Gorillaz cover The XX in live Radio 1 set with Daley

Damon Albarn's current project, Gorillaz, performed at the BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge over the weekend, accompanied by singer Daley. They performed very low-key versions of their new single 'Doncamatic' as well as 'Melancholy Hill', as well as a stunning cover of The XX's 'Crystalised'. You can watch the three videos below (via Some Kind of Awesome)

New Spiritualized LP on its way!

Spiritualized are set to release a new LP in the very near future; maybe this year, maybe not - or as Jason Pierce puts it, "when it's done".

The new album is the follow-up to 2008′s 'Songs In A&E' and is said to draw influence directly from 1997's classic 'Ladies And Gentlemen, We Are Floating In Space'.

Spiritualized's Pierce told The Quietus it’s very weird to lay out something you did 12 years ago in all its complexity and then get inside it enough to be able to play it live, and not have that get into some of the newer stuff we’re doing."

Check out FACT’s Essential... Spiritualized for an in-depth guide to the band’s most important releases and read the full interview with The Quietus here.

Strange days for Strange Boys

One of my big tips for this year is definitely The Strange Boys. They've recently signed a deal with Rough Trade to allow them UK distribution. Their current single 'Be Brave' is going to be really chuffing big. I'm so glad to be writing about these guys; it's been too long since a really dirty little band like these came out.


Hailing from Austin, Texas (via some other places), they're kind of in the vain of bands like Animal Collective, Passion Pit and very early Rolling Stones. Oh, and there's some Monks thrown in there for good measure too! It's really sleazy, old timey music. If it reminds me of any one thing it's of scruffy teenagers in cheap leather jackets playing garage and blues tunes on shitty guitars with far too much distortion.

Most of all, I love the production; nowadays everything's so slick and polished that there's very little discernable difference. In fact, you'd be forgiven for thinking they all had the same producer working on them. So let's all thank the good lord Jahova for The Strange Boys.

Download: The Strange Boys - Be Brave

Chew Lips - Unicorn

After hearing The Plastician's remix of 'Salt Air' I couldn't help but eagerly anticipate Chew Lips' debut album, 'Unicorn'. However, the rest of the LP and the synth-by-numbers approach to production felt like a La Roux b-sides collection.

Featuring vocals that are somewhere between Florence & The Machine and Karen O, the album fails to make any sort of significant impact. The production is another gripe of mine: ripping off everyone from Devo to the Eurythmics and The Legendary Pink Dots, this album would have sounded dated and unoriginal 30 years ago, let alone now.


And that's precisely the problem with this current wave of quirky female singers all trying to exist in the realms of Annie Lennox and Kate Bush: they have none of the flair or originality. In fact, it's becoming increasingly apparent that La Roux, Little Boots, Goldielocks and anyone else of their ilk, are singing pretty good songs but with lazy production because they know that it doesn't really matter, as long as they get an "edgy" or "trendy" producer like Skream or The Plastician to add credibility with a remix that becomes way more popular than the original. Is that good? Is it good that the person who wrote the song couldn't even record the best version? No. No, it is not.

Having said that, their upcoming single 'Solo' (out on Kitsuné very soon) and their debut, 'Salt Air' do offer something in the way of promise (What better than a ballad about drink-driving to get the party started?!), but even then Tigs can't break out of Karen O-lite. And I know, I know they're deliberately trying to sound unoriginal so their sound doesn't date - hang on, how is that better? "Well, we knew it was a waste of time trying to produce anything original so we just smashed a Florence CD into the head of our keyboard player until his ears bled, flicked the Casio to stale and kicked back and watched Hollyoaks." Great. That doesn't make me depressed at all.

Ultimately, underneath all the knowing, ironic references and kitsch eighties productions they're no different to Girls Aloud - formulaic, saccharine, derivative and completely uninteresting. And would you look at them? That's what Andy Warhol would have looked like had he been a T4 presenter.

New Animal Collective EP!

Animal Collective have been around since 2000 when friends and core members, Avey Tare and Panda Bear. At present, the band also includes Geologist and Deaken, but operate with anything between 1 and 4 of the members.

In doing so, the band manages to simultaneously master everything from "skewed pop ballads to fiercely ruptured noise-squalls to tribal rhythmic work-outs to simple folk songs, to who knows where; from fully orchestrated group freak-outs to a the intimacy of an acoustic duo", their website boasts.

Animal Collective have always had an interest in the "sonic experience", but remain grounded in indie-pop sensibilities. There's almost a hint of Ween in them, the more you listen to them the more you can hear the similarities, and in a good way: I was just thinking it was a shame Ween aren't recording so much nowadays.

Anyway, below is the latest of their tracks to come to my intention, taken from their 'Fall Be Kind' EP, out on the 16th on Domino. It's a 7 minute Eno-ish epic that builds with equal measure shoegazer and post-rock. It does have a bit of a poppy edge to it but it's more introverted than their catchier stuff and borders on choral with the layered vocals. So dig in, it's reet scrummy!

Download: Animal Collective - I Think I Can