Good Weather For Airstrikes

FIXED: Updates to resume when university stops shitting on me.

My first-ever Camden Crawl experience totally ruled. Here’s why:

SAM SPARRO (Electric Ballroom, 6 PM)

We kicked things off at one of two 6 PM offerings, hitting the legendary Electric Ballroom to see Sam Sparro’s first-ever London show. His debut single “Black & Gold” went supernova seemingly out nowhere and currently sits at #3 on the charts so this was an understably hot ticket, the packed house a resounding testament to this fact. While I’ll admit the single is catchy as fuck, I’m definitely not his biggest fan, but my friends we’re jonesing for their Sparro fix so I went along with it hoping for the best. Turns out dude puts on a damn good live show. The flamboyant Aussie took the stage looking like a party pix all-star in sparkling gold tights and an oversized tribal-print top, before cruising through a set of future chart hits and keeping the crowd bouncing throughout. Don’t get me wrong, shit was like, super gay, but Sparro’s a top notch performer and the crowd loved every minute of it. Those of you who’ve been waiting for the next Jamiroquai listen up, Sam Sparro’s your man.

MP3: “Black & Gold” (Phones’ As Hard As Diamonds Edit) - Sam Sparro

DOES IT OFFEND YOU, YEAH? (Koko, 7:20 PM)

From the Electric Ballroom we made our way down the high street towards Mornington Crescent, where Does It Offend You, Yeah? were set to take the NME-sponsored stage at Koko at 7:20. I’d not yet seen them do their thing in a live setting, and to say I was pumped would be an understatement. Fortunately they didn’t disappoint, rocking the perfect medium of punk and electro and putting on the first epic show of the weekend. There was dancing, there was moshing, and there was definitely no shortage of drinks flying through the air. My 6′3″ stature makes me a kind of lightning rod for that shit and I left the venue sufficiently drenched in beer, sweat and assorted other bodily fluids, but it was all good - Does It Offend You, Yeah? fucking slayed.

MP3: “Doomed Now” - Does It Offend You, Yeah?

FLORENCE & THE MACHINE (The Crescent, 8 PM)

Leaving the ridiculousness of Koko behind us, we crossed the street to the Crescent to see the inimitable Florence and her machine. I’d been awed by her uncanny vocals and stage presence on a few occasions last summer back when it was still just Flo and her guitarist, but now the line-up had expanded to include a drummer as well. The added intensity of live percussion really took her show to a new level, and it was easily the best performance I’d seen her put on to date. We missed the amazing “Girl With One Eye” and her cover of Beirut’s “Elephant Gun” waiting in the interminable line outside the packed pub-turned-venue, but her set was amazing regardless, the rollicking “Kiss With A Fist” rounding out her set in triumphant fashion and more than making up for the tracks we missed. That track, her upcoming debut single, will at long last see a release on Moshi Moshi June 9th (backed with a brilliant cover of “Hospital Beds”, no less), and from there it’s only a matter of time before she’s taken over this entire London folk scene.

MP3: “Girl With One Eye” - Florence & The Machine
MP3: “Going Down” - Florence & Kid Harpoon

LYKKE LI (Black Cap, 9:15 PM)

One of the more hyped shows of the weekend was Lykke Li’s 9:15 slot at the Black Cap just a few blocks up from The Crescent, and the place was absolutely packed. Florence and her crew were there, along with a few hundred other eager onlookers, and finding standing room was no easy feat to say the least. We’d seen her before at February’s Chocolate Rain night at Cafe Mahiki and thus were totally ready for her adorable stage presence and fly-ass moves, but this was far better than her previous showing. The sound was an issue at Mahiki, but everything was perfect for Lykke’s Black Cap gig. She played all the hits - “Little Bit”, “Let It Fall”, “I’m Good I’m Gone”, et. al - and proved why every single person in this fucking industry is absolutely shitting themselves over her. I said it back in November and I’ll say it again, this girl will be huge.

MP3: “I’m Good. I’m Gone.” - Lykke Li

SOKO (The Crescent, 10:30 PM)

The only letdown of the day may have been Soko’s performance at the Crescent rounding out our European female singer-songwriter trilogy. It’s not that she was bad, far from it in fact, it’s just that it’s still quite early in her career and her live show doesn’t seem to be quite there yet. Furthermore, her charm lies in the quirkiness of her endearing vocals and lyrics, and the less-than-ideal sound and buzzing crowd made it difficult to here in the packed Crescent. Thus, we rolled out after three or four songs, figuring we might as well try to see Robyn across the street despite the slim chances of gaining admittance into Koko for one of the most popular shows of the entire festival.

MP3: “I’ll Kill Her” - Soko

ROBYN (Koko, 12:30 AM)

Surprisingly, we made it into Robyn with remarkable ease, and after a brief wait in line we found ourselves at the front of the venue ready for the sugary girl-pop experience of a lifetime. Now, I’ll be real with you: I was way drunk at this point, which is the kind of thing that happens when you’ve been drinking for six-and-a-half hours on a half-full stomach, and my memory of her show isn’t exactly crystalline. What I do know, however, is that she totally dropped “Sexual Eruption”, which pretty much made my life. I also remember realizing just how many chart-toppers this girl’s put together on one album of new material and being a little bit awestruck, but I guess that wasn’t exactly a secret or anything. Either way, I’m pretty sure I had the time of my life and it was a perfect ending to what was probably my best day in London so far.

MP3: “Sexual Eruption” (Fyre Department Remix ft. Robyn) - Snoop Dogg
MP3: “Who’s That Girl” (Styrofoamkid Remix) - Robyn

So there you have it, unbelievably good times. I wasn’t able to go Saturday, as my bank account is in the red (please donate drug money at the PayPal link above kthx) and the only band I was really dying to see was White Lies, and that can wait until the Great Escape for now.

OH and how ’bout those Caps? Four straight goals last night (including two from Alex Wale Ovechkin) at Philadelphia to tie up the series at 3-3 and bring game seven back to the Chocolate City? Fuck yeah.

Despite my lukewarm feelings towards his debut LP, The Last Resort, I regard Trentemoller as one of the most gifted talents in electronic music. As demonstrated by his impeccable remix work and the finer cuts off Resort (especially “Take Me Into Your Skin”, perhaps the most technically impressive song I’ve ever heard), what he does with sonic textures puts him in a league of his own as far as I’m concerned. Sure, he’s not quite there yet, but I feel that he could unleash one of the better electronic albums of all time further down the road in his career, and if his takeover of the Kentish Town Forum last Monday was any indicator, he’s well on his way.

It’s hard to find an entry point for discussion of such a performance, as it really doesn’t compare to anything I’ve ever seen. This certainly wasn’t a DJ set and it was way more than a mere live performance, shit was an experience. The night got off to an ominous start with an opening DJ whose set was just abysmal – aside from looking like a total douche, dude couldn’t mix for shit and his song selection was all over the place to say the least. But none of that mattered as soon as Trentemoller took the stage and brought the audience into a whole new world of sensory overload. Performing in the company of live guitars and percussion, Trentemoller stood before a monolith of synths and keyboards in front of a backdrop of some of the best visuals this side of The Knife’s much-hyped live show. Haunting monochromatic images created the perfect atmosphere within which to process the Danish maestros mind-altering soundscapes, taking already mindblowing tracks like “Take Me Into Your Skin” and “Moan” to new levels of otherworldliness.

His set was comprised predominantly of tracks off The Last Resort and a few excerpts from his remix work (a thirty-second teaser of his masterful “What Else Is There?” remix threw the crowd into a frenzy, but he quickly moved on before allowing the vocals to drop), and there wasn’t a weak moment to speak of. To me, Trentemoller’s the most technically impressive artist in the game right now, and this was very much on display as he strung together climax after climax for nearly 90 minutes, keeping the crowd in a constant state of nigh-on pandemonium. I’m not exaggerating when I say it was unlike anything I’ve ever seen: Monday night was more than just a concert, this shit was an all-out rave.

Closing with “Moan” and “Always Something Better”, I reckoned he didn’t have much more in his repertoire for an encore. How wrong I was. Returning to the stage minutes later, he took shit to a whole new level when he launched into an absolutely earth-shattering remix of “Seven Nation Army”, in which he repeatedly dropped the pressure like Zeus himself, raining down blows on the unsuspecting masses below. I’d heard he’s got all kinds of amazing bootlegs laying around his studio (including a rumored edit of “Toxic”), but I never expected anything of this magnitude. If this shit ever escapes the studio look out, I promise: You Are Not Ready.

Trentemoller appears to be operating on a whole new level right now, what he’s doing with electronic music is miles away from everyone else as far as I’m concerned. After Monday night he’s joined an elite pantheon of artists I’d travel to the ends of the earth to see, and if you’ve got any sense in you you’ll make an important point not to miss him if he rolls through your town on this tour. Trust me, it has to be seen to be believed.

MP3: “Take Me Into Your Skin” – Trentemoller
MP3: “What Else Is There?” (Trentemoller Remix) – Royksopp

In my efforts to unearth some of these alleged bootlegs Trentemoller seems to be so fond of making, I came across this jam. We’ve been dying to find a droppable remix of “Tainted Love” for ages and even recently started working on our own, but Trentemoller’s gone ahead and rendered our efforts wholly unnecessary. I don’t know what that “Co-pen-hay-gen” sample is from, but I do know this shit is GOLD.

MP3: “Tainted Copenhagen” – Trentemoller

You’ll hear that track and more if you come down to PUSH tonight, where Fresh Prints will once again be taking the decks, this time closing out the night upstairs after the likes of Noah & The Whale, Bombay Bicycle Club and White Lies spin on the 1’s and 2’s and Innerpartysystem does their thing on the main stage. This will be our last gig in London for a long-ass time, so if you want to see us stumble through an hour of shoddy mixing and drunken button-pushing, get your ass to Astoria 2 between 1:30 and 2:30 AM Saturday. See you there?

Also, there’s no better time than now to mention the blog superstars over at Transparent Magazine, as they’re the ones kind enough to be putting us on tonight. They’re running what’s easily the UK’s finest blog and also put on some brilliant shows around London, and their absence from our blogroll to this point is pretty much unforgivable. Show them some love.

“Divine” is summertime, surfboards, drinking on the beach and tanlines, and it’s the triumphant pop moment of Monsieur Tellier’s career. An unabashedly obvious nod to the Beach Boys records that influenced the Frenchman growing up, the track bounces along on an infectious strings of “nah nah nahs” and “oh oh ohs” and should be the perfect soundtrack to the warm weather and long light of summer ‘08. Furthermore, “Divine” will be the track that Tellier hopes to ride to success in the 2008 Eurovision Song Contest that takes place a week after the single’s release, and it could prove to be a major turning point in his career with the international exposure that the competition will undoubtedly yield.

Beyond the original track, the single release makes itself that all that more enticing with a crop of top notch remixes from the likes of Midnight Juggernauts and Danger, the latter of whom is proving himself to be increasingly unfuckwithable in this here remix game. Further establishing themselves as the electro kings of Down Under, Midnight Juggernauts take the track and rework it into a blissed-out, synth-drenched masterpiece, turning up the atmosphere and replacing the carefree bounce with the original with an ominous intergalactic drone. Basically, this is what you want playing on the sound system as you and your crew make your final descent into the uncharted territories of some newly-discovered planet in 2056 AD. The REAL jam, however, is the Danger remix, in which our hero takes the blueprint laid down by Tellier and absolutely obliterates it, glitching it out, cutting up the vocals, and taking it to hell and back before he’s done with it. It’s easily the best Tellier remix since one Mr. Dan Carey attempted to conquer Mt. Ritournelle with his magic wand back in ‘05, and the single’s worth buying three times over on the strength of Danger’s masterpiece alone.

This review’s a bit premature as the single version of “Divine” is to be a bit different than the one found on the album, but if anything that’s just more incentive to buy the record and with a triple-threat package like this you really can’t go wrong.

MP3: “Divine” (Album Version) - Sebastien Tellier
MP3: “Divine” (Midnight Juggernauts Remix) - Sebastien Tellier
STREAM: “Divine” (Danger Remix) - Sebastien Tellier

Seb will make his triumphant return to London after his sold out show at the ICA last month when he takes the stage at the Scala April 28th, this time with support coming from none other than the brilliant Lykke Li, everyone’s favorite Next! Big! Thing! and likely heir to the Swedish pop throne. With a line-up like that it’s a show you really can’t miss, and as it’s almost sold out you’d be wise to get your shit together and secure tickets before it’s too late.

GOTYE GETS THE REMIX TREATMENT, MAKES INTERNATIONAL DEBUT
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, but today I’ve finally gotten clearance to share an absolute burner with you courtesy of blog superstars Ocelot. With Gotye’s European debut single due out May 26th, we commissioned a few electronic types to remix the track, with Lull and Ocelot hitting it out of the park their first time up with two equally brilliant mixes. The Lull remix goes the chill, atmospheric route, dressing Gotye’s melodramatic pop masterpiece up in all manner of swirling synths and pulsing basslines in what might be the London producer’s best work yet. As expected, Ocelot’s rework falls at the exact opposite end of the spectrum, as the transatlantic duo drop obliterate the languorous pace of the original and turn it into one of the finest rave anthem’s of the new year. This is the sound of Ocelot taking the jump to the next level and it’s fucking amazing.

MP3: “Heart’s A Mess” (Ocelot Remix) - Gotye
STREAM: “Heart’s A Mess” (Lull Edit) - Gotye [exclusive]

FRESH PRINTS TOMORROW NIGHT AT APOCALYPSO. HOT JAMS WILL ENSUE.

And no, it has nothing to do with the freshly-leaked Presets album of the same name. But if you come down, you just might hear something off it.

Finally: Who that good looking lady in Vice Magazine? Why it’s Rya Backer, hipster periodical superstar!

Female singer-songwriters had a banner year in 2007, with figureheads in this post-Lily-Allen-or-whatever movement like Kate Nash and Laura Marling killing it with major label deals, sold out tours, critically acclaimed releases and all kinds of other next-level shit. 2008 seems to be yielding more of the same, with industry heads shitting themselves over the likes of Lykke Li, Florence & The Machine and other left-field pop talents of their ilk. One such artist who’s flown under the radar to this point is Marina & The Diamonds, but her star is very much on the rise and you better believe you’ll be hearing a lot more about the Welsh-born chanteuse in 2008.

More Kate Bush than Kate Nash, Marina writes, sings, records and produces haunting piano-based tracks in her bedroom and the results are totally ace. Though I’ve heard but a scant three tracks, I don’t think it’s too soon to declare her a special talent worth writing the fuck home about. Tracks like “We’ve Got Obsessions” and “Hermit The Frog” establish her as a beacon of hope in the oversaturated and increasingly dull London singer-songwriter scene, her endearing personality shining through in her winning lyricism, and her powerful vocals and excellent lo-fi production validating her as the total package. Below is “We’ve Got Obsessions”, arguably her strongest track and, somewhat surprisingly, my most listened to song of 2008. Vulnerable, beautiful and damn near perfect. I get chills every third listen or so when that part when the beat drops after the first verse hits.

MP3: “We’ve Got Obsessions” (Demo) - Marina & The Diamonds [exclusive]

Wale returned this week with a new track off his upcoming Mixtape About Nothing called “Back In The Go Go”. It’s less polished than “Nike Boots” and some of his other offerings, but it features what might be his best lyrics yet and rocks a go go beat that’s so quintessentially DC I can’t not love it. And just as “Nike Boots” soundtracked the Redskins amazing run into the playoffs last winter, “Back In The Go Go” has arrived just in time to coincide with another improbable late-season surge for DC sports, with the Capitals looking to complete a miraculous run from last place in the Eastern Conference into a #3 seed playoff birth with one game remaining and the Wizards also looking to lock down a playoff spot with Gilbert Arenas back in the lineup for the first time in months. Wale even shouts out Caps superstar Alex Ovechkin on “Go Go”: “Doin’ it for the Capital, Wale Ovechkin”, the first and possibly only NHL reference in hip-hop history.

MP3: “Back In The Go Go” (ft. Bun B & Pusha T) – Wale

There’s also a new unofficial Wale mixtape, The Beast of the Beltway, in circulation, compiled by London-via-NoVa mash-up artist DJ Maf and featuring rare/unreleased Wale cuts and some truly absurd mash-ups. We’ll focus on the mashes then, as DJ Maf has chosen some pretty flawless material to work with. First, there’s “Dangerous Girls”, which takes the rap from Wale’s “Good Girls” and transposes it over a slowed-down version of Danger’s “11h30”. But the real jam is “W.A.L.E.F.R.I.E.N.D.S.”, which follows in the footsteps of Wale’s “D.A.N.C.E.” bootleg, combining “Ice Cream Girl” with – what else? – “We Are Your Friends” with phenomenal results.

MP3: “Dangerous Girls” – Wale vs Danger
MP3: “W.A.L.E.F.R.I.E.N.D.S.” – Wale vs Justice

Finally, the most exciting news of all might be the announcement that Wale’s much-hyped remix of “D.A.N.C.E.” will be seeing an official release this month, complete with a So-Me inspired (directed?) music video and everything. Check these two brief clips (here and here) from the official video and start getting very, very excited.

TONIGHT: FRESH PRINTS TAKEOVER PULSE

Come to the Redstar in Camberwell Green tonight to see Fresh Prints obliterate the dancefloor. I haven’t heard of any of the other acts, but I do know Fresh Prints are going to ROCK shit. Guaranteed.

Our love for the late London three-piece Fear of Flying has been well documented over the past two years, so you can imagine our disappointment when we learned of the group’s dissolution in late 2007. But disappointment quickly turned to excitement when it was revealed the boys were back together and recording under a new name, and the results are all kinds of brilliant. White Lies, as they’re now called, pick up where Fear of Flying left off with a fairly straightforward brand of infectious guitar-rock, but where their former group made their money on cheap, catchy hooks and frantic pacing, the new recordings have a newfound depth to them. Darker, more ambitious and with a previously unheard penchant for the epic, White Lies’ look fully able to go the distance this time out.

Recording once again under the tutelage of legendary producer Stephen Street (The Smiths, Blur, Kaiser Chiefs), White Lies seem to have embraced the sound of some of the production maestro’s former bands. On demo tracks “Unfinished Business” and “Death”, frontman Harry McVeigh channels Morrissey with a touch of Brandon Flowers for good measure, while the instrumentation recalls that of Echo & The Bunny Men or Joy Division. Surely the last thing we need right now is another band ripping off the aforementioned, but somehow White Lies rise above their like-minded contemporaries and sound like nothing else I’ve heard so far in 2008. Furthermore, their finely-tuned, polished sound could lead you to mistake them for a band two albums into their career, but in fact their debut single doesn’t drop until the end of the month. Out April 28th on Chess Club Recordings, a new label co-founded by Lies drummer Jack Brown, Will Street (son of Stephen) and video director and photographer Max Knight, “Unfinished Business” looks set to cause quite a stir in the industry, though word on the street has it they’ve already been locked up by Universal offshoot Fiction Records (Snow Patrol, Kate Nash, The Maccabees) for a full-album deal. Either way, White Lies are a definite band to watch for 2008. “Death” sounds like the best song the Killers never wrote (the breakdown at the end? yeahhh) and you’d be wise to get all up on that shit below.

MP3: “Death” (Demo) - White Lies