IO

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When you’re hunting around the edges for very new music you come across a lot of utter crap. That’s the price we pay for setting ourselves up as your filtering service. Please don’t think that we come across bands this awesome every time we look, we don’t, it takes an eye-wateringly long time to wade through the myriad of bullshit pretenders before we stumble upon diamonds cut this way. And this is truly one of those diamond finds. You’re going to love them. Your friends are going to love them. NME is going to slap them all over their radar pages and in a few months time they’ll be adorning front covers. BBC Radio One will quickly follow BBC 6Music’s adoption by adding them to the likes of Zane Lowe and Huw Stephens’ playlists. They’re utterly fucking awesome. Really. This truly is one of those exceptional finds. But as we said, this is very new music. They’ve some way to go yet, but this is a band penning some great music right now and from the songs we’ve heard to date we think they’re on a good path. A very good path.

To begin with we should cut out those faux house producers of the same name, that adorned The Hype Machine listings over the last year or so; this band is not them. This is a new four-piece band from North Yorkshire, also called IO, making smart, sophisticated, elemental indie music, on the kinds of playing fields from which you normally find Blessing Force‘s scouts. Comparisons to Trophy Wife will obviously bounce around, with the well-arranged, tidy indie pop that’s on offer here, but we believe there’s more to this lot than the popular Oxford lads. They maintain a similar shimmer on their guitars and a flavour of that same tropical taste to their beats, but they’re making music that feels like it’s stepping up to the next level. It’s Blessing Force reborn with all the lessons of past mistakes learned and the flab trimmed in all the right places. You can add the likes of Yaaks, Zulu Winter, or even the new Friendly Fires, better known as Discopolis, to the frame of reference here, but just you wait until you hear the middle section of their tune, This Place. It’s a fucking heart-stopper.

We’ll get to that masterful tune in a minute, but the best place to start off an introduction is to point you in the direction of No Life. For a band capable of storming it up like that Halle Berry character in the X-Men films, this track actually feels like the calm before hand. This steadying, confident pace is something they have total control over through every song on offer. It starts as something that could easily be dismissed as a dated fade of Fenech Soler‘s dead-end eletro-pop style, but their swagger soon gets going, with less reliance on synths and more focus on delicately-placed guitars. Oliver Webb’s vocals carry it, which is all the more remarkable, as he was actually the final missing piece, added to the band after all the other band members were on board. Occasionally he matches the melancholy, storytelling sadness found in America‘s ‘A Horse With No Name‘, but this is still contemporary stuff, with robots replacing the horses, as they speak of a man failing to carve out his own way in life. Like a lot of special music it speaks to the ‘Everyman’.

This Place moves through the gears in the same crescendos you once heard with Foals and Friendly Fires, again starting out as a stripped-down affair, baring the songs nakedness as instruments are played in separation, but things soon wind up together. The bass is brought in front and centre and the added punch is a master-stroke. It promotes the songs to a heavier fighting weight. The guitars star once again, but there’s never one dominant over-reliance on any particular instrument or sound. Where Delphic occasionally drowned in synths, IO flick them on like a club that saves it’s big green laser for the peak of the night. Where Foals, particularly on their first album, played their guitar notes independently of each other like an over-used poker move, IO use the same effect in waves that wash in and out, allowing for a smoother finish, rather than the spiked, angular abrasiveness of so many Foals-pretenders.

The band started by floating around a couple of demos back in the middle of 2010, but that only resulted in the odd blog post and some local radio plays. Still, the following months earned them occasional support slots which cropped up in the York gig scene, including shared stages with the likes of The Jezabels, CSS and Is Tropical, allowing them to slowly build a presence. We got in touch with the band last week and it seems they’ve recently had the chance to record three new tracks, which is how they earned today’s Recommender appearance. All are available as a free download on their Soundcloud account. It’s with these that we believe the real attention should start being attracted. They plan to support Club Smith at The Basement in York on February 11th and they play with The Glitches at the Electricity Showrooms in East London on February 22nd, so there’s your next chance to check them out in person. In a world now dominated by pop and all things synthetic, it’s impossible to say which band or exactly which turning point will spark the re-invention of the guitar, but history tells us that it will happen eventually, just look at how Nirvana managed to wash away the 80s with four (very loud) chords. We’re not suggesting this band will prove a turning point for indie, we’d never be that confident, and on a basic level they’re simply combining parts of guitar bands from the recent past, albeit to very good effect. They’ve confirmed to us that they’re in the process of writing yet more material, so we will soon see just how high the boys are aiming. Personally, we think they’re pointing skywards. (MB)

IO – NO LIFE

IO – PEAKS

IO – THIS PLACE

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AU PALAIS

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We’ve been monitoring the global music scenes for nearly four years on The Recommender. What we’ve come to notice is that cities and sometimes entire countries seem to randomly peak at the top of everyone’s attention from one year to the next, like an ever-changing economic graph of music. When we started music was buzzing on the back of France, and particularly Paris’, dominant electro scene. That was swiftly followed by Australia’s outpouring of electro pop bands. Scandinavia seems to spout new bands at an alarmingly high rate and New York is never far from the top but both of these places have enjoyed a real bulge over recent years. In 2011 our spotlight has regularly visited and re-visited Canada, and particularly Toronto.

We’ve given plenty of blog inches to the likes of Freedom Or Death, Grimes, and Austra, among others, throughout this year. The quality of these Canadian artists has been very high indeed, in a year where the bar was unattainably sent skywards. If 2011 is anyone’s then it surely belongs to these North Americans. What ties them together, if anything, is their ability to write at the sharpest edges of pop whilst still being accessible. Sometimes they’re experimental, sometimes the melody has you flowing with it’s every shift, but as ethereal and expressive as they are, they’re often-electronic productions are enjoyable and employable. Their music feels like it’s directing an intelligent future for pop music, mixing class and traditional boundaries up as every new artist drops anchor. Today we are showing the latest act through the arrival doors.

Au Palais are a duo. A brother and sister duo, Elise and David Commathe, who call London home and the buzz around them in recent months has been impossible to avoid, as they’ve played shows in key venues for emerging artists, such as The Shacklewell Arms, Camp, or Cargo, upon bills that included other hyped bands, like Outfit and Zulu Winter. As gooey as this makes the London crowd go, the pair actually come from – yes you’ve guessed it – Toronto, Canada. Bright spotlights such as NME and Pitchfork have waded in with coverage, as well as the blog world’s cornerstone commentators. Comparisons with Zola Jesus or the aforementioned fellow-Canadians Austra have correctly bounced around, as Au Palais dice elements of this year’s repeated penchance for electronic pop.

Next week they’re releasing their four-track EP, Tender Mercy, which arrives from the hot UK label, The Sounds Of Sweet Nothing on November 28th. Like their fellow countrymen, they’ve designed a set of tunes packed with sophistication. It turns many corners and around each one is a delightfully presented piece of pop architecture, with rigid edges and curves that draw you in. Beats throb like a pulse that sometimes races and sometimes relaxes, but what ever the track is doing it always carries you along smoothly like riding aboard a red blood cell. The title track is as arresting as a beautiful face emerging from the dark, taking in it’s features one at a time, patiently observing each perfect element one by one, before the full image is lit up at two minutes in. Waves of diaphanous synths glide over each other as if weightless, as Elise’s vocals move alongside, as if in a singular, perfectly-rehearsed dance move.

Pathos feels Canadian, in a way that would have Katie Stelmanis nodding with approval. All the signature moves are there, with similar instrumentation that’s equal parts heavy and light, particularly with the synthetic melodies. The beat is once again addictive, giving them a familiar special move, a trick that also appears on a remix they recently completed for The Golden Filter. That band’s Syndromes EP delivers us a set of songs designed as the soundtrack to a Kristoffer Borgli-directed short film. Within it is the track, Mother, of which Au Palais provided their exceptional remix. Like all the best remixes it maintains the key elements of the original, including the vocals, whilst introducing an electro funeral-march beat. It’s a very fine example of Au Palais’ craft and skills.

What strikes a note with us is that Au Palais decided to re-locate from Toronto to London, as no matter which place the music appears from, it’s the UK that has open minds and readied ears for it’s output. Canada’s loss may ultimately prove to be our gain, as we walk the duo’s first steps alongside them, but overall the lesson is one that teaches us not to reflect on the wonderful locations spawning emerging music, but to in fact ponder how lucky we are in the UK to be a culture of receptive people that act as a sponge for every new experience. Which ever city or country eventually dominates through 2012, one thing can be assured, if it’s good enough then the UK crowd will welcome it with open arms. We’re not suggesting that the homes of these artists shouldn’t be proud to be associated with the roots of music such as this, but it’s in the discovery that the pleasure’s been revealed, and this year we’d like to thank Toronto, although in all honesty the pleasures been all ours.  (MB)

AU PALAIS – TENDER MERCY

AU PALAIS – PATHOS

THE GOLDEN FILTER – MOTHER (AU PALAIS REMIX)

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