Tomorrow, the debutalbum “Profile” from GITHEAD is released on Swim Records. Githead is Colin Newman (wire), Malka Spiegel (minimal compact), Max Franken (minimal compact) and Robin Rimbaud (scanner). Swim records is of course the obvious label choice, owned and run by husband and wife Spiegel and Newman. In many ways, you can hear both Wire and Minimal Compact in Githead. Their sound is not too far away from the music Wire did on their last couple of albums, - added with a deep, funky bass from Spiegel and beautiful layers of clean guitars from Newman/ Rimbaud. Rimbaud makes a distance from his work in Scanner by changing both style and instrument. In Scanner, his main tools for making his experimental layers of sound are electronic instruments, samplers, found noises and synths. He has played guitar since he was 16, but never in public. Now, he is Githead’s guitarist.
If you buy the album from Posteverything.com you will get the free ep “Free Git” with 3 tracks (one remix and two live tracks).

Githead’s website is generous with their mp3’s. Four songs available there, - three of them are here at eardrums for you:

Githead - Option Paralysis (from profile)
Githead - To have and to hold (from their debut EP, headgit)
Githead - Profile (live from the Swim studios, april 2004)

A confusing name, maybe… Lisa Brown is an up and coming band from Manchester, UK that play beautiful, melodic indiepop.

Here are some tracks that they’ve recorded recently:

Lisa Brown - Listen (april 05)
Lisa Brown - Anna (april 05)
Lisa Brown - Everybody likes to dream sometimes (april 05)

If you go to http://www.lisabrown.net, you will find more music from the band.

Retnesegel is a duo, half-norwegian and half-swedish, with a little link to Denmark too. The norwegian in the band is the singer, Ingrid Lode, who at the moment is a student in Stockholm, Sweden. The swede is Viktor Olofsson, who plays guitar and is a student at RMC in Copenhagen, Denmark.
That is also where the two met (RMC), started to play together and decided to continue to do so.

Musically, it’s highly original, - playful, dreamy, melodic pop with influences of jazz and electronica.
It’s difficult to point at any similar artists, but the closest I can get is a melodic version of Stina Nordenstam, also swedish The Tiny, or the less rythmic and electronic driven tracks of electronica duo Lamb or Psapp. Very good!

Tracks are available both from NRK’s Urört and from MyMusic.dk. Here are some of them:

Retnesegel - we went and played (lyrics by Emily Dickinson)
Retnesegel - the dream
Retnesegel - would probably do so

Ingrid is also very actively involved in the jazzprojects Surrig, Kobert and Eyewaterlillies. Kobert is musically much like Retnesegel, though more jazz than pop. Kobert will record their debutalbum in june and release it in the autumn 2005. All of these projects are very listenable and musically very good.

British band Alto 45 is out now with their debut album named ‘101101′ (which is ‘45′ in binary numbers) on Happy Capitalist Recordings. According to themselves, they are described as ‘punk for tired people’ or ‘poppy then weird then loud!’. Still according to themselves, they love broken guitars, tape players, cheap keyboards, distorted basses, omnichords, FX pedals, drum machines, harmoniums, telephones, record players, vibroslaps, maracas and all the mid range audio frequencies. Lo-fi, in other words.
The song we have for you is from the new album, - a slow and jangly track. Nice!

alto 45 - moses gunn

LORNA’s “Static patterns and souvenirs” is a fine, relaxing and interesting album in many ways. On the other hand, - the style and the way they build their songs also seem to be their greatest enemy. When it works, it is gold. When not, it can be unfocused and even boring. Luckily, Lorna makes it work most of the time!

The album opens with greatness, “understanding heavy metal parts I and II”, a beautiful song where most of the elements that make Lorna such an interesting band is clearly visible. It has a great melody, driven forward by calm and airy male vocals. It has an interesting instrumentation, - both traditional rock instruments, electronics and lots of other different sounds arranged and melted perfectly into the music. It has great backing vocals (all members of the band are good singers), and it has a lot of fine details under the surface. This is what can be said about most of the Lorna tracks and it is the core of their quality as a band.

Lorna is on the Words-on-music label, a label known for its love of slowcore/sadcore or shoegazer music. Lorna may fit all these genres and fit well into their labels profile. The band have a lot of the sound and feeling that Slowdive (and the bands that followed, especially Mojave 3) and some of the calmer shoegazers had. No screaming guitars or raw noises, - a flow of breezy melodies.
I personally think Lorna are at their best when they manage to be above their most downbeat sides, - when the songs have a forward drive to them. I like them best when there is some movement and developement in the song from start to end. My favourites on the album are especially the before mentioned opening track “understanding heavy metal” (great title!), “Swans”, “the swimmer”, “he dreams of spaceships” and “Snow song”. Interesting songs with a forward drive, a great melody and lots of nice things underneath. These songs make this album worth buying.

As I mentioned, Lorna’s slow and beautiful style can also be their greatest enemy. A few of the songs on this album doesn’t seem to go anywhere at all. They rest in layers of vocals, guitars, strings and slow tap-tap-tapping on snaredrums, - beautiful and nice for a while, - but they lack developement and movement. The song “homerun” is one of those songs, and as you probably understand, it’s not a homerun for me. It lacks the melodic and rythmic focus that “understanding..” has. It seems to me that Lorna sometimes trust their vocal qualities so much that they build some songs too much on them alone, and forget to give the track a melody that can stand on its own and build arrangements that developes throughout the song. The quality of beauty does not always give a song a lasting greatness.

“Static patterns and souvenirs” is not a perfect album, but it delivers enough for me to file this album in my “interesting”-folder. Check it out and buy it if you like calm, breezy music with nice male/female harmonies and equally small doses of shoegaze and country.

LINKS:
Lorna
Words on Music

- Knut B. / eardrums