perfect way to draw down the curtain on these last twelve months. Our Best Tracks Of 2011 post will be up on the blog over the holiday period so you can clearly see all it’s highlights. Right at the last minute this new band will easily rush straight into that post too.

If there’s been one theme running through this year’s discoveries it’s the appalling choice of band names. It’s not necessarily the actual titles that are the issue, more the massive lack of understanding search engine optimization. We guess music is what their best at, which is fair enough, but surely the A&R’s and labels should advise them better? We’ve had bands such as Friends, who arrived in an SEO-abandoned WTF moment. Citizens! foolishly thought some punctuation might help matters. Typing Escort into Google is highly unlikely to uncover the excellent New York disco band. Although a little fun can be found with Leisure, Theme Park and Amusement, who all might prove a little safer on search engines, but no more helpful when it comes to locating their music. More recently we had Neon Gold’s Foxes arrive, having adopted a moniker that clearly ignores not one but two UK bands of the same name, (albeit one had added a not-very-different-at-all exclamation mark to their title in a hopeless attempt to be distinguished). Even the Slough shit-piece Brother had to shift their title to Viva Brother following a legal challenge from an Australian band of the same name this summer, when perhaps a change of musical direction would have been preferable.

And so we come to today’s recommendation, Alpine. Not only will their SEO take you to numerous businesses offering anything to do with European mountain ranges, but there’s also the Arizona rock band of precisely the same name. That doesn’t even give mention to the UK duo that are high on hype, Alpines, although the addition of an ‘s’ at the end might just stave off the major label who they signed to earlier this year. Names aside though, this new band’s tunes are perhaps the best of the bunch, which goes to prove that it’s the output that ultimately matters most. Here is a six-piece from Melbourne making the kind of extra-special music that will have people stretching that bit further to reach them. They’re gearing up for their début album, which is to be released early in 2012, and considering their releases to date it’s already looking like one of the most exciting releases of the year.

Absolutely everything we’ve heard to date from the Melbourne-based band has been of an exceptional standard. Having formed in 2009 they quickly gained some useful early coverage on Australia’s Triple J radio station, which ultimately led to them signing with Sydney’s Ivy League Records by the summer of 2010. Their debut single, Heartlove, came out late last year introducing us to their female-fronted indie pop, with an emphasis on the drafty, left-field end of that genre’s spectrum, perhaps best associated with Scandinavian bands. Consider Le Corps Mince De Francoise covering Lykke Li songs and you get a sense of the excellent pop that they’re trying to design here. That single was found at the centre of their debut, five-track EP, Zurich, which arrived in November of 2010 and which proved to be one of the most consistent EPs we’ve heard in recent times. The highlight amongst the five highlights is their second single, Villages, which combines their signature moves of layered vocals and sweeping guitars in a knock-out potion.

Their tunes cause an instant lift for the listener, but nothing prepared us for the rise delivered by the first single to officially arrive from the expected debut album. Hands arrived in the second half of 2011 in preparation for next year’s hype and it’s an absolute winner. It initially creeps in the room without fuss, but quickly turns on the style, especially with the peaked vocals and waves of riffs that wash up and down in volume. It’s as deadly as a classically beautiful woman chewing bubblegum, delivered in distinctly classy sections, yet all of it coated in an instant pop appeal. If you thought their video for the Villages single was worthy of your attention then you should check the new one for Hands. It’s yet another stylish and beautifully created short film, directed by Luci Schroder and involving more seductive women in their underwear than any others this year. Or perhaps any year? All this sets everything up fantastically leaving us in a tantalisingly poised position for the full debut album next year. Beyond any names or titles, both the videos, and more importantly the music, is well worth clicking to page six of Google’s search results for. (MB)