For his second album Jack decided to rip it up and start again. Totally start again. Total honesty, absolute vision, complete control.

The result is Everything Is New, a soul record. Recorded over twelve intense months in producer Paul Epworth's (Bloc Party, Friendly Fires) own west London home studio, Everything Is New is a giant musical leap forward from this 24 year old Londoner’s acclaimed debut album.

Everything Is New is a technicolour record full of experimentation and possibility. Featuring the blissed-out house grooves of first single “Tonight’s Today” and swaggering soul of anthemic new single “Be The One”, the album fuses Peñate’s wide-eyed pop songwriting with the music he’s always loved and lived, successfully bringing Brazilian Tropicala, Krautrock, New Orleans marching bands, Bashment, Afrobeat, lo-fi Hop Hop, Gospel, Reggaeton and Phily Soul into the mix over a nine track record that delights and surprises at every turn.

So here it is. Nine tracks. No filler. An ambitious, timeless, lo-fi soul record. Everything Is New.

the best way to understand Golden Silvers’ magical first album True Romance: it’s a properly soulful liberation. Lovelorn, charmingly eccentric, literate, starry-eyed, earthy and glowing warm with empathy, the ten sun-dappled songs within – built from an unfussy bed of sweet three-part harmonies, keys, bass and drums – are infectious without ever nagging, clever rather than arch and completely their own. “Queen of the 21st Century”, a skewed psychedelic terrace stomp, sits happily with the swaggering, Prince-ly funk of the title track, a trippy, mystical and mediaeval-sounding “The Seed” and the rinky-dink but raucously anthemic “Magic Touch”, all corralled into a giddy, excitable line by a kind of futuristic doo-wop.

 “I know it doesn’t describe much me going, ‘Yeah, we wanted to make it so it sounded great,’” says Gwil, “but that’s what we did. We wanted to approach each song differently, which means people will go, ‘Oh, that’s bonkers.’ But listen to The Beatles’ Revolver. Every song is different and yet it’s a classic. I don’t see why we’ve gone so far backwards that we now just get the same type of song, the same sound all the time.”

Following last years two rapturously-received independent singles (‘Arrows Of Eros’ and ‘Magic Touch / Another Universe’), enthusiastic critics have already compared Golden Silvers to the likes of The Beach Boys, Tyrannosaurus Rex, The Coral, Super Furry Animals and Prince to conjure a description for their brassy, keys-driven psychedelia. Meanwhile, Gwil himself says he always wanted to play piano like Hendrix played guitar (just listen to Golden Silvers’ darkly wiggy “Shakes”) and that when he was learning how to write he studied Dylan like a man possessed. “It’d be beautiful if you could open your mouth and sing like Marvin Gaye but that’s what put me off for so long, the thought I could never do that. But when I started singing Bob I was like, actually...”

But for all the talk of brilliant, instinctive songwriting and classic influences, Golden Silvers are a very modern outfit, as familiar with Metronomy as they are Mystery Jets. They were bred on Erol Alkan’s indie-electro crossover, which the feted DJ began to beckon from his decks at Trash, Golden Silvers’ regular Monday night haunt. They’ve also employed the help of latest producer wunderkind Lexx (Esser, Crystal Castles) to produce their debut album and the band run their own night, The Bronze Club at Hoxton’s Macbeth, where they call on their fellow purveyors of weird, wonderful music to come and play, like The Invisible and Micachu And The Shapes.

Known primarily for his haunting falsetto and other-worldly presence as the singer in
Sigur Rós, Jon Thor Birgisson has - together with his partner Alex Somers - been exhibit-
ing artwork and staging exhibitions under the name Riceboy Sleeps for two or three years
now, including the release of a limited edition picture book.  A couple of months back
the early fruits of the musical side of this collaboration surfaced in physical form for the
first time, with the track “Happiness”, on the exemplary Dark Was The Night Red Hot
compilation.

Riceboy Sleeps is human in a profound and verging-on spiritual way. It says nothing, liter-
ally, and yet living through its 68-minutes you emerge feeling much has been revealed. 
Its slowly evolving abstract landscapes are both edifying and life-affirming. The record
works as a whole, and exists in a contemplative dream-state, unconstrained and mesmeric,
seemingly outside time.

The record, however, is more active than its apparent antecedents in the ambient output of
Brian Eno, and other deliberately low-impact works. Riceboy Sleeps is awash with both
tension and stimuli, as well as being frequently, and stunningly, beautiful.

Played solely on acoustic instruments in Iceland (and featuring long-time string col-
laborators Amiina, as well as the Kopavogsdaetur choir) and then endlessly toyed with
on solar-powered laptops in a raw food commune in some far corner of Hawaii, Riceboy
Sleeps has a suitably, uh, “organic feel” to it; the wave-like lapping of its tidal flow buried
beneath analogue hiss, crackle, pulse and distortion; the creaking of rigging and sometime
indeterminate falling delicately over; and, on “Howl”, ruminative animal chirrups, grunts,
snorts and purrs.

Yorkshire is full of towns where nothing much happens, or so they'd have you believe.  Laura Groves either didn't hear, didn't believe or simply knew better and on the edge of seventeen began writing songs.  With an old family piano and a borrowed guitar, thinking of the records she loved, lyrics that broke her heart, phrasing that made it race, composers cradling her aspirations.  Influences spanning genres and generations; from Bartók to Bush, Tiersen to Tears For Fears, Debussy to Du Maurier.  She dreamt of writing, arranging, performing and producing an album that would be as treasured by someone else, and hopefully inspire them in the same way.
 
The journey from then until now has not only given her more years, but more confidence, more experience of life, the courage to let the music express when words seem too restrictive.  The name Blue Roses is encompassing; it is more than just one person and their sole aspirations, it is what happened in making the album- this process gave the need for another, more representative name. Blue Roses is the story, with Laura Groves as the protagonist. Included is a cast of family members to play instruments and a choir of firm friends, acquaintances and perfect strangers gathered together in a café to help.  A small amount of money and a little faith was stretched with the benevolence and enthusiasm of those who stood at each door. From recording in living rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms in various houses, to recording a Steinway in a local piano shop (a millionaire, who despite having paid a five-figure sum for the concert grand piano, was enchanted enough by the story and the music to allow Laura to record with it before it was moved to entertain guests his Lake District hotel). The equipment graciously bought and generously lent, (most of which was older than Laura herself, some of which was of pensionable age) put her on a sonic par with her idols and instilled in her a romance which translated through the Neumann, the Gibson and Wurlitzer, the Neve. The valves, the plates, the springs, the tape, transformers and circuitry are as musical as the instruments and voices passing through them, and are part of the story, the colour between the lines.