Tag Archive for "Muse" - The Recommender

NIFE

Right now indie rock is about as fashionable as a Razorlight press photo. For example, Muse just pissed everyone off with their faint attempt at dubstepping their way out of a rock corner with their latest single. They’d gotten away with oversized grandeur up to this point, but the recent album teaser was the perfect example of how to disappear up your own black hole. As you know, we operate in the world of emerging music, so when you hold up successful indie rock bands of the recent past, such as the Arctic Monkeys, Kings Of Leon or Kasabian against the cutting edge artists, such as Purity Ring, Grimes, Savages or Angel Haze there’s a sense that the older giants have lost their exciting fizz. They just don’t sound like the future any more. Or if you check Razorlight‘s recent press photographs then they don’t ‘look’ like the future either. Today we recommend to you a band that can comfortably be placed upon the indie rock shelf, but they’re proving that this is a shelf with a lot of life still in it.

Nife are a three-piece band, originally from the ancient West Country city of Bath, with one of the trio apparently from Austria, but they’re now calling London home as they set up camp and attempt to buck the trend that’s currently raging against indie rock bands. Their camp seems to have been doing a pretty good job too, as a series of packed gigs have lead to them not only earning blog inches on the likes of Cougar Microbes and Alt Sounds, but they’ve also attracted the attention of producer Tim Oliver (Happy Mondays, New Order), who not only jumped into the studio with them for their debut album (apparently recorded in Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios) but he has also become a mentor to the band. You can hear why when you witness the extraordinary talent that fronts them. Nicky surely has to go down as one of the most exciting females in music today, with not only one talent but two. Firstly she sings, and we mean really really sings, properly belting out vocals that shake the room, maintaining a clean tone whilst raising the volume up and up. Secondly she jams lead guitar in the kind of constant riffing that makes each song seem like one long solo.

Those of you who might remember what Noel did to the Oasis song, Columbia, or how Lenny Kravitz used to merrily fuck along the fret board, will hear lots of similar guitar-led power and talent with Nife. Their debut album, Chemicals, is due out on August 13th on Independent Records Ltd, and the nine songs play out like one long consistently bright jam. Remember that stonking riff in The Riverboat Song by Ocean Colour Scene? Imagine 45 minutes of that. That’s not to say that it doesn’t ebb and flow as the stream of music hits the bends in the album, with songs like Happy Birthday and Dregs applying the occasional brake to the otherwise racing set of hooks. This is a melodically accessible rock album in the old fashioned sense, taking you on a confident ride, with the kind of timeless, soaring guitar music that we used to get with albums such as Pearl Jam‘s addictive debut, Ten. Now that shouldn’t work in 2012, but believe us it does, this is an album with such a strong sense of classic that they could have found a more appropriate title if they’d called it Eleven.

The first single to arrive from the trio shares the same title, Chemicals, and is due out on July 30th. From the outset you realise this is a three-piece truly plugged into each other as the jagged guitar stabs and up-tempo off-beats land like raindrops on sand behind Nicky’s sky-high vocals. As she reaches that central mantra with the phrase “cut me loose” the purity in her voice adorns the kind of empowered stance that towers over the song. Just as in her lead guitaring, she knows precisely when to tweak a line, giving inflections that stop it from being delivered too straight. It’s utterly astonishing and the perfect introductory single. Elsewhere on the album she remains the dominatrix, always in charge, especially on tracks like Silence, which she uses to cut you in half by holding the song entirely alone at 2 mins and 45 secs in, before the hurricane riffs collapse back on top of you. Imagine Halle Berry as the character Storm in the X-Men making pop music. You. Do. Not. Fuck. Around. Listen to Nicky confidently call at you during Slow Motion Accident, “because I’m forever and you’re so temporary” and you’ll know exactly what we mean.

Having had the power of lo-fi, dubstep, pop and alternative music dominating the underground scenes in recent years this is the perfect act to re-introduce you to the guitar. It’s an instrument that’s been on an extended vacation for some time, perhaps mostly down to the Internet and Ableton which allow a new kind of bedroom production that simply wasn’t available ten years ago. We have nothing against this new proving ground, as it enables an individual to generate electronic music in a freedom that can only help talent to rise. We probably wouldn’t have had the likes of Grimes without it, but Nife give us a powerful reminder that instruments and talent can shine when the reigns are harnessed this exquisitely. We imagine their live sets are knock out too, as Nicky admits to regularly “going off on one“. They’re playing a series of shows across North London in August, so check your local listings if you’re around that area. We will certainly be in the crowd, ready for her to slap us around the face with her guitar. The real slap with this music is how it is still likeable in the face of the adversity shown to most current guitar bands. It not only shows how good their song-writing is, but it tells us that when you nail indie rock this perfectly you actually transcend current fashions. (MB)

NIFE – IF I WAS GOOD
http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/49573916

NIFE – SILENCE

NIFE – CHEMICALS

2 Comments

Published: July 23rd, 2012
Author: Mike Bradford
Category: The Recommender
Tags: Chemicals, If I Was Good, Lenny Kravitz, Muse, Nife, Ocean Colour Scene, Pearl Jam

THE CHEVIN

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These days if you write stadium-sized anthemic guitar music you will most likely be ridiculed in the UK, none more enthusiastically than by music bloggers. Shelve your sound under the term ‘indie rock’ and the knives will be out before you even begin, as the key-holders to cool, from the established music publications, to the specialist radio shows, to the taste-maker bloggers, will be attacking your every-man appeal. It seems that by writing timeless tunes you will immediately block any chance of your band being attached to any contemporary movement, or underground scene, as your songs transcend any sense of being fresh or challenging, and it definitely cannot be seen to play any part of music’s future. Your biggest market will be housewives and Radio 2 will play-list you as soon as Radio One do. By over-stretching your aims you will be jumping right over the slower, more gradual process that sees bands being considered cool before becoming big. However, in a world of lightening fast attentions and the kind of buzz blogging that kills music before it sees the light of the mass market, it will actually prove rather interesting to see if The Chevin will be able to hop, skip and jump right over the usual taste-maker pitfalls and into the wider conscience.

The Breaking More Waves music blog stirred up this point, when they mentioned in their own balanced coverage of The Chevin, that they are “possibly one of the most deeply unfashionable bands around“. This quartet from Leeds released an EP last year and are now all set to break through in 2012, as they gear up for the eventual launch of their debut album, Borderlands, which is due out in September 3rd on So Recordings. When we say ‘break through’ we of course mean in the Queen sense, as this is a band that are more likely to be tipped by Q Magazine than NME, or appear on David Letterman (something they’ve already scheduled for this August) than on the post-midnight music shows we see on Channel Four. Useful support slots to the likes of Franz Ferdinand have already built a fan base in Europe and their sound is so perfectly suited to America that they’ve already relocated to New York.

Comparisons to U2 and Muse have bounced around, which is entirely fair enough when you consider that their tune, Menwith Hill, sounds like the former covering the latter. It surely doesn’t get any more stadium than those two bands, but alas more comparisons to other headliners continue with the opening track on their EP, Champion, coming across like a missing anthem from The Killers and another track, Blue Eyes, delivering the gritty romance that Bruce Springsteen fills arenas with. Of course we’ve seen all these grand aims fall short of world-domination, with the likes of The Bravery and White Lies, among many other pretenders, but we have to state that The Chevin seem to absolutely nail it. Singer, Coyle Girelli, has a confidence and style that will have you double-checking his British passport and lead guitarist Mat Steel is heard wonderfully backing him up with the kind of soaring guitar work that can only be applied with real talent. They have hits galore and to suggest they’re radio-friendly is like stating the presidential candidate is baby-friendly – nothing will keep the two things apart.

The bloggerati claim taste-maker status, having crow-barred a new underground layer underneath the one that the NME once inhabited. Music bloggers are often accused of killing off new music before it gets going, but The Recommender tries to fight that image, claiming that blogs are more innocent and altruistic than that, but there’s no doubting that The Chevin do not fit the usual criteria that us bloggers are looking for. However, by writing music without any sense of trying to be cool, The Chevin remind us of how music used to be before the Internet sped the whole process up. This isn’t so much a test of whether the band are good enough, but whether every band actually needs the initial buzz from the blogs in order to make it. By creating a brand of music that is neither hip nor contemporary, they found a formula that bypasses the underground minefield and it won’t affect their chances one jot. Instead these guys will hurdle the usual routes to the market and will surely sell stacks of records to people who have never read a music blog in their lives. If music is a business, then this is a band with genuine commercial appeal. When they’re headlining festival’s main stages they’ll seem to be operating in a hipster-less world as the underground and overground exist like oil and water. They may well be unfashionable, but not all music is trying that hard. If making a career as a band in today’s flailing music industry is considered an almost impossible task, then a lot of bands should look upon The Chevin with jealous eyes, as they effortlessly leap into tomorrow’s stadiums. (MB)