Track Of The Day: Blonde Maze – ‘Thunder’

I’ve pretty much been addicted to everything New York artist Blonde Maze has created since meeting her when she was a guest on our radio show over a year ago. There are days when I find myself just listening to the sheer blissful sounds of tracks such as ‘Awake/Asleep’ and ‘Antartica’ on repeat for hours, just getting lost in their luscious, dreamy haze… So, I was pretty pleased to discover that, after a twelve month break from releasing music, Blonde Maze is back with another majestic electro-pop offering.

Oozing her trademark shimmering, ethereal melodies and atmospheric, sweeping synths, ‘Thunder’ is filled with rich textures and interwoven musical layers, making for a beautiful and utterly captivating slice of electro-pop. Of the track, Blonde Maze explains:

“‘Thunder’ is about growing and changing with someone…You start to miss older times with them, but you also acknowledge that the growth has made them an inseparable part of your heart. Sometimes, with a relationship’s maturity, you lose your patience more, you let your guard down, and you get hurt, but the beauty of this maturity is that there becomes no one else in the world you are as comfortable growing with.”

So, let yourself become completely immersed in and addicted to the dreamy splendour of ‘Thunder’, as we wait for the release of a new EP…

Mari Lane
@marimindles

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Track Of The Day: Velvet Volume – ‘Look Look Look!’

Having just released their debut album and recorded the theme song for the Danish version of The Powerpuff Girls (!!), Danish sibling trio Velvet Volume are fast becoming one of the most exciting rock bands around.

Taken from the album is latest single ‘Look Look Look!’. A slice of racing garage rock, it’s propelled by driving riffs, pounding beats and gritty vocals, making for a truly infectious offering. With shades of the likes of ’90s brit-pop legends Elastica or the seething punk-pop of Blondie, it oozes an immense sense of cool that’ll leave you longing for more from these three Danes.

Written about the bad habits that come with not yet knowing how to structure your life, Noa Lachmi explains of ‘Look Look Look!’: “This track was written at a point in our lives, where we all had to get used to time with restlessness and insecurity.”

Watch the vibrant, wig-filled new video for ‘Look Look Look!’ here:

Look Look Look!, the debut album from Velvet Volume, is out now via Mermaid Records.

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ALBUM: Mammoth Penguins and Friends – ‘John Doe’

There are moments that define you, for better or worse, scattered throughout life. The happy, the sad, the shattering. Arrivals, departures and all that’s in between. And then there are the moments which suspend you, that have the potential to break you completely but only fracture – a creased page in the centre of your story.

The ambiguous grief suffered by those around a man who fakes his own death only to return years later is the subject dealt with on Mammoth Penguins and Friends’ new album John Doe. From the record’s opening domestic sounds of tea cups nudging against saucers through lush strings and folk picking, and electronic bleep and scratch around indie-esque guitar, the album weaves this story, each track the view of someone around the disappearing John Doe. The not knowing, the resignation, the hope, the questions without answers in living through this event are all beautifully, painfully, and painstakingly crafted here.

Many will already know Mammoth Penguins, led by indiepop royalty Emma Kupa, but musically the addition of the ‘and Friends’ to the Penguin party has changed the shape of the band’s sound significantly. Haiku Salut’s Sophie Barkerwood and Joe Bear add programming, samples and synths, while Russell Lomas adds violin. The band also added to their three-piece indie stomp as bass player Mark Boxhall made field recordings across the space of a month, and to the tracks are the subtle addition of photocopiers, butter being scraped onto toast and Ramsgate beach. This brings a depth, a startling reality to the tales being told, sharpening their poignancy.

From those at the epicentre we get the innocence and disassociation of ‘The Child’, and album closer ‘The Wife’, a piano and found sound scratch beyond Kupa’s high, wavering and yet never-less-than-sure vocal. The effects of the disappearance ripple outward, to the dehumanising monologue of ‘The Line Manager’ and then sloshing back with two more up-tempo numbers in ‘The Ex-girlfriend’ and ‘The Ex-girlfriend Pt 2’. Each track has its own viewpoint, and its own distinct sound, revealing the mundanity and the monument of every day life and one person’s decision; but together the songs bring comfort and sadness in knowing even broken hearts keep beating.

Concept albums are not without stigma, often feeling heavy-handed and overwrought, and – while the subject matter here could easily have been rendered that way – it is the expert crafting of gentle yet raw emotion and melodic resonance which make John Doe an album of exceptional bittersweet beauty.

John Doe is out 13 October via wiaiwya.

Sarah Lay
@sarahlay

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INTERVIEW: Baby In Vain

Mari & I have shamelessly plugged our love of Copenhagen trio Baby In Vain via Get In Her Ears since 2016 when we saw them perform a free show at tiny Dalston venue Birthdays. There’s something about their heavy, corrosive sounds that keeps us both hypnotised, and we were more than happy to be swept back under their spell at Camden Assembly on Monday night.

We met Bene, Andrea & Lola backstage before their show to talk about their current UK tour, their favourite tracks on debut album More Nothing, and how tricky it is to shoot a music video on skateboards and mopeds when you’re hungover…

Hello girls, am I right when in saying you met and started playing music together whilst still at school?

Bene: Not entirely…

My bad! How did you initially meet? What was it that made you want to start a band together?

Andrea: Lola & Bene went to music school together and we had some mutual friends and we went to a lot of the same shows, so we just started talking and one night decided we should all jam together, and we’ve been doing that ever since.

Bene: Every Tuesday, always on a Tuesday.

Cool. You’re almost half way through your current UK tour. What have been the highlights so far? How do the UK crowds differ from your hometown crowds?

A: Glasgow and Edinburgh…

B: So, Scotland?.

Lola: Edinburgh has been the best so far, and tonight maybe?

A: We had two days off in Nottingham also, and went to see Ulrika Spacek and Gary Numan.

I love Gary Numan! I saw him live for the first time last year and I thought he was incredible.

A: That was definitely a highlight for us. When it comes to crowds it’s not really fair to compare because in Denmark we play larger venues, and people know who we are. When we play here we’re still very new to people. Most places have been alright, but we’ve played a couple of places where only a couple of people showed up. But for an unknown band, the crowds in the UK are a little bit better.

L: I think it’s the same. Remember when we played in Oxford? People bought all of our merchandise afterwards so they really enjoyed it, but while we were playing people were just stood completely still (laughs)

B: Scotland crowds though…

L: They were incredible.

Is there any particular reason why they were so good?

L: They were so drunk!

A: Actually, when we played here about three years ago with The Wytches in Hull, the crowd was insane. Even for the support bands. They were also drunk.

There’s a trend here, the drunker they are, the better the crowd. Cool.

You released your debut album More Nothing (through Partisan Records) earlier this year. It’s a follow-up to your 2016 EP For The Kids. Did you approach the album differently in terms of writing/recording/producing compared to the EP?

B: Very differently. You can’t really compare the two recordings at all. For The Kids was meant to be an album when we started recording it, but our label thought it would work well as an EP. We were in the studio for a very long time, a very long time (laughs), several years I think? But the album was recorded in two weeks.

A: When you don’t have a time limit you just don’t get stuff done. Once we had a deadline, things worked much better.

Do you have a favourite track on the album, and if so; why?

L: I think ‘One Feather’ is one of my favourite songs. I just think when we wrote it, you know, it was like… next level (laughs)

A: I really love ‘Transcendent’ as well.

I really like ‘Thank You’, just in case you were wondering…

B: That’s definitely a London thing! Something about Brits and that song…

It’s because the song name is really polite, but it sounds really aggressive. That’s the British way…

Your video for opening track ‘To Heaven & Back’ was shot in one take and looks extremely cool. Can you tell us about the shoot? Was miming on skateboards as easy as you made it look?

A: It was a very fun day. Me & Lola used to skate when we were younger, so it wasn’t that big of a challenge, but it was still a little nerve-racking because Bene was driving really fast, even if it doesn’t look like that in the video.

B: It was my first time riding a moped as well, I had to learn on the day.

This video sounds like a death trap.

A: It was really painful actually, the next day my thighs and my feet were killing me (laughs)

L: We shot the whole thing around 7 times. We didn’t really have a plan, we just met up and started shooting. There were no safety procedures, and we were all really hungover (laughs).

A: It was an old idea we had years ago, that Bene would be on the bike, we’d be skating, and we’d also have those little propeller caps on our heads.

L: Why didn’t have those in the video?!

I guess you’ll just have to do it again, re-shoot the whole thing.

You’ve also released a video for your latest single ‘Low Life’. I read your interview with Line Of Best Fit in which you describe this track as being “hard to complete” because you had several recordings of the song, so it took around 3 years to find a version you were happy with. Have you felt like this about other tracks?

L: ‘Low Life’ is definitely the song that we’ve worked on the longest, so we haven’t had that long a process with other tracks.

A: If you heard the old, old version of the song, it’s completely different to what it is now. We had to grow in to the song, we had to be better musicians and songwriters to write it properly. Half of the songs on the album were written pretty fast though, so we just worked really hard, kept playing at home…

L: ‘Thank You’ and ‘Pills’ were changed a lot for this recording. They’re still the same songs, but we just changed the song structures a bit.

As a blog centred around women in new music, we would love to know what female bands or what new music you’ve been listening too. What can you recommend?

B: Taylor Swift (laughs)

She’s great!

L: She’s not kidding (laughs)

Neither am I!

L: If we’re going with female bands, I love Mazzy Star.

A: Definitely, we love her.

L: She’s one of our favourite singers, and also a very beautiful woman. I’d also recommend Pure X, they’re a band we’ve been listening to a lot. They’re not girls, and they’re not new music (laughs) but they’re unknown to a lot of people and I want to spread the word about them!

They’ll be new to someone! We’ll have to have a listen.

Finally, what’s next for Baby In Vain? More recording? Touring? A holiday?

A: Holidays don’t exist (laughs), but more writing, recording, touring…

B: the same things we always do (laughs)

L: I’m really looking forward to writing songs again. You can’t really do it on the road.

A: We haven’t written a new song in over a year actually…

L: Woah, that’s insane. We need to focus man. That’s the best part of being in a band, writing songs…

…and we can’t wait to hear them. Huge thanks to Bene, Andrea & Lola for talking to us before their show. Follow Baby In Vain on Facebook for updates on future gigs and releases.

Kate Crudgington
@KCBobCut

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