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Right from the moment the bass dunk-dunk-dunk arrives amidst the grating fuzz of ‘Crazy’, it’s clear that The Pack a.d., Vancouver’s rawest and buzziest duo, aren’t holding anything back third time around. A gem of the grittiest kind, the song teeters on White Stripes messiness but retains enough composure to keep driving and driving its hooks into our heads. A perfect retort to those who still brainlessly contest the ability of women to really rock hard, The Pack a.d. make it look so easy, so effortless. There’s a fantastic energy to ‘Crazy’, building throughout the song’s duration to reach a passionate, climactic ending with shrieks and grunts. There’s also one hell of a chorus, which benefits from Becky Black’s fearless and brilliant vocal performance. New album We Kill Computers is due May 3 through Mint Records. MP3 after the jump.

FREE MP3: The Pack a.d., ‘Crazy’

visit The Pack a.d. on Myspace

Much-missed rapper Rah Digga announced her imminent comeback this week with this aptly named free download. Just over two minutes of tight, swaggering salutations, it’s a taster to whet appetites in anticipation for her upcoming album, tentatively titled The Big 10, which is set for a late spring/summer release through Raw Koncept Records. The release will be managed from end to end by producer Nottz, whose resumé includes hip hop giants such as Kanye West, Snoop Dogg and Busta Rhymes, an erstwhile colleague of Digga’s since her induction into the Flipmode Squad in the late ’90s. Previous to this, Rah Digga had been a member of Outsidaz, a New Jersey clique who made their brief mark on the mainstream through a close association with Lauryn Hill’s former outfit The Fugees. According to Raw Koncept, ‘Warning Shots’ will not be included on the eleven-track album, which is being touted rather boldly as a “female Illmatic”. It will mark the New Jersey MC’s first release since her 2000 debut Dirty Harriet, which is widely regarded as a classic. Watch this space for more news. MP3 after the jump.

FREE MP3: Rah Digga, ‘Warning Shots’

‘Raw Shots’

Behind the scenes studio footage

Black Tambourine
Black Tambourine

[Slumberland; March 29]

Hard to believe that early ’90s shoegaze/twee-pop outfit Black Tambourine never released a proper album. Formed in 1989 as a side project by members of Whorl and Velocity Girl, they lasted a mere two years yet somehow remain among the most celebrated progenitors of American indie-pop. They were, after all, one of legendary label Slumberland’s first signings (an act of brilliant self-serving by band member Mike Schulman, who also co-founded the label). This new collection of odds and ends was overseen by Black Tambourine singer Pam Berry, a founder member of the still-going-strong Chick Factor zine, and features all of the band’s established catalogue plus six unheard songs. From the vaults come two unheard demos, along with four songs recorded by the band especially for this definitive release. Two are original numbers the band would play live back in the day but never had a chance to record, and the others are covers: Buddy Holly’s ‘Heartbeat’ and Suicide’s ‘Dream Baby Dream’. Available digitally and in a deluxe 12″ gatefold vinyl package.

Tracklisting
01 For Ex-Lovers Only
02 Black Car
03 Pack You Up
04 Can’t Explain
05 I Was Wrong
06 Throw Aggi Off The Bridge
07 Drown
08 We Can’t Be Friends
09 By Tomorrow
10 Pam’s Tan
11 For Ex-Lovers Only [first demo]
12 Throw Aggi Off The Bridge [first demo]
13 Heartbeat [Buddy Holly cover]
14 Lazy Heart
15 Tears of Joy
16 Dream Baby Dream [Suicide cover]

Label website

Last month, we finally got our mitts on the artwork and tracklist for Laura Marling’s upcoming second album I Speak Because I Can, the first of two full-length releases she has planned this year, and we’re even happier to hear that the Hampshire folk darling will be gracing Camden Barfly on March 23 for what the club’s Fly Presents are accurately, tantalisingly calling an “intimate” gig. Tickets go on sale at midday today from barflyclub.com, but you may want to hedge your bets by taking part in a competition the club are running that goes live on Friday morning at www.the-fly.co.uk.

It’s probably safe to assume Marling will be airing tunes from the upcoming LP, which signifies a maturing artistic direction for the young songwriter and revolves around the themes of “responsibility, particularly the responsibility of womanhood,” according to NME. Expect to hear new single ‘Devil’s Spoke’ (out March 15), the official video for which has already racked up an impressive 57,000+ views on YouTube.

Charlotte Richardson Andrews

‘Devil’s Spoke’

Dum Dum Girls / Veronica Falls / Yuck
Madame Jojo’s, London ••••
March 2, 2010

Queues all the way down Brewer Street and particularly unhelpful door staff meant a lot of the hyper buzzed fans only got to catch the last yells of opening support act Yuck, who faded out with an enticing swansong of distortion guitar wails. Veronica Falls followed up with a set of consistently lovely songs that have progressively stolen a substantial number of hearts over the past year. The shoegaze pop of ‘Stephen’ was dreamy enough to sway unabashedly to, while ‘Beachy Head’ rang out with romantic thrash. One of the capital’s most exciting homegrown outfits, they proved to be a well-selected warm-up for the US headliners whose appearance was the last, love-letter punctuation on a week of gigs across the capital, a doubly special affair since it marked the band’s UK debut.

The Sub Pop-signed quartet plugged in punctually and with little fuss, gracing the stage with whippet lean legs, neat retro dresses and vintage Danelectro guitars. Ex-Vivian Girl Frankie Rose kept the beats foot-tapping tight while Dum Dum Girls founding member and frontwoman Dee Dee filled centre stage lithely, her gaze focused unwaveringly straight ahead, propelling vocals both lush and smoky. A lack of interaction between band members gave the performance an elegantly austere air, pushing the girl harmonies and shoulder-shimmy guitar rhythms to the forefront, but no between-song banter and a minuscule amount of crowd acknowledgment seemed to betray the stage fright that Dee Dee intimated during our interview with her last week.

Reverb is a notoriously tricky FX in situ and the songs lacked a little of the crispness that radiates on the forthcoming album, I Will Be, taking on a grungier sound that thrilled regardless. The stoner sunshine of ‘Bhang Bhang I’m A Burnout’ was cheery fun, while the twanging romance of ‘Yours Alone’ and ‘I Will Be’ had stage-front fans whirling happily. The set ended with the romantic promise of ‘Rest Of Our Lives’, a perfect, swooning rendition that sounded as sincerely sweet as any lover’s au revoir. It’s safe to say London awaits another Dum Dum Girls visit with all the anticipation of a long-distance crush.

Charlotte Richardson Andrews

Lonelady
Nerve Up ••••
Warp

Warp Records has a long history of plucking unusual and promising electronic artists out of obscurity and giving them an arena in which to produce their best work. In recent years though, they’ve branched out into music which falls outside their usual electronica-based remit, but that pushes playfully at genre boundaries – think Jamie Lidell, Maximo Park, Grizzly Bear et al. – and Lonelady (aka Manchester-based artist, poet and musician Julie Campbell) falls somewhat defiantly into this category with her debut album, Nerve Up. A one-woman wonder, Campbell has created an album that blends modern girl-with-guitar attitude with 1980s synth-references into sparse, solitary musical vistas befitting her stage name, and which could only have originated from the home of The Smiths.

A tense mood is established right from the off; ‘If Not Now’ starts out by contrasting Campbell’s crystal-clear vocals with a ringing bassline, achieving an open, economic sound through a minimal and exacting use of handclaps, guitars and a couple of synth strokes. (A purpose-built recording studio in a disused mill can’t have been a disadvantage either.) The pulsing rhythm pushes through a number of instrumental breaks, with all these elements crescendoing together at the finale. The net effect of this thrilling introduction is that the listener is drawn into a web of subtly referenced and cleverly structured songs that span several genres simultaneously. Campbell’s vocal on the title track, for instance, somehow combines Kylie Minogue’s breathy vocal style with the strict, clipped stylings of Debbie Harry, making for an unlikely but somewhat tasty combo.

There’s also a lovely cadence to Nerve Up; it starts out all feisty with punky power-chords and lashings of attitude on tracks like ‘Early The Haste Comes’, gradually shifting into a quieter, more subdued and reflective mindset. Lyrically, the album deals in conflict and frustration (‘Nerve Up’), isolation (‘Cattletears’) and a tinge of tightly-controlled emotions (‘Have No Past’). Penultimate track ‘Army’ bumps the mood back up again, briefly, only for the downward trend relapse into the heartbreaking, country-inspired finale ‘Fear No More’.

Weaving in some carefully chosen references that call to mind the spectrum of ’80s pop from Heart to Gary Numan, and with modern shades of Electrelane’s Verity Susman and Ladyhawke in Campbell’s vocals, Nerve Up could sound chaotic and mismatched. But ultimately it’s her mixing of these references into a catchy set of understatedly brilliant pop songs which makes this a record that’s infinitely more than the sum of its parts.

Seb Law
UK release date: 22/02/10; www.myspace.com/lonelady

Blood Red Shoes
Fire Like This •••
V2 / Co-op

It’s all a bit too easy with Blood Red Shoes. They’re the tastiest, most palatable pill in all of rock, sliding down the throats of the record-buying public with the slightest of contractions. Anyone expecting a challenging and exciting progression from their 2007 debut Box Of Secrets may find themselves confused by the first half of Fire Like This; essentially, it’s just more of the same long guitar phrases, punchy drums and sweet overlapping vocals that build up to the chorus into boring shouty melodies. Take ‘Don’t Ask’ as a prime example. You can practically hear the teenagers singing along, but there is a sense of something lacking. It’s like Blood Red Shoes by numbers. There’s a middle drop-out section with a lovely thick guitar sound, but it’s just so predictable that it does nothing to accelerate the heart rate and fails to ignite to the usual levels of angst that we’ve come to expect from Stephen Ansell and Laura-Mary Carter’s disaffected tales of boredom, isolation and frustration.

Fire Like This doesn’t make it any easier to crowbar Blood Red Shoes away from those young alternative rock bands that come around every once in a while who are good and catchy and inoffensive and usually cite Nirvana, Pixies, Rage Against The Machine, and if they’re really daring, Sonic Youth as big influences. You know: Nine Black Alps, The Subways, Dinosaur Pile-Up etc.; we might like all of those bands, even love them in moments, but on album number two there should be no scope for underwhelming ambition. Luckily, they do eventually plumb to more rewarding depths and, perhaps surprisingly, it’s a slow song that provides the album’s first exhilarating moment. ‘Keeping It Close’ arrives as a mid-album highlight, benefiting from a slight change in melody tempo to distinguish it from the sameness of its predecessors.

The second half of the album is markedly better as the songs take on a new level of realism and truth. No longer are Ansell and Carter simply banging out chart-bound singalongs with often seemingly arbitrary lyrics; these later tracks seem reactionary. Things leap into brilliance immediately with ‘Heartsink’, with its Graham Coxon-esque riff. Instead of the superficial teenage teeth-gnashing of the earlier tracks, here Blood Red Shoes adopt a mature, grating and gloomy anger. Finally, we can start to relate. Other standouts include ‘One More Empty Chair’, whose dreamy start juxtaposes nicely with Ansell’s yelps, and could mark the beginnings of a battle between the sweeter and the macho side of the band, and ‘Colours Fade’, the album’s bold seven-minute epilogue.

Intentional or not, the sequencing of Fire Like This means it quite literally documents Ansell and Carter’s growth from crowd-pleasers to progressives. As an album, then, it’s a confusing collection of contradictions, but one that gives plenty of reasons to be optimistic for the next.

Maxie Gedge
UK release date: 01/03/10; www.myspace.com/bloodredshoes

Jenny Owen Youngs
Last Person EP

[Nettwerk; March 2]

Nearly three months after the video for the title track appeared on YouTube, this new six-song digital-only EP from Jenny Owen Youngs sneaked out into the world today. With previously unreleased material including four tracks from last year’s Transmitter Failure [review] recorded live “in the Basement” and a “re-think” of another album track, ‘Dissolve’, it’s one that fans will want to snap up.

Tracklist:
01 Last Person
02 Led To The Sea [live]
03 Start + Stop [live]
04 Secrets [live]
05 Last Person [live]
06 Dissolve (The Lovely Light Re-think)

Jenny Owen Youngs website
Label website

‘Last Person’

Influential post-punk outfit The Raincoats have taken inspiration from Bikini Kill’s recently opened archive blog and are calling for fans to contribute their own personal stories and reflections of the band. In case you need a reminder (!), The Raincoats were formed thirty years ago by Ana da Silva and Gina Birch who met as students at Hornsey College of Art, London. An evolving list of band members has included Palm Olive and Kate Korus from The Slits (and later The Mo-dettes), drummer Ingrid Weiss, Vicky Aspinall on violin and photographer/manager Shirley O’Loughlin. The band released five LPs, and went on to become much lauded inspirations for Kurt Cobain, Kim Gordon and the riot grrrl movement as a whole, beaming a blindingly great path through music’s wider, male-dominated annals.

The band have hived off with a number of interesting solo works over the years, but continue to tour and are confirmed to play the Matt Groening-curated ATP at Butlins, Minehead in May. No formal site has been set up yet, but thoughts, photos and memory lane adventures are all being encouraged on their official blog’s comments section, so scoot on over and tell the world about your Odyshape crush or how you cut your first Mohawk to the sounds of Looking In The Shadows.

Charlotte Richardson Andrews