Tea and cake

Let's start this second bank holiday with a bit of traditionalism, what with it being the big royal dookeroo today an' all. I'm sure an appropriately massive amount of tea will be consumed across the UK in the next few hours, most of it hopefully accompanied by some sweet spongey goodness. Mmmm...

Fika Recordings, the indie cassette label touting today's musical delight, subscribe to the (clearly genius) view that music is best digested with tea and cake. Fika, they tell us, is the Swedish version of afternoon tea. Muchos appropriate for the royal wedding day, no? They even send a recipe for a delicious baked treat with every purchase, along with a tea bag that they deem will suit your musical choice. So, to match the electro-pop sunshine rays of their new Petter Seander cassette release, they'll also send you a recipe for hazelnut cookies and an elderflower tea bag - how lovely is that?!

"But!" I hear you cry, "'tis no use if the music doesn't tickle my fanciful bits!" Fear not, intrepid music lovers, Petter Seander's new 'Destroyer' EP (you knew I'd get to the point eventually) contains jolly good upbeat-yet-angst-ridden Swedish pop songs. The only way I can really describe it is by saying it sounds as if Outkast and The Postal Service met at a Passion Pit party. And if you hate all of those things, then at least you'll get a recipe and a tea bag out of it, eh? The tape is available for pre-order from the Fika website in a limited edition of 100 for the princely sum of £3.50 each (but you also get an instant high-quality download of the full EP), and seeing as I've bought one of those 100, you'd better get your skates on! Listen to all four tracks below:

Bossing it

I used to live in Bournemouth. For one whole year. I liked it, on the whole - mainly for the gawjus beach and the Time Crisis game in the pier arcade (and they had one of those Mario Kart machines where you could put a picture of your own head on the characters, hours of fun) - but I have to say that the local music scene was pretty much a shocker at the time. I'm glad to see, then, that today's band are holding the fort for the Bomo massive. They're from Boscombe just up the road from Bournemouth, a place that I walked to along the seafront just a handful of times in that year, and all I remember was some dodgy-looking bars and an even dodgier-looking branch of Primark. The band are named after Boscombe, being called Bos Angeles, which has the following entry in the Urban Dictionary:

"Another slang term for Boscombe, heroin capital of England and home of the Bafia (boscombe mafia). Also features a suprisingly pleasant cafe."

What gets me is the word another; how many slang terms for Boscombe can there be? We can but wonder......

So, Bos Angeles are pretty good anyhoo, from the sounds of the one track they've got floating around on the tinterweb. The track, Beach Slalom, was played on the Beeb's 6Music this week and is a rather tasty slice of attitude-filled indie pop. They're playing a show in Bomo next month so presumably they have some more tracks to play (or they might just play Beach Slalom over and over again which would be fine by me) - keep an eye on their Myspace page for developments!

Bos Angeles - Beach Slalom by thissceneisntdead

Tight like a tiger

Decent free album alert! And it's very nice, very nice indeed. New Animal are a duo from Atlanta who make wistful, quirky harmony-centric pop of the Panda Bear / Animal Collective / Atlas Sound ilk. And no, they don't share any members or direct link with any members of the above, somewhat incestuous, bands (as far as I know, which is little).

Now, you may think this 'psych pop' (as it seems to have been coined) scene is pretty much covered for what is essentially quite a specific sound, but New Animal manage to freshen it up a bit with a few phat beats peppered around the album and some darn catchy vocal hooks. I quite like that their name, whether intentional or not, pre-empts the old chestnut of music journos labelling bands as the 'new' this or that. No need to call them the new Animal Collective if they're already called New Animal, is there? Ho ho!

Their free self-titled debut album, available here, was released in January and is a lot of bang for your non-existent buck at no less than 15 tracks in length. And these tracks ain't short, neither, with the shortest number covering a generous 4 minutes.

The opener, 'Nightmares Of Candy Yang & The Black Italian', is a clear winner with 'choon' stamped all over it, and I'm also loving 'Science' with its skippy skippy beat, and 'Frightened' for its little driving hook - but hey, you can make up your own mind what to give or take as the whole bleedin' thing is free! These are new times people, new times indeed......

Small wonders

A band I've ashamedly only come across this week, Big Troubles released an album in September of last year and are due to support The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and Real Estate in Americacaca before hopping over here to play a little UK tour next month.

They've been gushed about by someone or other at Rough Trade, making the ubiquitous My Bloody Valentine comparison and saying that Big Troubles' sound is "totally damaged and beautiful", but to me, although they do stand up to the whole My Bloody Valentine likeness, they do have a bit of their own thang goin' on. It's all very scuzzy and 'now' but, contrary to sounding 'damaged', the inclusion of a good slice of pop and tunefulness gives it a lovely warm cheeriness, and rather than making me want to wallow in my own insignificance, it makes me feel like doing a little shuffle-dance in my bunny slippers.

In fact (although My Bloody Valentine are clearly awesome) the most My Bloody Valentines-ey ones are actually my least favourites, because, gosh darn it, I like a band to have a bit of their own personality. Try 'Bite Yr Tongue' on for size and you'll see why they're supporting Pains Of Being Pure At Heart:



or 'Drastic And Difficult' to get your slipper dance on:

03 Drastic And Difficult by OESB

Both from their album 'Worry' out on Old English Spelling Bee Records. Check out their Myspace for upcoming tour dates.

Hell, yeah!

Now quite a few of you outrageous muso boffin-heads probably already know about this band but I just thought I'd bring your collective attention to them in celebration of their new release this Monday just gone. Reading Rainbow are a very good band from Philly, who make a pretty brand of harmonic lo-fi (well, it sounds pretty lo-fi, who can tell these days?) with a healthy dose of punk thrown in. They're playing a plethora of shows over in the US of A, but sadly none scheduled for the U of K at the mo but watch their blog in anticipation and hound them with messages asking them to play over here (or not, whatever). If you like the Internet Forever track featured here a few months ago, you'll love their infectiously fun and catchy track Wasting Time:



Their new single is called Cover The Sky - which is a little bit spooky seeing as Internet Forever's pop masterpiece is called Cover The Walls - and is out on Hell, Yes! records right at this very point in time.

READING RAINBOW "Cover The Sky" by HellYes

Sunday services

Festival season is (almost) upon us! Would you Adam & Eve it?? Trawling the London line-ups for juicy things to check out, I was just about losing the plot (and the use of my ears) when, praise be, I stumbled upon some stupendous chawns by the silly-named Christian AIDS, by all accounts a reclusive band from Manchester. Having done a bit of the ol' research, it looks like I'm quite late to pick up on these guys; the blogosphere has been all over them like a rash of late. And well they might be - I keep listening to the band's Soundcloud page over and over again.

They fit quite nicely into this whole 'chillwave' thing that's been going on, although let's not put them into such a crappily-named musical category. They make that finest kind of house music that is both relaxed and fantastically thumpy at the same time. It's cool as hell, but if your partial to a bit of ravey cheese as a guilty pleasure to lift those knees up to, they've got something in store for you as well.

The good news is they've got a single out soon, available for pre-order now from Double Denim Records. Hurry up and nab one if you like it though, it's a limited 7" of 500 copies. The single is on their Soundcloud named Stay Positive, but just to cement their status in the uber-cool musical underground they've changed it to Stay +. Well, you've gotta keep up with them kids these days, haven't you? Check it out below:

Stay Positive by christianAIDS

And, to return to what I started off by saying about festivals before I rambled on a bit, they're playing at the Stag & Dagger festival in London on 19th May. So get a ticket, aaiiight?