Coldair
Getintothis’ Patrick Clarke returns for another year of new music with his week’s favourite debuts, alongside a round-up of a 2015 spent Soundcloud globetrotting.
As a fight between an emu and a robot rang in the New Year in Wolstenholme Square, for this writer so too did the opening of the floodgates on another 12 months of Soundcloud globetrotting.
2015 was a fun one here in Unknown Pleasures corner, Getintothis’ weekly round-up of all things new and/or obscure, with slick Slovakian blues, Brazilian space-prog and synth wizardry from the depths Niger among some 133 new bands introduced across a year of Thursdays.
Yet however many musical stones we may unturn, an infinity more still remain. You can listen to my forty highlights of last year’s voyage in a bumper three-hour playlist down below, but accompanying, as ever, are some brand new picks for the first of another 52 weeks of online crate-digging.
We begin the New Year in sweeping style with the debut single from Crow’s Feet, the project of multi-instrumentalist Lewis Tollan. The curtain raises on Alarm Clock Bones in rich, sad, sonorous style with spacious chords of organ, which when coupled with guest vocalist Calum Stewart‘s quivering, Scottish-accented vocal recalls the finest of King Creosote‘s work with John Hopkins.
Yet where Creosote pulls back from letting his sensibilities ramble, grounding his music with directness and modesty to its emotional punch, Alarm Clock Bones revels in the off-kilter as it expands with an unrushed crescendo of layered, explorative strings, Stewart‘s vocal cracking and swooping with all the beauty of a Hebridean Jonsi.
Warsaw-based producer Coldair, meanwhile, releases his new album The Provider on January 15, with Perfect Son the perfect single to precede it. A weave of dark, machinistic texture and bursts of melodic light, he cuts an enigmatic stance on the album as layers of twisted instrumentation dovetail to astounding pockets of blissfully commanding darkwave.
Boston’s Gladiola are a more direct prospect on their own new album, This Year’s Storm. Formed as an impromptu wedding band over a decade ago, the pacey jangle of 80s college radio meets a not-quite-so-bleak Mountain Goats drill and sees the group still more than up to scratch.
