Five Favourites: The Inspirations Behind Grawl!x’s ‘PEEPS’

Having previously received acclaim for their previous three albums, including last year’s Appendix, Derby-based Grawl!x, is now set to release their brand new album later this week.

To celebrate the release of their new album, Grawl!x will be playing our gig at The Finsbury this Friday, and we cannot wait to be captivated by their soaring cinematic soundscapes live. 

Hi there! My name is Maria & I’m in Grawl!x. We’ve got an album coming out called PEEPS. It’s about friends & how important they are in the face of impending doom, but it’s also fun – YAY!!! Here’s five tracks that influenced the making of this record.

Jon Hopkins – ‘Immunity’ 
A big impetus for this album was a trip I took a few years back with a friend a mine. We went and stayed over in North Wales for a night & just sortof hung out. On the way back we stopped by this beach which, given a spot of gorge weather, felt briefly like the hazy Mediterranean. I sat and had a ponder while my friend played with her dog. It was a lovely moment as I’d been having some mental problems and I just felt everything would be OK, despite all this doom & gloom in me bonce. On the way there, we listened to Immunity and the title track is my fave. It was such a eureka moment the first time I heard this; it was like “oh, dance music can be heart breaking, tender & beautiful in an almost classical sense”. Having just done a rather slow piano record, it seemed like a logical progression to pop a beat in there somewhere. He’s rate clever.

Deerful – ‘N1c’
Not sure how I got turned onto Deerful (probs through Haiku Salut who are lovely peeps!), but I absolutely love her voice and synth work. There’s so many from her first record Peaches I could pick but I just heart the vibe in this one. I gather she uses algorithms which blows my mind, but then I am a country bumpkin! Plus, it references The Postal Service, which is like one of my favourite albums ever. It was such an honour to have her sing on two of the tracks for PEEPS. We’ve still yet to meet, so it’s like my first online friendship if that’s rate to say? I remember getting the stems back one shift at work (I’m a projectionist), and I was just geeking out diving around in the dark projection booth. Proper highlight. So, thank you for that Deerful.

Yves Tumor – ‘Limerence’
This is such a beautiful track, and that it comes from such an enigmatic, challenging artist makes it all the more beautiful. It’s just one of those tracks that just makes me yearn for bygone folks & memories of loveliness. When the vocal sample comes in, it’s so unexpected but so playful; juvenile but perfectly encapsulates that sense of youth. It evokes a lot it me face brain.

Emma Kupa – ‘Katie NYC’
This is just one of my fave friend songs. When I was looking at songs about friendship, the most common tendency tended to be that they were a bit – dare I say – cheesy. This is a stark example to the contrary. It’s just so sad and heartfelt. You’re proper there with her and her loved one who’s suffering. I think we’ve all been there where you want to help some one, and you feel so helpless. Of course, sometimes just being present is enough. I might be reading into it too much. I just love Emma’s solo music & proper hope to hear some new stuff soon.

Animal Collective  – ‘My Girls’
I couldn’t not include this song for many reasons. It’s been such a huge influence on my life. If I could ever write a song halfway as good as this, I’d be happy. I’d been in mostly rock bands up to the point this came out, and it just reconnected me to the joy of electronic instrumentation. It’s catchy, beautiful, clever – it’s just so good, I’m listening to it again now! As well as all that, it’s been there in my life at such crucial points. I remember driving with my Dad one time going to the beach in my twenties, and just had a lovely day. I played it at a DJ night recently, and we all had a good grind. Plus, pretty sure me and my friend played it on the way back from that trip to North Wales. Friends are proper important, I think, but friends with music is like the best cake you can ever go swimming in. Quote for the ages I think you’ll agree.

Huge thanks to Grawl!x for sharing their five choices with us! 

PEEPS, the upcoming album from Grawl!x, is out on Friday 14th February via Reckless Yes. Pre-order on Bandcamp now. And catch them live to celebrate at our gig at The Finsbury that night, along with Piney Gir, Captain Handsome and I Am HER.

 

Photo Credit: Laura Mi

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FIVE FAVOURITES: Bones Garage

Tel Aviv-based band Bones Garage have been making music together for the last 6 years. Formed of Ariel Pedatzur, Eden Atad, Yaniv Bin, Dor Harari, Yoni Deutsch and Raz Copperman, they’ve played stages at Glastonbury, SXSW, All Points East, and The Great Escape, and are set to release their third record in May this year. Influenced by elements of post-punk, surf rock and shoegaze, the six piece create intriguing soundscapes, but their latest single ‘I’ve Loved’ shows the band can also deliver stripped back, gentler tracks too. 

We think one of the best ways to get to know a band is by asking what music inspired them to write in the first place. We caught up with Bones Garage to ask them about their “Five Favourites” – five albums that have influenced their song writing techniques. Check out their choices below, and scroll down to watch the video for ‘I’ve Loved’ at the end of this post.

1. John Lennon – Plastic Ono Band
Like many others, we grew up as Beatles freaks. The first show Eden and Yaniv ever played together was a Beatles covers show at their school. But somehow this album ended up resonating with us more than any Beatles record. It’s raw, personal, heartbreaking, broken, yet perfectly beautiful. The experiments and cleverness of The Beatles was replaced by bare-minimum arrangements. As a band of six people, our initial arrangements are rarely minimal, but this album is a great reminder that sometimes simple and raw is the most beautiful.

2. Elliot Smith – Either/Or
We’ve been called many things – post-punk, surf, shoegaze, and so on – and the aesthetics in our music are indeed influenced by many genres. But that’s all extra stuff on top of the most important thing – the songwriting itself. We admire too many songwriters to list here, but Elliot Smith stands apart as one of the most open, sensitive, talented and emotional songwriters in history. Either/Or is the peak of his career, an album that perfectly sums up the emotions we strive to achieve in music.

3. Timber Timbre – Hot Dreams
It all started when Timber Timbre were scheduled to play in Israel, and we were asked to cover one of their songs to help promote the show. Somehow, we ended up as their opening act for two shows in Israel, years apart. We’ve discovered this great band together, and their lush, dark and dramatic style have influenced us greatly. The gentle, meaningful drumming of Olivier Farfield has been a great influence on our drummer Dor (who used to be an insanely loud metal drummer), and we’ve discovered and experienced their great music together, as a band. And also, we think our cover turned out pretty well (listen to it here).

4. Pavement – Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain
After a revolutionary debut album, Stephen Malkmus and Pavement delivered a masterpiece that’s everything rock music should aspire to be. It’s a nostalgic record, reminds us of hot summer days, makes you want to ride a skateboard with friends, listen to music and fall in love like when we were naïve teenagers. It’s full of humor and silliness, a reminder we shouldn’t always take ourselves too seriously, and still manages to be profound and meaningful. It sounds like it was made up on the spot and recorded in one take, yet every note and word is right where it should be. And besides, Stephen Malkmus really is something special.’Middle America’ is, hands down, one of the best songs we’ve heard in the last few years.

5. The Microphones – The Glow Pt 2.
When we were teens, Eden and Yaniv recorded a string of weird, ambitious albums on their own in a home studio. Most of them honestly weren’t great at all, but it helped us become who we are. So it’s great to see such a masterpiece like “The Glow Pt. 2” made in a home studio. Phil Elverum has combined raw, emotional, stark songwriting with experimentation and weird noises, taking us to an emotional journey that has deeply influenced our music, and they way we’ve learned to use noise to express ourselves.

Thanks to Bones Garage for sharing their favourites with us. Follow the band on Facebook & Spotify for more updates.

Photo Credit: Eirad Netzer

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Five Favourites: Captain Handsome

Having been a pretty massive fan of indie-pop superstars Fightmilk for a couple of years now, we’ve recently been excited to hear that Lily from the band’s solo project Captain Handsome have just released their debut EP.

Exploring everyday anxieties and all-too-common awkward situations with an intimate twinkling emotion, the EP’s filled with sad lo-fi bangers and effervescent indie-pop sounds that tug at the heartstrings in all the right ways.

We think one of the best ways to get to know an artist is by asking what music inspires them or influences their writing. We caught up with Lily, who has shared her “Five Favourites” – five tracks that particularly resonate with her. Check out her choices below, and make sure you take a listen to brand new EP I Am Not An Animal as soon as possible!

The Proclaimers – ‘Over And Done With’
I don’t know how many kids have a ‘Proclaimers phase’ but mine was FORMATIVE. I was about ten, still one of the tall kids in class and extremely sensitive about my bad skin, when I started listening to my parents’ cassette tape of This Is The Story – which I thought I’d try out because I thought the nerds on the cover looked funny. The best song on their debut album is ‘Over And Done With’. It was the first song I ever learned to play on guitar, and I loved it so much that after months and months of practicing C, E, Am and F, I covered it and made a music video for it, long lost to the toilet of history.

“This is the story of our first teacher Shetland made her jumpers and the devil made her features” – It’s just a series of little awkward, unfair or tragic moments, completely mundane but weirdly existential and funny. It’s a mood I absorbed as an angsty kid and have probably transferred, knowingly or unknowingly, into almost every song I’ve written since. I love how it’s upbeat and simple, completely stripped down to just two voices and a guitar, a singalong tune about shag ennui and low-key worrying about death and how, in the end, it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s over and done with.

Did you know the Proclaimers have ELEVEN albums, one of which is called Angry Cyclist? There you go.

Kirsty MacColl – ‘Free World’
Ahhhh fuck the Tories. This song came out in 1989 as a way of saying “fuck the Tories” and lo and behold and quelle surprise, we (at least in the DIY scene) are still saying fuck the Tories 31 years later. This is my favourite fuck-the-Tories song. Sick of bands doing Political Songs and then skirting the issue in interviews? Here’s what Kirsty said about ‘Free World’:

“The subject matter is Thatcherite Britain – you know, grab whatever you can and sod the little guy. That’s a fashionable way of looking at things, and I don’t agree with it.”

Kirsty’s abilities as a political songwriter are unfairly overlooked. Very often hits like ‘They Don’t Know’ and ‘Soho Square’ are cited as her best writing, same as it ever was with female artists and big love songs. ‘Free World’ sounds like it’s been playing at breakneck speed forever, urgent and fast and present, and that massive, effortless, vibrato-free note at the end is still unnerving today.

“And I’ll see you baby when the clans rise again // Women and children united by the struggle // Going down with a pocketful of plastic // Like a dollar on elastic // In this free world.”

I’d love more than anything to be able to write and sing half as well as Kirsty, but I don’t think anyone but her could write ‘Free World’.

Bruce Springsteen – ‘Bobby Jean’
For such an ecstatic sounding song, ‘Bobby Jean’ is a real bummer. It’s about Bruce/The Boss/Daddy as a young misfit, falling in with another young misfit and running wild, listening to rock music and being little punks that everyone looks down on. So far, so Stand By Me.

But kids grow up, and BruceTheBossDaddy and Bobby Jean fall out of touch. Years later he goes to call on her (or him – Bobby Jean’s gender is never specified, which is an entirely different dissertation and one that I hope you write one day), hoping to shoot the shit and remember their halcyon days of throwing rocks at trains and wearing jorts. But Bobby Jean has disappeared. Where does she go? Does life get too much for her? Does she go on the run? Does her mother send her to a convent school for girls bewitched by Bruce Springsteen?

“And I’m just calling one last time not to change your mind // But just to say I miss you baby, good luck goodbye, Bobby Jean.” – Bobby Jean is just gone, and it’s fucking brutal. BruceTheBossDaddy never got the chance to say goodbye in person but, absolute human being that he is, craves closure so much that he writes a song, effectively leaving a voicemail.

As far as happy-sounding pop hits about devastating blows to the heart go, this is one of the all time greats. Just when you think that BrucetheBossDaddy howling his guts can’t get any more powerful, there’s a sax solo.

Phoebe Bridgers – ‘Funeral’
Phoebe Bridgers is ruining my life. Aside from the fact that she successfully KOed an abuser’s career with a pop song, Phoebe writes the kind of gloom-country I can only dream of. ‘Funeral’ is a track from her debut album Stranger In The Alps, and it’s such an amazing move to position a song ostensibly about pulling perspective on your own sadness so near the start of a record about your own sadness – like punching a hole in your ego before it can even begin to inflate.

“I have a friend I call // When I’ve bored myself to tears // And we talk until we think we might just kill ourselves // But then we laugh until it disappears” – I love this song because as someone who finds it hard to write happy lyrics, I often find myself mining for things I know make me sad and this is a reminder to never, ever take the dark stuff for granted or to trivialise it. Of course you should be sad – there is so much to be sad about – but Phoebe is a master at self-awareness. This song, about going to a funeral for someone the same age as Phoebe, is about there being some things you can’t have.

Dolly Parton – ‘Little Sparrow’
To know Dolly is to love her. ‘Little Sparrow’ is a pretty recent Dolly drop, taken from her 38th (38! Who has the fucking time?!) studio album of the same name. It’s a small, spooky song in the fine tradition of heartbreak and bad men, but there’s no self-pity – it sounds old and folky, bluegrass violin fluttering and soaring like a second vocal, but also angry and young and impetuous, too late for hellbent revenge on the cold false-hearted lover and his evil cunning schemes and so just doomed to be a cautionary tale. It’s one of my favourite Dolly vocal performances, powerful and fragile and uuuuggghhhhhh. It’s one of those songs that sounds like it’s been around for centuries and it gets to you HARD. And I love Dolly for continuing to make gorgeous folk music into her ACTUAL 70s without falling into the trap of feeling like she needs to reinvent herself and make glitzy country-pop. Dolly is the top of her game. She is the best at this. She is the heavyweight champion of the world at making lighter-than-air country songs that fuck you up.

Also, I really like the line “they will vow to always love you // swear no love but yours will do”. It’s probably completely unintentional and Dolly is far too cool to self-reference – there’s no way Dolly’s flipped the coin on her most beloved song to reveal an absolute misery-banger on the other side… Right?

Massive thanks to Lily for sharing her Five Favourites with us! Captain Handsome’s debut EP I Am Not An Animal is out now via Reckless Yes, and make sure you catch them live at The Finsbury for us on 14th February, along with Piney Gir, Grawl!x and I Am HER.

 

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Five Favourites: Peggy Sue

Set to release their upcoming fourth album next month, London duo Katy Young and Rosa Slade – aka Peggy Sue – create beautifully captivating offerings filled with luscious harmonies and a shimmering energy. A celebration of self love, the reverb-strewn, uplifting sound of latest single ‘In Dreams’ showcases all their is to love about them, a band who have now found themselves again after a four year hiatus.

We think one of the best ways to get to know a band is by asking what music inspires them or influences their writing. We caught up with Katy and Rosa, who have shared their “Five Favourites” – five tracks that particularly resonate with them. Check out their choices below, and scroll down to listen to watch the new video for latest single ‘In Dreams’ at the end of this post.

Porridge Radio – ‘Lilac’
Katy:
I fell in love with this song last summer, when we played a show for She Shreds with Porridge Radio at Great Escape. The refrain “I don’t want to get bitter, I want us to get better, I want us to be kinder to ourselves and to each other”, really spoke to me then and is a pretty good rule for life to be honest. I may or may not have recorded a sneaky bootleg on my phone at the time, but luckily it’s now out for real and sounds much better. They have a new album coming this year that I’m excited for.  

La Luz – ‘Sure As Spring’
Katy:
We did a support tour with La Luz in 2018 – there wasn’t really any reason for us to do it because the record wasn’t finished, but it was exactly what we needed to kind of force us into being a band again properly. I think their music has been a big influence on this new album – their sound is obviously incredible but it’s also clear and cohesive and consistent in a way that I think we strived for. Taking influence from lots of places is really important, but there’s something really powerful in turning all of that into one continuing sound that is all your own, which is something we’ve really tried to do on Vices more than we ever did before. But probably even more than any of that, being on the road with those girls was really inspiring, and their encouragement and support was a massive confidence boost exactly when we needed it.

Big Thief – ‘Paul’
Katy:
It feels like it’s so much rarer that I become totally obsessed with a band now – something that felt like it happened about once a week when I was younger. But Big Thief have been a bit of an exception to that in the last few years. At least five friends sent me this song, knowing I would love it. It’s so beautiful and tender and catchy as hell. I have probably had the first line in my head for three years straight. 

Beth Gibbons – ‘Tom The Model’
Rosa:
It’s kind of a cheat to choose this song; the chorus borrows so much Nina Simone’s ‘Do What You Gotta Do’, another of my all-time favourites, it’s a bit like sneaking two songs into one choice. When it bursts into that chorus, it’s the ultimate release after the slow creeping verses. The horns and strings are lush and kind of ominous. Beth Gibbons’ voice soars – walking that line between delicacy and pure force. I’ve always liked that she embraces darkness so unapologetically, and can make sweetness or desire as threatening or powerful as they are gentle. Listening to her music always feels like a solo experience. It’s impossible for me not to enter into the world her songs create wholly.

Landshapes – ‘Red Kite’
Rosa:
I love this song – it has made me cry perhaps every time I have watched Landshapes perform it. There’s a deep feeling of pride watching close friends play a song you think is truly objectively beautiful. The song just builds slowly and surely like this swelling wave. Jemma’s guitar solos have the ability to shift Landshapes’ songs into a totally different place, and when Luisa sings “in the face of everyone I swear this time I’m done”, it’s like this wave crashing down in a sort of haunting catharsis. Dan, Landshapes’ drummer, also played drums on Vices, and it’s a joy watching and listening to the different things he’s brought to both bands.

Massive thanks to Katy and Rosa for sharing their Five Favourites with us!

Vices, the upcoming fourth album from Peggy Sue, is out 21st February via French Exit. Watch the new video for ‘In Dreams’ here:

 

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