Those lovely folk in Summer Camp have just swatted off any mid-week blues by unveiling a brand new EP forthcoming and streaming a new track as well.

‘Life’ is the track in question, which can be streamed below, and is taken from the Always EP set to drop 9 July on Apricot Recording Company/ Moshi Moshi.

The tracklist should look a little something like this:

1. Life
2. Always
3. City
4. Hunt
5. Outside

But that’s not all – just how bloody good is that new press shot above? Very bloody good.

Listen to Summer Camp’s new track, ‘Life’, below:

LA’s Abe Vigoda, in Stockholm, Sweden before their gig at Strand in June 2011, by Victor Lundmark.

We try and close out our featured content each day with an interesting picture from the musical world, mined from the libraries of our photographers and readers. We call this The Final Shot. If you’d like to contribute, please send your pictures to paul@thelineofbestfit.com at landscape, 960 pixels width.

In a series of intimate London dates, The XX played Chats Palace last night – making the evening even more special by airing some brand new track.

Among the new tracks was this untitled number, which you can stream a recorded clip of below.

The tickets to the gigs were priced £19.50, but the winners were decided via a lottery. The Mercury Prize-winning band played Electrowerkz in Islington on Monday and play Battersea Arts Centre on 18 May.

Catch that new track beneath:

Elliphant, our new favourite Swedish pop-star-to-come, was supposed to be supporting Niki & The Dove in London tonight. That show has sadly been cancelled, but the ‘Tekkno Scene’ artist will livestream a show of her own at 8pm GMT. You’ll be able to watch below.

Video streaming by Ustream

Dirty Projectors have unveiled some new details about their forthcoming album, which you see the cover art of above.

As well as revealing the album cover to their follow-up to 2009′s Bitte Orca, David Longstreth and co have also announced it will be out on 9 July in the UK and a day later in the US.

Swing Lo Magellan will be released via Domino as 3000 deluxe limited-edition 180-gram vinyls, as well as, of course, digitally.

Listen to new track ‘Gun Has No Trigger’, which is to feature on the record, below:

Just two weeks now until this year’s Field Day festival, and yet we can still remember last year’s helping of East London’s favourite day-out. Alas you may be forgiven for thinking it has flown round quite fast, however, as this edition of the fest has been push forward by a whole two months due to a certain sporting event happening in London later this summer.

So if you haven’t yet bought your ticket, here’s the chance to win a pair of them for the one-day festival taking place in Victoria Park on 2 June. The line-up is already looking great, with Grimes, Beirut, Gold Panda, Liars, Summer Camp and Friends among those confirmed. So exactly what’s stopping you from entering?

To win: Simply share this article via Facebook or Twitter – but remember to tag The Line Of Best Fit and @TLOBF in the posts so we know you’ve entered!

Voting closes 27 May.

Field Day 2012 takes place at Victoria Park, London on Saturday 2 June of the Jubilee Bank Holiday weekend. The full line-up is as in the poster above.

You can look back at all the coverage from last year’s event to get you in the mood by clicking this very link.

Diplo released ‘Express Yourself’ on 7″ earlier this month, complete with absurd video (which you can watch below). Now you can stream the b-side, ‘Move Around’, courtesy of Brooklyn Vegan.

Flying Lotus has revealed that his forthcoming new album release has been forced to be delayed.

It had previously been set for a summer 2012 release date but now, according to Prefix, it will be more like to drop in the autumn.

“That shit comes out in like October, or some shit,” the producer told fans at a Sao Paulo live event.

At the event he also revealed a brand new track, likely to feature on the Until The Quiet Comes record.

You can listen to that below:

Yeasayer have revealed the first piece of new material that they had been hinted at for a while.

Having already unveiled a series of live dates, some new tracks were expected to follow and here is the first – entitled ‘Henrietta’.

You can listen to the track below, the first thing heard since 2011′s Record Store Day release.

The Brooklyn band will also tour the following dates:

June
19 – Richmond, VA, The National
20 – Asheville, NC, The Orange Peel
21 – Knoxville, TN, Bijou Theatre
22 – Nashville, TN, Cannery Ballroom
23 – Louisville, KY, Headliners Music Hall
24 – Cincinnati, OH, 20th Century Theatre

July
4-7 – Gdyina, PL, Open’er Festival
12-15 – Suffolk, UK, Latitude Festival
13-15 – Ferropolis, DE, Melt! Festival

August
3 – Montreal, QC, Osheaga Music Festival

From The Hives‘ onstage bravado, wild uncontrollable outbursts, scissor kicking frenzy and obscenely arrogant banter, you might expect them to prove a difficult band to interview. In the past they’ve certainly tried to make it that way, turning interviews around with ease and making journalists the baffled subject of an in-joke they’re not privy to. The five gracious men sitting around me – a.k.a. “The world’s wisest musical council and international rock sensation” according to their latest press release – offering me Mexican crisps and beer and asking about my tattoo are not what one may expect. A couple of the band come in late and apologise politely, Loveheart sweets are scattered over the table and my inner 14 year old fangirl is fucking psyched to be here and having minor palpitations.

The band, on the other hand, are totally composed and relaxed after a return from a stint touring in the US that included characteristically mindblowing shows at Coachella. Back in the land that adopted them early on as part of a fledgling garage rock resurgence, guitarist Nicholaus Arson, tells me “We enjoy being in London very much. It feels like coming home and we spend so much time over here”. Of course, The Hives never really get to spend too long anywhere, with a live reputation that precedes them, the band have critics fawning over their notorious live shows and are always in demand. With so many gigs, how do they keep things from feeling stale? The impossible ball of charisma – and admittedly the cause of my slightly clammy hands – that is frontman Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist answers “Play just as hard as you can at every show. We play basically the same songs but you don’t know what’s gonna happen between the songs” (Judging by their live record, it seems like what usually happens between songs is complete unabashed immodesty courtesy of Pelle in the form of declarations such as “I’ve been busy being fantastic”) Nicholaus continues, “Playing live is supposed to be like dancing on the edge of a blade. Everything is supposed to have the chance to go wrong, nothing is supposed to be planned.” It turns out that at one of their recent shows, the thing that went wrong was Pelle falling off a lighting rig and giving himself concussion. “It was rough”, he tells me. “It was only a few songs in but I finished the show. Maybe the concussion made me stupid enough to think it was a good idea to do that!”

Being on the road so much of the time must take its toll on a band and I want to know the best and worst things about touring. Turns out the best thing, as Nicholaus says, are the shows themselves. The worst thing about touring leads to an unexpected exchange after bassist Dr Matt Destruction chips in:

Matt: “I hate the travelling, the waiting and waiting! And getting up in the morning and wanting to take a dump and you can’t.”
Pelle: “Yeah, not being able to shit on the bus is one of the worst things.”
Matt: “The music would work so much better if you could take a dump on the bus.”

“You’re asking all the wrong questions!” Pelle laughs at my barely concealed horror. I take a different route and ask about their black & white dress code, which I imagine is a laundry nightmare. A mixed load would spell disaster. (Today they all wear matching leather biker jackets, white shirts and black trousers. The effect is inadvertently adorable.) “We were always impressed by bands that looked like a gang,” Nicholaus says. “In the same way we made up rules for our music we made up rules for what The Hives could wear. It’s like James Bond. He doesn’t wear slippers, he doesn’t grow a beard…” So I guess ‘The Pastel Album’ isn’t in the pipeline.

After discovering their band name is based on the desire to get under people’s skin, I ask what gives the band hives. Nicholaus tells me, “I get proper hives. I’m allergic to raspberry jam,” before drummer Chris Dangerous admits, “there are types of music we really don’t like.” They laugh at my suggestion to name and shame but Pelle offers “Crybaby music,” and Nicholaus adds “Rock bands that don’t sweat.” The Hives are a band that certainly sweat their hearts out when putting on a show and though meticulous over their image, they couldn’t care less about posturing and deliver their songs with unmatched self-assuredness.

“Our confidence falters when you don’t see us,” Pelle insists, “but when we’re done making a record it’s like ‘shit, this is amazing!’… Being away for four years, your confidence shakes but then it’s done and you think ‘Wow!’ So why have The Hives been away for so long? “We’ve been around for a while now, made a few records and done a lot of the things we set out to do. So then you have to find new challenges,” Pelle says. Nicholaus continues, “in the beginning we scrapped songs earlier on. Now we have the time to work on songs and they end up being really good. We wouldn’t do demo songs in the beginning because we thought… the dynamic would fall out the window,” Pelle explains. “There are albums where the artist will later release the demo’s for it and there’s always something that’s better about them. There was a Bad Brains album that was the raw takes of songs and that was the thing we’d listen to but on the actual album they put out, Rock For Light, the same songs are just played slightly faster and it sounds like they care slightly less.”

Citing contemporary peers they love as Queens of the Stone Age, Eagles of Death Metal and Swedish hard rock band, Graveyard, the band got to work with the QOTSA frontman who produced tracks for their new album, Lex Hives (Their “body of laws” in song form). “He was someone we trusted,” explains Nicholaus, with Chris Dangerous adding, “being under pressure and not having much time, he was still very meticulous in the same way we are.”

With their playfully dark alter-ego monikers, I want to know what The Hives nice names would be. Matt Destruction says “Mine would be Dr Matt Construction, like a handyman. Or just Sexy Bear,” while Nicholaus suggests “Mine would probably be Nicholaus not-arson. Or Nicholaus Parsons. Chatting Pelle Almqvist?” Their semi-dangerous names are reflective of the playful jibes that conceal a confrontational feel in the delivery of their songs. “The music we play is such an outlet for blowing off steam. Bad politics annoys me. Everything that’s wrong about the world, we write about,” Nicholaus says. And where would The Hives situate themselves on the political spectrum? “It’s hard to say,” he explains, “because a lot of the time modern politics are so corrupt and insincere in a way that means it doesn’t matter. We lean more to the left than to the right, where everyone has a fair chance and the kind of society where people take care of each other. For the most part it’s just common sense that gets thrown out the window because lobbyism and bureaucracy get in the way.” So it seems that for all their surface tomfoolery, there’s a social conscience beating away under the black and white guise. Who knew?

Photo by Victor Lundmark

The Hives may not have reached the public view until 2002 but have actually been together since 1993 and still have the desire to come back and give more. Where do they find the inspiration? Pelle answers “For me it’s being curious about what we will do next. I don’t know what The Hives next record will sound like and I can’t wait to find out. We couldn’t be happier with Lex Hives right now but there’s always that thought of “Could we beat this one?” “The panic in the notion of maybe going away makes me want to come back” Nicholaus adds. “Every record we make we think it’s our last record; that we can’t pour any more into this.” I want to know if they’d ever pour it all into a ballad and Nicholaus admits “We tried on Tyrannosaurus Hives with ‘Diabolic Scheme’. The intent was to make it a ballad but people tell us it isn’t… We had other ballads in the running. We had a 60s type ballad for The Black and White album. Are you talking power ballads?” (At which point he does an impression of big, 80s drums central to the sound of Michael Bolton et al.) “We really like ballads,” Pelle insists, “but there are enough people who sing about girls and love and we deliberately don’t do it… We write ballad type songs but they probably wouldn’t be called ‘Emma’ for example.” Disregarding my heartbreak, he adds that they couldn’t write a better ballad than Nick Cave, which is probably the best reason you could have.

So what do The Hives want to give the world? “A hard on. Or happiness I think” Pelle offers. “Same thing”, Nicholaus deadpans, to roars of laughter. “In a roundabout way, yeah” Pelle adds. “The best feeling of joy I get doesn’t come from going to church; it comes from the friction of when something feels good. If our live show appears confrontational it’s because we love the confusion, ‘do these people love us or hate us?’ And we love that feeling. It’s exhilarating and we want the world to feel that way and love us and give us a lot of money.” What would you say to a Hives novice to convince them to come see you play? “You’d have to come to the show to let us convince you. Our shows are a long presentation of how good we are” Nicholaus asserts. Pelle continues, “I think we would say, really, you have no idea how good it is. If you don’t love it I’ll give you £100.” If this is The Hives cast iron guarantee of an amazing gig then you might say £100 is a little humble, especially since there’s no way they’d ever need to pay out.

Of course, when The Hives first came to the public’s attention, guitar music at that time was on a commercial high and informed by a punk ethos that led to a thriving garage band scene. Would The Hives still class themselves a punk or do they think the genre is dead? “Absolutely, we’re a punk rock band but here’s what I would say about it: we were just at a friend’s art gallery and he’s going through a punk magazine as he’s writing a book about the punk rock aesthetic and they weren’t allowed to use it but on the last page there’s a photo of the cover of Architecture Digest and it’s Demi Moore in a feature on ‘At home with Demi and Ashton’ and she’s wearing a Sex Pistols t shirt. There’s also a photo of David Beckham wearing a Crass t shirt. I think that means punk is dead; it’s as good a case as any,” he laughs ruefully. “Rock & Roll and punk rock is in rude fucking health really. I mean, do people ask, is jazz dead now? They don’t, even though nobody’s actually listening to it. When we’ve just played to 85,000 people, I don’t think it’s dead. The teen rebellion of the punk ethos has always been around. There were ‘Swing Kids’ in north Germany. That’s more rebellious than being a punk in the 70s.”

Nicholaus continues, “If you look at punk as a movement that was a rebellion against something else then of course it’s dead. But if you’re looking at it as a style of music, like where we come from in the Swedish sticks, it’s huge. Punk goes into hibernation, in 80s California it wouldn’t be visible but it’d be around in Anaheim and it will always be around. It’s the music that can’t die… The ones who were saying “Punk is dead” were always people who were punks at one time and just didn’t really have the energy. ‘Yeah, punk’s not what it used to be’ (feigns snoring)”

After this, we have to wrap it up. And I’m left to consider the five delightfully charming men I’ve just spent my afternoon with. The Hives seem a much tamer beast than they once were, and appear to have mellowed into pragmatic, mature adults with a penchant for disguised social commentary. I begin to worry if this inner calm means they’ve lost the very essence of what made them so exciting and made me fall in love with them all those years ago. And then I watch their tiny sold-out show at The Borderline and realise there’s nothing to fear. Their live show is their true raison d’être and showcases them at their most vital. It is electric, thrilling and yes, the utter metaphorical equivalent of a hard on. Lex Hives Rule 1: Never doubt them for a second.

Lex Hives is released on 4 June through Columbia.

Despite their geographical separation Husky display many of the same traits as the current crop of American Sub Poppers – Poor Moon, Father John Misty, Fleet Foxes etc – a strong tendency towards classicism, a love of ‘60s California folk rock and a penchant for “keeping it (ethe)real”.

The songs here are largely set in a specific natural environment which forms both the backdrop and provides a third, key character in the interplay between vocalist Husky Gawenda’s voice and the people that make up the bulk of the focus of the lyrical content – prime among them his fractured muse “Josephine”.

Tracks like ‘History’s Door’ – a simultaneously delicate and maudlin military stomp with a leaping chorus and positively luscious string refrain replete with unsettling notions like “Your heart knows you’ll never win/Till you’re freed from him” – and the zigzagging piano run of the disconcerting ‘How Do You Feel’ (a tale of murder that considers “Maybe it’s a movie or a dream/Perhaps I’ll wake up screaming”) are where the band shine: traditional sounding alt-folk ballads that feel like a refreshing dip in warm, clear musical oceans.

There isn’t enough of this across the record though. The songs too often stare uncomfortably at their shoes wondering what to do next – take the lachrymose but generic ‘The Woods’ or overwrought Decemberists nod ‘Hundred Dollar Suit’ – both just about saved by Gawenda’s Paul Simon-treading vocal nuances but otherwise unremarkable.

There are a number of other tracks that could be as easily left as taken – the Shearwater-scraping acoustica of ‘Dark Sea’ and the jittery ‘Fake Moustache’, an adventurous sounding song that gets tied down in borrowed melodies and faux-afrobeat instrumentation – and it sometimes appears that we’re listening to yet another band infatuated by Radiohead, toying with an old treasure map that points at the sweet spots of the Byrds and Beach Boys but whose exact locations are muddied by the thumbprints of a thousand previous owners, as on the Yorke melody-driven ‘Forever So’ and the direct ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ lift of the chorus on ‘Don’t Tell your Mother’.

This is not all bad though. Despite it’s perilous length (a good, bold edit across the board would have buoyed this album considerably) there are little joys to crack open, among them opener ‘Tidal Waves’-  a Lost In The Woods-style beauty, carefully crafted from patches of old folk and modern melody, and closer ‘Farewell (In 3 Parts)’ – a stunning and sparse Sun Kil Moon-skirting ode to fractured love that builds with a sliding electric guitar, carefully pressed piano keys, delicious acoustic strums and snaps of heartening percussion before carrying us through on a ragged Kozelek chord sequence, jolting us with a knuckle rap on the guitar’s body and allowing us the finest moment of the record: “Time can be so cruel but you’ll be my friend some day/There was a lot we didn’t say, wasn’t there Josephine?/There were oceans in our way/Oh what does that even mean”. It’s engaged, soulful stuff and it’s a shame that the record isn’t often clear and expressive enough to allow more moments like this the space to resonate.

While it’s sometimes a bland experience, the songwriting here, with a little self monitoring, could bring us something really special next time around. As it stands we’re left with a debut referential in the extreme but with an occasional knack for shining loveliness. It’s fair to say there’s plenty of mileage in the Sub Pop brand yet.

So what does Unpatterns invert? Texture? Resonance? Statements? The tittering critical emulsion that washed over Attack, Delay, Sustain, Release certainly wasn’t thinking about how those lippy Londoners would look in 2012. Surprising, considering how reductively futuristic and blatantly fashionable they once looked. But perhaps this is the best step they could’ve possibly taken. Faced with veteran status and all the arced implications that come with a “third effort”, James Ford and Jas Shaw are making the music they love, a deep, dark, and often irresistible techno record.

I’m not gonna wax poetic, or solipsistic for that matter. SMD have always etched tunes free of all that chin-stroked discourse anyway. That’s why a gigantic diva-house hook cascades over twitchy body-funk on ‘Seraphin’, or why ‘Put Your Hands Together’’s relentless bass drum overdrive feels wonderfully retro and hugely revamped at the same time.  These are kids who grew up and nurtured taste on acrylic floors, catching rays in the red and green lasers, filling notebook margins with DJ charts. This is their eternal night; Unpatterns is a cool cackle of fearless pop passion, the moment where they seem closer to us, and themselves, than ever before.

There’s a dark undercurrent slithering underneath, even in the brightest flares, like a constant reminder that Simian is saving their biggest fold for a different attitude, but I’d like to think that this is who they are. Sinister House, Techno With Fangs – a smug confidence you would punch if the grooves could let you move. It would be a defining DJ set if they didn’t write all the songs. The flocked painlessness to their flow is something they worked very, very hard for.

Yeah, I guess it’s just a dance record, the same way most things are just a dance record – Delicacies, Personality, The Devil’s Walk – all well-regarded albums from well-known guises immediately paved over because, well, we’ve got Important Stuff to spin! Leave it to the artful miners and Resident Advisor best-of lists – Unpatterns is unfairly a utility work, wonderful and singular, but not quite transcendent, and it can feel that sometimes, in a webzine’s impossible quest to straddle all the art, the watershed moments unfairly overshadow all the really good cornerstones. Unpatterns won’t move your brain, but it will move your nerves, and that should be enough for you.

An anomaly of sorts within the metal world, Miami-based quartet Torche have been confusing and delighting in equal amounts since their formation in 2004. Musically, they’re unabashedly joyful, yet they’ve always remained strident in their rock roots. With a plethora of past bands between their members – including Floor, Cavity, Shitstorm, Tunes For Bears To Dance To, Riddle Of Steel and Tilts – the group have always been a centrum of integration, and as their first release on Volcom, after stints on Rock Action and Hydra Head, Harmonicraft sees Torche at the pinnacle of their musical reinvention.

Torche have been described in many musical terms over the years: stoner metal, sludge metal, “metallic sludge” – yet their music has always encompassed a kick of powerful pop melodies and a penchant for the unusually uplifting, as showcased on their critically acclaimed 2008 second album Meanderthal. On Harmonicraft, Steve Brooks’ vocals remain central to Torche’s dual dynamics: powerful, yet smooth, melodious, yet lyrically often indecipherable. Meanwhile new guitarist Andrew Elstner – replacing Juan Montoya – slides into the formation nicely while bringing his own style to the band, particularly during the solos on tracks such as ‘Off The Wall’ and ‘Looking On’.

The colourful, graffiti-like cartoon artwork may not give anything away to someone unfamiliar with the band, yet it does betray the inherent sense of fun that permeates the entirety of Harmonicraft. Nowhere is this notion of joviality demonstrated more than on first single ‘Kicking’, clearly the band’s most commercial track to date, yet thoroughly enjoyable and frenetic nonetheless. It might only be the album’s second track, yet it’s one of the very best. That’s not to say that the rest of the album is a disappointment, rather that it truly sets the record’s entire tone with its statement of intent. It’s unapologetic, upbeat, all-out stadium rock, and its elated nature is a theme that weaves its way throughout the remainder of the record.

‘Skin Moth’ and ‘Sky Trials’ continue this upbeat attack: both are thundering and immediate, cutting straight to the heart of the action. ‘Snakes Are Charmed’’s surprisingly frantic introduction threads its way through the ongoing melody, its guitar riffs as hypnotic as its title would suggest, while ‘Walk It Off’ is simply one-and-a-half minutes of frenetic noise, its escalated guitar solo quickly cementing Eltsner’s place within the band. It’s not all breakneck speed however, as fourth track ‘Reverse Inverted’ and its follower ‘In Pieces’ demonstrate. Later ‘Solitary Traveller’ also slows the pace, its tuned-down, chugging guitar lines and drawn out vocals epitomising the sludge accolade that they are often tagged with. It’s tracks such as these that accentuate the fact that Torche’s music feels both classic and of its time. While there’s certainly an ‘80s and early ‘90s sound to both Torche’s vocals and their string harmonies, it has been updated in a manner that very much places the band in the here and now.

At 39 minutes long Harmonicraft comprises a set of songs of varying lengths, each track acting as individual counterparts to one another. In typical Torche fashion, they save their longest track for last, the expansive ‘Looking On’, which stretches out its final minutes. The careful placing of songs – moments of heightened elation followed by the sweeping slowness of doom – showcases a mixture of styles, structures and emotions, while ensuring that their listeners are constantly kept guessing. As such Torche should continue to have widespread appeal, amalgamating as they do so many components of different genres, from the heavy hooks of the wonderfully-titled ‘Kiss Me Dudely’ and the echoing vocals of ‘Roaming’, through to the instrumental penultimate title track ‘Harmonicraft’.

While the album might not showcase a dramatic evolution from what Torche have produced before, it’s certainly a refined and honed collection of what they have crafted so well throughout the members’ collective careers. In fact Harmonicraft sees Torche bigger and braver than ever, and there’s no doubting that the quartet are unafraid of their renewed sense of commerciality: rather they’ve finally fully embraced it. As a perfect starting point for anyone who’s bypassed the band prior to this release, Harmonicraft shows Torche at the height of all that they can continue to achieve: wielding their metal credentials within the realms of pure, vibrant rock melodies.

Zammuto left Brooklyn a few years ago to build a secluded homestead for his family in rural Vermont, and turned the backyard shed into a recording studio where much of the record was created. That stark feeling of isolation and separation colour the entire record, which is full of pulsing, inventive songs that at their core have a sombre, pensive essence.

In addition to Nick on guitar and vocals, the Books guitarist/keyboardist/violinist Gene Back joins Zammuto, along with drummer Sean Dixon and Nick’s brother Mikey on bass. And while Zammuto’s heavily processed vocals hide a bit of the raw emotion at the heart of these songs (along with the jocular wordplay featured in the titles themselves), those despondent feelings still resound in the downcast, spare arrangements that are featured throughout the album.

The album launches with the decidedly tongue-in-cheek titled ‘Yay,’ which features Zammuto’s chopped vocals over a lurching rhythm and funereal organ strains. Is serves as a smooth transition from his former project to his new one, and with ‘Groan Man, Don’t Cry’ the shift is fully complete, as the sprawling, dynamic track features Zammuto’s vocoder-drenched vocals repeating the phrase “It’s all good/It’s alright/Crisis solved” over his sprightly guitar riff. The healing, restorative number eventually blossoms into a flurry of arpeggios and encouraging lyrics meant to uplift a fallen subject during his darker moments.

‘Idiom Wind’ is a direct homage to Dylan’s caustic ‘Idiot Wind’, with the jazzy percussion featured on the track never clouding the crystal-clear lyrics, which drive this song more than anything in Zammuto’s back catalogue. The clever song titles continue on ‘F U C-3PO,’ and once you stop laughing over the absurdity of the track’s name, the thoroughly modern number unfolds rather majestically, and blends seamlessly into the album’s centerpiece, ‘Too Late To Topologize,’ which sounds as if an autotuned Justin Vernon found his way into Zammuto’s distant Vermont studio during the recording.

‘Zebra Butt’ has striking keyboard riffs at the start that sound as if they could, indeed, emanate from a zebra’s butt. But the track is far classier than the title implies, and gradually coalesces into a forceful, funky statement that emphatically puts someone who has wronged you in their rightful place. ‘Weird Ceiling’ is a glorious collage of many different musical styles, boldly making the transition from clubby house music to free jazz to fidgety drum and bass over the course of its tumultuous run.

After the wildly inventive ‘Ceiling’ things take a mournful turn on the wistful ‘Harlequin’, which is drenched in forlorn sentiment but still is able to surprise listeners with enough modern flourishes to keep from being too mawkish. The album draws to a close with the buoyant, optimistic churn of ‘The Shape Of Things To Come’ and the spare elegance of ‘Full Fading’, which brings a level of calm to the turbulent feelings generated earlier on. The creative curtain has certainly been drawn back quite a bit on this new project, and the reticent artsiness of the Books has been replaced by the genuine, unvarnished emotion of Zammuto, whose imaginative musical story thankfully goes on.

John Maus, shot at Rough Trade East, London on 16 November 2011 by Anika Mottershaw.

We try and close out our featured content each day with an interesting picture from the musical world, mined from the libraries of our photographers and readers. We call this The Final Shot. If you’d like to contribute, please send your pictures to paul@thelineofbestfit.com at landscape, 960 pixels width.

So bands must be finding it hard these days coming up with different ways to unveil new tracks. But here HEALTH have just managed it by revealing new track ‘Tears’, which is going to feature on the forthcoming Max Payne video game.

The song features on the soundtrack for Max Payne 3, the score to which the band themselves wrote and composed.

Listen to the track in question below:

Best Fit faves Amusement have unveiled this reworking of Surrey-bred trio Mafia Lights‘  (pictured above) track ‘West’. It flows like a bumpy rollercoaster, running smoothly with a deep-felt groove but stop-starting at random intervals with blips and crackles throughout.

While all fellow Southerners alike spend a little longer in the office today, or put off leaving the house at all for the foreseeable future, just to shelter from the rain some bit further, we may as well all kill some time by giving this remix a spin. Listen beneath:

We were fortunate enough to catch Swedish singer-songwriter The Tallest Man On Earth live last year in the most brilliant of settings. Playing a sunset set at Norway’s Pstereo festival in the picaresque coastal city of Trondheim, most of those looking on congregated on a nearby hill, rather than in front of the stage, watching from a far as the sky slowly darked in the background. It was a moment that could so easily have been deemed quite corny, had everyone not been at the right point of tipsiness.

Sure, we can’t promise to replicate that moment while we’re all stuck indoors this afternoon, but a premiere of a brand new track is good enough of a treat on its own. ’1904′ is the first song to be aired from the musician’s forthcoming album There’s No Leaving Now. The follow-up to 2010′s The Wild Hunt, the record will see release on 11 June via Dead Oceans.

After going from supporting Bon Iver at NY’s Town Hall not long back, he’s now headlining the exact same venue this time round. The summer also sees the man heading to the UK for a number of shows and festival appearances, including Hop Farm and the Brecon Beacon’s Green Man Festival.

Listen to the Best Fit UK Exclusive of ’1904′ below:

Last night, anyone remotely interested in alternative music and with a Twitter account would surely have known that Perfume Genius was playing London’s intimate St Pancras Old Church. The amount of tweets stating how brilliant his performance was, however, may have just been rivalled by those posting how lovely a guy he seemed on meeting him.

And because he’s such a nice-seeming dude, he decided to treat us to some more and took the time out to stop off at the BBC Radio studios and perform a live session for 6Music. The singer-songwriter appeared on the Marc Riley show, which you can listen to in full here.

Perfume Genius recently released his superb second album Put Your Back N 2 It.

“People still ask me about smoking weed and loving cats,” Best Coast’s Bethany Cosentino says as I look down at my own questions, double-checking that I haven’t accidentally slipped any in sub-consciously. “It’s like somebody bringing up something you said or did years ago”. Anybody who has ever stumbled back upon their old diaries or, worse yet, their now-deserted MySpace pages will sympathise with this sentiment. And now imagine that the person you once were is not just apparent via a quick Google search but instead is present in the form of records, interviews and endless photos online.

“A lot of the time it’s just people trying to be friendly and like ‘I know you’re into this, so…’ But I just feel like I’ve finished making a new record, let’s just focus on that. Yeah, that person is kind of still me, but it’s not all there is. I’ve also changed and matured since then, you know?” Snowballing onto the scene with sun-kissed, lo-fi anthems about sun, love and all things you could categorise with the tag “youthful” in between, it seems to have been something etched onto music critics’ collective minds ever since, no matter how her press bio expands.

But that was all a while ago now, and there comes a time, normally the album number two such as this, where a musician or artist gets a little tired of the original point-of-interest that the press initially latched on to. This is the place where we meet Bethany, as we huddle in the cramped East London offices of her UK label. A couple of months ago while speaking in one of her first interviews of this album cycle, Bethany told Pitchfork that she felt she’d grown up a lot over the last couple of years, and in the public’s very eye no less. So two months later and with publicity levels at their all time peak for the band, does she feel like there’s been a shift in media treatment of her and bandmate Bobb Bruno? “Well it’s still a ‘thing’ to some people, so I don’t think it’s completely changed just yet.”

From a critical standpoint, however, and despite all the questions about her pets and relaxation techniques, there seems to be shift in the media treatment of the band with this release. No longer confided to the blogs, Best Coast have been welcomed with open arms by the broadsheets and glossy magazines as well. Sure, Bethany’s new clothing line for Urban Outfitters, endless comparisons to the Sharari-Las and repeated proclamation of her love for golden oldies such as Fleetwood Mac and the like would have done much to earn some new fans not restricted to the counter-culture peripheries. If ever there was a time where you’d be likely to see Best Coast listed in one of those “Going Up” columns of the Sunday supplements, it is very much now. The main reasoning for this, though, must predominantly be taken as the music featuring on the new record itself.

There had previously been some hesitancy shown to the band, some apprehension to give complete credit even when it was certainly due. It may have been the joyfully naïve lyrical matter, a truthful manifestation of modern woes it could be deemed, Ivor Novello fodder it certainly could not. There was a general critical view that stripping away the production values of an artist like Best Coast, or any of the other hazy shoegaze-nostalgists that came to prominence a few years back, may reveal a certain lack of depth underneath. In this day and age when high-end recording techniques are manageable to almost all, deriders would suggest, there’s no need for such distortionto be chic.

Whether a response to this criticism or simply a product of more money to work with (Bethany tells The Line of BestFit that she’s long given up reading the reviews), the new record is predominantly ‘fuzz-free’. “I hope it shows that we’re not just some gimmicky band who can only do one thing,” Cosentino says of the sonic shift. Sure, the ice-cool sun-pop feel remains but things are a lot clearer this time round, and varied too. While Crazy For You could probably have been summed up by of the songs featured like the whimsical tune ‘Boyfriend’, this is definitely not the case with this LP. Tracks such as ‘No One Like You’, for example, sees things slowed down and the introspective balladry couldn’t be further from anything off the first release. There seems to be real growth that totally justifies the increase in broadsheet column inches the band have been enjoying.

As talk veers on to the tour that lies ahead, there’s a general sense of malaise in the air and in Bethany’s languid speech. It’s the end of a long press day, one so jam-packed that I bumped into numerous other musos who had just interviewed her on the way there, and Bethany is, by her own admissions, quite exhausted. Too often a sense of tiredness or unhappiness expressed by any modern musician is met with an uproar by fans and die-hard music-lovers in response, as if it implies some sort of ungratefulness – but is this really always the case? The rapid ascent of the band and the nature of them doing so (the band gained their current levels of popularity via the online world more so than they did through initial touring) could not have prepared them for the actualities of what stood ahead. There seems a crucial point where a band realises what the music world is really like beyond the perceived glamouryou dream up in your bedrooms when uploading those first few demos, and this time also appears to be nigh.

Bethany has previously gone on record as saying she wanted to rid herself of any “bad habits” this second time round, which she explains is as much about the personal aspect of being in a band as it is the technical side of thing. “I hated touring before. I was always complaining and stressed out, this is what I’m trying to change about myself when I’m on the road,” she says. “We had to realise that it isn’t always going to be fun, and by the end of the last tour, it wasn’t. We couldn’t wait to get back home. But we’ve found out that if it’s going to be fun, you have to make that fun for yourselves.”

This last sentence should resonate with any acts out there currently coming to the end of their first full length tour, and is probably something you can only truly understand by being the ones experiencing it yourselves. Either way, there’s a telling reason why a band’s fun-loving tour diary-style music video always accompanies their first record but is hardly ever replicated after that. “You just have tokind of treat it like a job at the end of the day, which is technically what it really is.”

New album, The Only Place, exemplifies this feeling in places. While some have called the record’s title-track an “ode to California”, it seems rather to be a manifestation of this homesickness while on the road, when all memories of your hometown suddenly seem tinted in lighter shades. “We got the ocean, got the babes, got the sun, we got the waves,” Bethany sings on the pre-album release first single. “Why would you live anywhere else?” Cosentino goes on to ask and coo. Would a band, for example, ever be able to write a song of such unabashed fondness if they had still been stuck back there, doing the local venue rounds?

“Actually, as a matter of fact, that song was first written quite a while ago; it’s one of the earliest off the new record,” Cosentino corrects my rather rambling proposed thesis. “It was originally written before we even recorded Crazy For You, but it just so happens that it fit in so well to how we’re feeling right now. I guess it’s kind of fate that I had written this song that so naturally ties in to this very point in time. Then everything just clicked and I was like “Wow, this song finally makes sense!” So it was as if I was a psychic and knew back then that this record would exist one day and that this song would epitomise where we’d be at in the future.”

As the band sets to hit the road again, for a bigger and more intense stretch than before, Cosentino does seems to be in the right mindset this time round and does, as she herself affirms, seem to have matured in her outlook. Is there anywhere she’s looking forward to visiting? “Probably Australia,” she says before pausing. “It’s got sun, sea and the people there are just laidback and great. I guess that’s just like California then in a way.” You can’t blame her for being so Cali-centric, this kind of pagan-like paean seems alien to the rest of us who equate “the summer” to be “a single sunny day”. Indeed as she sings in the title track, why would you want to live anywhere else? I guess if it wasn’t for some complex social-economic factors then we all would.

The Only Place is out now on Wichita Recordings.

Norway’s indie-popsters Team Me have offered a completely free download up for grabs.

‘Weathervanes and Chemicals’ is the band’s new single, taken from their debut album To The Treetops – which is out now on Propeller Recordings.

Stream/download below:

Madlib must be the busiest artist in the Stones Throw stable. In the last year alone he has released a collaborative EP with Freddie Gibbs, turned in production work for Georgia Anne Muldrow, begun work on the new Talib Kweli record, and completed his ambitious Madlib Medicine Show project.

Today, though, we are delving deeper into California artist’s back catalogue thanks to Stones Throw’s reissue of 2003′s Suite For Weldon, a Madlib-produced jazz project. The three-track release, which also features Breakestra and Mr Dibbs, was recorded in tribute to pianist Weldon Irvine – “the first of the ‘jazz elders’ to validate Madlib’s take on jazz”, according to the label. The title track is a 10-minute piece that roams freely between swung, breakbeaty thrust and Hammond-heavy, smoke-filled groove. Stream ‘Suite For Weldon’ below, and grab the complete release on 12″ here.

Field Day have announced the list of final acts set to feature in this year’s festival line-up.

Among the billing are the likes of Chairlift, The Internet and Blanck Mass.

Others confirmed in this last wave announcement are:

Amateur Best DJ
Blackest Ever Black DJ
Debruit
Jen Long DJ
Kidkanevil
Novella DJ
Paddy O.Neill (Liberation Technologies)
Olugbenga (Metronomy)
The Haxan Cloak DJ
UMA

Previously announced were:

Afrocubism / Andrew Bird / Austra / Baxter Dury / Beirut / Blawan / Blood Orange / Citzens! / Com Truise / Crocodiles / Daniel Avery / Django Django / Eats Everything / Errors / Fennesz / Franz Ferdinand / Friends / Gold Panda / Grimes / Here We Go Magic / Hudson Mohawke / Huw Stephens DJ / Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard / Jessie Ware / Julia Holter / Julio Bashmore / Justin Spear / Kassem Mosse / Kindness / Korallreven / Koreless / Last Dinosaurs / Laurel Halo / Liars / Maya Janes Coles / Mazzy Star / Metronomy / Modeselektor / Outfit / Papa M / Peaking Lights / Pond / R. Stevie Moore / Revere / Rocketnumbernine / Rustie / SKTRKT / Sleigh Bells / Spector / Summer Camp / Sunless 97 / Tim Burgess DJ / THE MEN / The Vaccines / Theme Park / To Kill A King / Tortoise / Toy / Two Jackals / When Saints Go Machine / Zomby / Zulu Winter.

Field Day 2012 takes place in Victoria Park, London on 2 June. Tickets are still available here.

The Hives have confirmed that they will head to the UK for five live dates later this year.

Set for December, the Swedes will start off in Bristol before heading to Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and London’s Roundhouse.

The band are set to release a new album, entitled Lex Hives, on June 5.

You can see photos of their recent show in Stockholm here.

The full UK dates are as below:

December
10 – O2 Academy, Bristol
11 – O2 Academy, Birmingham
13 – O2 ABC, Glasgow
14 – London Roundhouse
15 – Manchester Academy

Azealia Banks has today previewed the cover to her forthcoming 1991 EP, which is that which you can see above.

I know what you are thinking, shouldn’t that be out already? Yes, it was scheduled to be but has had to be pushed back due to a change of management among other issues.

Now Banks has announced that it will definitely see the light of day digitally on 29 May before experiencing physical release on 12 June.

The rapper recently cancelled a number of summer festival appearances to focus on recording her debut album, however has made up for it by also releasing this pretty stellar new track, ‘Jumanji’, featuring Hudson Mohawke.

Joanna Newsom and Philip Glass have announced that they’re set to host a one-off event at San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre, a benefit organised for the Henry Miller Memorial Library.

On the night the pair will play a select few of each others’ best works as well as, wait for it, new collaborative material written between them both.

Will this lead to an entire album coming out from the two musician in the future? We can only hope. Or at least wish that some live recordings surface from it.

The Henry Miller library was founded in 1981 and is currently raising money to fund necessary construction. Info for the event is on the flyer above.

You there, Best Fit readers. You have a chance to win two pairs of tickets to this year’s Apple Cart festival.

The ever-generous Gaz Coombes, who’ll also be making a musicial appearance, is giving away tickets to the all-ages music/arts/comedy/magic showcase event.

Brought to you by the folks behind Field Day and Underage, the Apple Cart festival will take place at Victoria Park, London on Sunday 3 June.

Fill in the form below to win, all entrants will recieve a free download of Gaz Coombes’ track ‘Sub-Divider’ as a special bonus prize.

Get entering!

Charlotte Gainsbourg‘s credentials need little explanation. As the daughter of a legend, her musical career was kickstarted at the age of 12 by a collaboration with her father Serge. Her first album followed shortly after  but it was two decades before another: 2006′s 5.55 saw the singer-songwriter and actress collaborate with the likes of Neil Hannon, Air and Jarvis Cocker.For album number three, IRM, she paired up exclusively with the (then) ubiquitous Beck.

Stage Whisper, which dropped at the end of last year, sees some of her most interesting collaborations yet – among them, Best Fit favourite and star of one of our earlier sessions, Connan Mockasin. Fittingly, Charlotte brought Connan along with her for her very own Best Fit Session – which is also our 100th. What better way to celebrate?!

If you haven’t managed to buy a copy yet, maybe this little taster will convince you. Released just yesterday, Simian Mobile Disco‘s new album Unpatterns is available to stream this morning, embedded just below.

The electronic pairing’s third album to date was released via Wichita and can be ordered online here.

The duo can also been seen at the following upcoming live dates:

May
18 – Fabric, London
19 – Magnet, London

With various members sharing the stage with the poster boys and girls of the scene, it’s no surprise Sons of Noel and Adrian have been lumped in with the rising folk stars of the last decade. They could just as easily be grouped with Elephant 6 et al –  bands more frequently dubbed experimental Americana than folk. They transcend a label. Above all else, Sons of Noel and Adrian are so wholly different from the generic claptrap of primetime radio that they deserve their own tag.

As though to prove my point, a multitude of genres wash over the band’s new album Knots. Like their self-titled debut, at points the second relies on plucked guitars and lullaby melodies to create something awe-inspiringly beautiful. Unlike their self-titled debut, however, there is also a bite and relish here, adding a new scope to the band’s resumé and providing fans of other genres to find something to love too.

Embellished with strings, toe taps and handclaps, though Knots has a delicate composition there are breaks in the barrage of sound that suggest a progressive influence. Not to mention impossibly long song titles like ‘Come Run Fun Stella Baby Mother of the World’. Elsewhere a kind of freestyle orchestral rambling prevails on ‘Black Side of the River’, and throughout. the band echoes Marlon Brando if he had fallen on hard times and turned to a ukulele to recuperate.

The songs that transform Sons of Noel and Adrian’s previously tranquil demeanour into that of a Coleridge-style nightmare are the best. ‘Cathy Come Home’ and ‘Jellyfish Bloom’ pioneer the style, opening with whimsical abandonment before transforming into a furious row, using every instrument available to hand.

The down-and-out-by-the-seaside theme may still be dominant, but they’ve chucked in a bag of salt-cured beef and launched off into treacherous waters. Through an explosion of genres, Sons of Noel and Adrian prevail – controlled, talented  and ramshackle; making Knots an intriguing and enchanting listen.

Bob Stanley recently asserted that the album is about pop’s capacity to shape your life. Maybe that’s true, though it doesn’t feel like the whole story. Words and Music by Saint Etienne documents a life lived for the moment rather than the future and the regrets that follow once bright, brilliant youth wears off; aspirations formed in the shadows of their pop heroes, and money spent on records instead of saved for those cold twilight years. Saint Etienne have always plied tales we can relate to, human success and failure in prosaic ‘burbs. Unlike the immutable, ageless bombast of pop titans who aim for “icon” status and sing about their own survival and immortality, Saint Etienne’s street-level empathy, egoless and devoid of self-mythologising or caricature, also makes them mortal. The characters in their stories will get crows’ feet and varicose veins, their pencil skirts won’t fit them forever, and they’ll ruefully watch a parade of upstarts fill the nightclubs they used to regard as theirs. They have that in common with kitchen-sink heroes Pulp; like them, their music is more than the sum of its parts, and like them, age has brought about a darker set of tales. Once, Sarah Cracknell sang about warning off her little sister from hitting on her boyfriend; Words and Music stills you with the sobering thud of lines like “I’ve got 25 years, maybe more if I’m lucky” and ”I threw it all away/And now I’ve gotta pay/Forever”.

The album follows an unsettling emotional arc. There’s all to play for at the start – remembrance of wide-eyed hope in pulsing monologue ‘Over the Border’, Cracknell’s memories expanding into a sparkling chorus that suggests that all was, and is, well:  ”I’m growing older/Heaven only knows what’s on its way/Every single day/Love is here to stay”. The unfolding narrative gradually crumbles the edges off such optimism; teenage, first-time-clubber ecstasies are brought down to earth by the weight of experience. First love and first embitterment beckon the listener into darker, less proud reminiscences. ’25 Years’ is a rueful admission of mistakes made and time wasted, while clinging to remaining love, whilst ‘Haunted Jukebox’ recalls the associations between forgotten songs and long-lost friends, and imbues them with something sadder and more sinister. Saint Etienne were once the band you played while you put on your make-up on Friday night; now they sound more like a Saturday night alone, surrounded by vinyl and old memories.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. There’s charm in the idiosyncrasies familiar to Saint Etienne fans. In that great tradition of critic-turned-artist, founders Stanley and Pete Wiggs have both earned a living as journalists, and Words and Music makes much of the swottier delights of music fandom, from obsessing over new vinyl to journalistic heroes, with a namecheck for Paul Morley on the record’s opener. It’s a sweet twist of perspective to hear the pop star immortalising the critic. Aptly enough for such a pensive collection of songs, the delivery here is more subdued than the Etienne of old – minor-key backing harmonies and disconsolate melodies take the place of the euphoric, articulate stompers that originally brought Saint Etienne to the fore, but the songs still shimmer, and Cracknell’s delicately enunciated vocals still have that double-edged quality – ice-white yet warm and wise.

It’s not a huge departure, the familiar pumping beats and starlit, ’60s-tinged flavour staying true to Saint Etenne’s oeuvre. But an overwhelming sense of fragility dominates the record. You can trace the journey of one character who’s by turns expectant, let down, wiser, lonely, bitter, frightened, resigned. The pounding, hooky ‘When I Was 17′ is the only track that really escapes the introspection, bursting into life with a rush of melody in the way that Saint Etienne do best, all teenage fervour, staccato oriental strings and instinctive synths, but it’s bookended by much more dolorous moods. As a whole, and coming from these stylish synthpop figureheads, it’s an austere document; intelligent and enjoyable, but one for a certain mood, to soundtrack time spent alone. Above all this feels like a record about age, a table of regrets, smiled-upon memories, and past naiveties laid bare in all their gaucheness through the unforgiving lens of experience. It’s not a record by a band at the end of their careers, but an acknowledgment of the end of youth, the recognition that they can’t get the past back, and don’t know what lies ahead.

Sigur Rós have just announced that they will host a special ‘Listening Party’ for their upcoming new album this very Thursday.

Their new album, Valtari, comes 29 May on EMI/XL Recordings but the band will stream it online, in record shops and through selected radio stations on 17 May.

The stream will last a whole hour and will be available to those in the UK from the band’s official website and via NPR.

Here’s a list of all the other places where it will also be airing for all those folk in the U.S:

Radio Stations:
KEXP – Seattle, WA
WNYC – New York, NY
XPN – Philadelphia, PA
KCMP (The Current) – St. Paul, MN
KTBG – Warrensburg, MO
WFUV – New York, NY
KXT – Dallas, TX
WYEP – Pittsburgh, PA
WTMD – Towson, MD
WBER – Rochester, NY
KRSH – Santa Rosa, CA
FM 94-9 “Big Sonic Chill” – San Diego, CA

Record Stores:
BK Music (Richmond, VA)
Bull City (Durham, NC)
Bull Moose (Portland, ME)
Cactus Music (Houston)
Criminal (Atlanta, GA)
Dimple (Folsom, CA)
Disc Exchange (Knoxville)
Ear Candy (Missoula, MT)
Electric Fetus (Minneapolis)
End of an Ear (Austin)
Fingerprints (Long Beach, CA)
Good (Dallas)
Greywhale (Taylorsville, UT)
Grimey’s (Nashville)
Guestroom (Norman, OK & Oklahoma City, OK)
Harvest (Asheville, NC)
Homers (Omaha)
Landlocked (Bloomington, IN)
Lou’s (Encinitas, CA)
Luna (Indianapolis, IN)
Melody Supreme (Charlottesville, VA)
Monster (Charleston, SC)
Music Millennium (Portland, OR)
Origami (Los Angeles)
Park Avenue (Orlando)
Phono Select (Sacramento, CA)
Princeton Record Exchange (Princeton, NJ)
Radio Active (Ft. Lauderdale)
Rasputin (Berkeley, CA)
Record Archive (Rochester, NY)
Record Exchange (Boise, ID)
Repo Records (Philadelphia)
Scenesc.com
Schoolkids (Raleigh, NC)
Sonic Boom (Seattle)
Sound Garden (Baltimore)
Streetlight (San Jose & Santa Cruz)
Strictly Discs (Madison)
The Telegraph (London, CT)
Twist & Shout (Denver)
UHF Records (Royal Oaks, MI)
Underground Sound (Ann Arbor, MI)
Vintage Vinyl (St. Louis, MO)
Vinyl Renaissance (Kansas City, KS)
Waterloo (Austin)
Zia (Phoenix)

It’s been a busy few days for Gold Panda. Late last week he announced that his new label Notown would be releasing the forthcoming EP from pastoral Norfolk man Luke Abbott – and today he celebrates the release of his new double A-side single. ‘Mountain’ / ‘Financial District’ is out digitally through Notown, and will get a 7″ release on Ghostly next month. Stream both the tracks below.

2:54 are set to release their new single, ‘Creeping’, next month and their debut album right at the end of this one, but before both of these you can check out this new b-side track.

Entitled ‘The March’, it’s currently streaming via the good folks over at The Quietus.

The single will be released on 18 June on Fiction, with the band playing a special album release in-store at Rough Trade East on 31 May.

Some bands get tagged with the dreaded ‘One Hit Wonder’ line all too unfairly, while for others it’s somewhat of a compliment even then. For example, only the truly astute among us will remember any songs the likes of Joe Lean and the Jing Jang Jong ever had.

Meanwhile, Cornershop are a group that may forever be wrongly haunted by this phrase coming from some quarters. You can sort of see why though, ‘Brimful of Asha’ was a very big hit, one they’ve commercially not been able to reach ever since.

This is not to say, however, that they haven’t been put off by this inevitability. They never seemed a band destined for mainstream glory in the very first place, and have been continuing to conjure critically-acclaimed eastern and western groove fusions since.

New album Urban Turban is their fourth in just under a decade and features the standout track, ‘Who’s Gonna Lite It Up’, which we premiered the video to here.

Listen to the record in full below. It comes out today on the band’s own label Ample Play. Order it here.

The Independent Label Market have unveiled a host of new additions for their showcase event, as well as revealing the details of exclusive releases set to be on sale.

Among the new labels confirmed are The Sounds Of Sweet Nothing, Something In Construction, Brownswood, Buzzin’ Fly, Rocket Girl, New Music Club, Analogue Enhanced Digital and O. Genesis.

Meanwhile, Ed Banger, Bella Union, Full Time Hobby, Warp and others will be offering limited edition output.

This year’s Independent Label Market takes place in Spitalfields this coming Saturday (19 May).

The full details of all the releases are outlined in the v.long list that follows:

Because / Ed Banger Records

• Because / Ed Banger / Phantasy Remix 12″ Vinyl Compilation Mixed by Daniel Avery (Free with any purchase from the stall with £10 purchase)
• Because / Ed Banger / Phantasy Tote Bag (Free with any purchase)
• Signed Django Django CDs
• Original stills from the Django Django – Default Video shoot
• Django Django Tees
• Limited / Out of stock Vinyl across Because / Ed Banger / Phantasy catalogue
• Posters /  Stickers / Badges

Bella Union

• A one-off exclusive 12″ of I Break Horses/Mountain Man collaborations with CSLSX
• Signed Dirty Three albums
• Signed Hannah Cohen albums
• A few CZARS blue vinyl
• A few Lanterns on The Lake white vinyl
• A special new Bella tshirt design never  seen before today
• Rare vinyls and special packaging stuff that may be hard to find.

Brownswood

• All the latest releases, plus nuggets from the back catalogue which are getting rarer by the day.
• Some exclusive bundles that you won’t get anywhere else.

Chess Club Records

Post War Years 

• Personalised cassette mix-tapes and Walkmans
• 12″ ‘Glass House’ EP, 2 months upfront from public release + a few test pressings
• Band down to sign stuff

Kyla La Grange

• Singles back-catalogue collection 7″s
• A3 artwork posters
• Kyla will be making an appearance to sign stuff

Swim Deep

• T Shirts
• Band illustrated artwork (drawings)
• début single limited 7″

Chet Faker

• début EP 12″

Fabric

• A sliding scale on the stall – the more punters buy, the better value they get.
• The £5 lucky dip, where you can win anything from CDs to fabric tickets to fabricfirst memberships will be making a return

Full Time Hobby

• Craig Finn beer
• Rare white labels
• Tunng & Tinariwen DVDs
• Limited singles that escaped the SONY fire of ‘11

Lanark Records

• New Build Pill Shaped USB release of ‘Medication’ EP. With exclusive remixes from Planningtorock, Dominik Eulberg , Juju &Jordash and a brand new remix from Sam Lawlor

Lex Records

• The last of the Complex vinyl that we’ve saved especially for the market – so if you want the exclusive Thom Yorke / DOOM or Neon Neon tracks on vinyl, it’s your last chance.
• We have some of the last pieces of early Lex vinyl stock from people like Danger Mouse & Jemini, Boom Bip, Non Prophets

Ninja Tune

• Signed LPs and very rare stuff
• Amon Tobin boxsets
• The Invisible will be signing very limited edition QR posters

Rocket Girl

• Loads of 7″, 10″ and 12″ vinyl, CDs, rarities, fanzines, merch (record bags/tote bags/ t-shirts/badges).
• Lots of ‘deals’ on back catalogue stock and some bargains thrown in.

R&S

• Old vinyl and test pressings
• Some great t-shirts and merchandise for sale
• Lone will be popping along to sign copies of his amazing new album before his album launch party at Plastic People on the Saturday night

Sonic Cathedral

• Cheap vinyl.
• Some last copies of things and some test pressings.
• Plus lots of badges.

Warp Records

• We’ll be selling a range of Warp releases and tees, including an exclusive Warp logo tee produced for the market, as well as special editions and deals from Brian Eno, Gonjasufi, Gravenhurst, Battles, Bibio, Hudson Mohawke and more.
• We’ve also asked our artists to pick their favourite Warp record and will be stocking selections from Jamie Lidell, Plaid, Mark Pritchard, Rustie, Bibio and more…
• Every customer on the day gets a Battles carrier containing promo items from Warp’s history,  a free digital EP and a copy of Gravenhurst’s Ultraskull comic*.
• We’re expecting a few artists along to serve customers, make the tea and help us man the stall. Details TBC.
• Finally, you’re invited to enter the Warp tombola – a charity draw for some very special prizes – signed records, rare tees, mixtapes, test pressings and more. Everyone taking part wins something and the proceeds go to Nordoff Robbins.

* while stocks last

Bobby Womack‘s new album, The Bravest Man In The Universe, is going to be very special indeed. Co-produced by [do action="main-artist"]Damon Albarn[/do] and Richard Russell, the record will be his 26th – and the first since the artist was diagnosed with cancer. This Albarn and Russell re-edit of the eponymous single is one of the most beautiful things I’ve heard all year, with Womack’s remarkable voice sitting atop a delicate, d’n'b-aping drum loop.

The Bravest Man In The Universe is out 11 June on XL.