The Caulfield Beats
This week’s new music round-up finds Getintothis’ Patrick Clarke sink his teeth into some point-proving French garage-rock, suave Canadian electro-pop and the perfect amalgamation of all things dance.
Over the course of our travels to the furthest-reaches of the internet’s musical obscurities here at Unknown Pleasures, a few geographical patterns have emerged. Sweden, as should be obvious by now, have long since carved their name as the psychedelic capital of the world, while the new-wave scene of Chile seems in the rudest of health.
It’s in a return to France, then, that another national pattern begins to emerge, namely that our antagonists across the channel are quite clearly doing scuzzy alt-rock better than anyone else right now. Though we’ve had warning shots from the likes of Volage and The Madcaps, it’s Lorient’s Summer Video Club that lends all the proof we need.
Weird Things, cut from an EP appearing earlier this year, is a snotty, attitudinous four minutes of grunge, garage and punk, swimming Nevermind hooks colliding with pummeling walls of unsophisticated feedback, a ferocious scream of vocal just about clambering above the chaos to visceral effect.
Altogether more suave is the propulsive elegance of Toronto pop trio For Esmé, who channel the high-minded pop of Robyn, Kraftwerk‘s pneumatic jabs of electronic texture and more than a splash of LCD Soundsystem‘s unstoppable motion on new track You, which comes as the tantaliser for upcoming album Sugar.
Hidden behind a veneer of straight-up pop, frontwoman Martha Meredith‘s vocals are fresh and immediate, yet are backed with undeniable groove by seductive weaves of layered synth and hypnotic hits of sampled voice. The accompanying video, below, matches it on aesthetic, the collision of midnight tones and modish, debonair dance lent visual aid by the three-piece’s urbane, secretive struts in the dark.
Finally, London dance duo The Caulfield Beats release their new EP Mexican Smoke on May 25, and it’s one simply to be devoured. The pair, Lawrence Northall and Molly Dixon, operate under a decidedly DIY aesthetic, and across the four tracks their involved, organic approach tells.
On record utterly absorbing, and live, we can only imagine, surely explosive, the release straddles generic definition, from the title-track’s smattering of acid house to Believe‘s graceful dovetail toward dub, the pair careen across a cherry-picked history of electronica, sampled vocals deployed with masterful restraint yet with a thumping momentum never lost. As prodigious as dance gets.
