Conelrad’s debut album, Function Creep, is the result of learning one’s craft with the tools you have available, rather than purchasing more tools in the hope that you’ll suddenly become a really good musician. Thus, Function Creep is a blissed out but post-apocalyptic soundtrack derived from computing machinery and guitar.

In many respects it borrows from the musical heritage that starts at shoegaze and delivers through the modern electronica of Boards of Canada and M83. Where it differs, and betters it, is that it jettisons the annoying noise-scapes and atonality that resulted when this evolution mutated through the clever-clever intelligent dance music brigade. It may well end up in my top 10 albums of 2007.

Sarcophagus is the majestic penultimate but conceptually concluding track, full of long distant chords, shimmering guitar work and burbling basslines, driven slowly by solemn drumbeats.

Free Download: Conelrad: Function Creep

It would be wrong not to highlight the title track from The Birthday Massacre’s electrifying new album. Walking with Strangers breaks speed limits, sparkling and sparking with overloaded guitars, pounding drums and synth lines. Add Chibi’s glassy vocals and you get euphoric music that binds gothic metal, rock and pop genres to produce a fiercely magnificent and beautiful experience.

The Birthday Massacre
Walking with Strangers – Amazon UK

Before my last.fm profile became a gentle prod to visitors to check out Hannah Fury’s music, it spewed a stream-of-consciousness rambling which included my musical preferences. Within this clumsiness was a nugget of blinding truth: “sorry, boys can’t rock.” I meant this as an oblique reference to my preference for female vocalists – a fetish which has grown over the past eight years. However it wasn’t until yesterday when I first listened to Swati’s debut album Small Gods, that I realised what this statement meant: when women write or play music it can reach to the core of their being, when men do this, no matter how hard they try, how pained or joyful they sound, it comes out as flimflam. Even the ‘greats’ of male singer/songwriting do nothing for me – hey, get your own umbrella. Male songwriting rarely affects me.

Big Bang proves to all those guys in the 1970s and 80s who reached for the synthesizer that they should have learnt how to play guitar instead.

More about Small Gods in further posts, I can guarantee this. (Hat tip to Muruch!)

Small Gods – iTunes UK
Small Gods – Amazon UK (Import)

Swati
Swati – MySpace

Whilst listening through A Piano: The Collection last year I came to three conclusions:

1. It’s remarkable that some people can create such incredible and varied music from the same notes;
2. It’s remarkable that humans respond to the arrangement of these notes – why don’t fish dance?
3. There’s got to be something “else” that’s given music to us, both as listeners and creators.

I discovered Hannah Fury yesterday afternoon, through one of my neighbours on Last.fm, and I listened to her 2000 debut album The Thing That Feels. It’s been twenty years since I discovered Throwing Muses – their debut shattered me completely. Throughout the years I’ve often wondered if any other music could make me feel the same way.

The Thing That Feels does. It destroys me.

[MellowTraumatic Recordings]
[iTunes UK]

I’ve been meaning to buy some music by Lisa Germano ever since Happiness was released in 1993 but for some unknown reason I never did. Then about this time two years ago, I was really going buy an album or two. But I didn’t – there just wasn’t enough emotional push for me to do so. Still, two of my objectives of my annual holiday are to re-visit music that I’ve left forgotten and to fill some gaps in my collection. This year, Lisa Germano made it there.

I’m wondering now if music finds me only when it’s supposed to? Or when I’m supposed to?

This track is the title track from her latest album. What I love about her music is that there are little things – and sometimes big things – that prompt the songs to evolve differently for what you expected when they started. That, and the way her albums work seamlessly thematically and musically.

[iTunes UK]
[Amazon UK]

MiNa is a new semi-acoustic semi-folk project from Lunik’s Jaël Krebs and Luk Zimmerman. Their debut album, Playground Princess is out on 28 September. There are four lovely demo tracks on MiNa’s MySpace page, including Praying Mantis, which is breathtakingly restrained in its delivery.

Listening to math rock band Battles’ debut full length album Mirrored brings with it the realisation that the majority of western popular music is the result of 12 tones repeatedly organised by tradition and convention. Whilst Mirrored never obviously escapes into the world of microtuning, there’s enough mis-invention to allow your musical senses to become reset. The rhythms, tunes and vocals are surprising, and on repeated listens you start to become accustomed to the ways that each track evolves. It’s not in the slightest bit unlistenable – friends and neighbours may think otherwise.

French punk from four nineteen-year-old women. It’s a stark reminder of the debt owed to popular music by the movement that broke (away from) the indulgences of long haired prog-rock. There’ll be more of this from France in the coming years. Plastiscines add genuine musicality, fun, and some lovely harmonies to make something a bit different from tedious protopunk and new rave xeroxisms.

[LP1: Amazon UK]
[iTunes UK]