Good Weather For Airstrikes

After over a year’s worth of snowballing hype and critical adoration, shit hot singer-songwriting sensation Florence Welch has officially arrived with “Kiss With A Fist”, her debut single and the latest addition to the vaunted Moshi Moshi Singles Club catalogue (it’s out in the US via IAMSOUND as well). With laudatory features popping up everywhere from Nylon to Q Magazine, the NME declaring her one of the best live acts to see this summer and an opening spot on MGMT’s sold out European tour (not to mention a freshly-inked deal with Virgin), she could release whatever she damn well pleased as her debut and still be doing pretty well for herself. Fortunately she’s chosen to grace us with “Kiss With A Fist”, a perfect display of her left-field pop sensibilities and eccentric style. It’s not her best track (that’d be “Girl With One Eye”) and is a bit of a departure from her typically stripped-down approach, all loud guitars and raucous percussion clocking in at under two minutes, but it’s still an extremely solid (if brief) debut.

The real story here, however, is Florence’s show-stopping cover of “Hospital Beds” on the flipside, easily the most thunderstealing B-side of 2008. She’s at her best when she lets her powerful voice shine over sparse arrangements, and that’s exactly the case here as she drops a jaw-dropping vocal over a rudimentary drums-and-guitar instrumental. The Cold War Kids original is undoubtedly a modern classic and one of the more transcendent tracks of the last few years, but Florence completely makes it her own, taking things to new levels of visceral emotion. Fucking amazing, folks.

STREAM: “Kiss With A Fist” - Florence & The Machine

MP3: “Hospital Beds” - Florence & The Machine

Elsewhere, Imran Ahmed of Abeano Music (the XL Recordings subsidiary responsible for bringing you Vampire Weekend, To My Boy, I Was A Cub Scout and now Magistrates) and PUSH fame has started a blog, and a damn fine one at that. Not only is he offering up Magistrates upcoming debut single “Make It Work” for free download (and in lossless AIFF at that), he’s also got some hot tips as well. Imran’s got a pretty solid track record in the industry having covered music for the NME and The Guardian (so he writes all good-like, you know), hosted a few different radio shows for the BBC, and redefined the indie club night in London with FROG at the Mean Fiddler, the predecessor to the current PUSH night he runs with the lovely Young & Lost Club girls. He also claims to have been the first person to ever play Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” on the radio, but that’s debatable at best. Either way, keep an eye on his space; it’ll be worth your while.

Also, as long as we’re on the topic of UK blogs worth giving a fuck about (of which their are sadly very few), I encourage you to revisit the fine gentlemen over at Transparent Magazine, where they’re consistently pumping out the jams (including another fine Magistrates cut here) and keeping things interesting with all manner of fancy words and pictures. Sahil and Jack Shankly are (quite frankly) two of the best writers in all of blogland (kind of like Said The Gramophone, only with, y’know, actual good music), so do show them some love and drop by their page from time to time.

I’d tack a few more jams of my own onto this post if I could get that motherfucking Miley Cyrus song out of my head, but there’s no hope for that, so check out our UK blog friends in the meantime.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Single Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.