Twitter has brought us many, many wonderful things. I don’t need to list them – you’re probably tweeting your favourite celeb right now. However, this week, thanks to the combined tweets of @ryanpitchfork and @daverawkblog, I managed to view hopefully-fake, hi-res, super-veiny photos of Kanye’s meat and two veg. Thanks guys. The ANBAD Donkey celebrates in kind.
FIRST! Golden Glow was one of the many artists I wholly intended on catching at the In The City festival but didn’t for one reason or another (NB – probably due to watching D/R/U/G/S again). However, I did bump into Pierre Hall, AKA Golden Glow, just after No Age had rattled my eardrums, and I promised I’d write about him. I then promptly forgot.
Adore Me doesn’t try anything obviously new – there is no discernible Witch House influence, for example – but in truth Pierre has found a bright, warm, mega-watt take on the same guitar, bass and drums set-up that so many are using nefariously at the moment. Hail, then, one of the brave few who are using instruments as instruments, as opposed to quasi-posing devices. Good stuff.
SECOND! Hi-Horse, simply by hailing from Helsinki, means that you can safely assume that theirs is a brand of super-jangly pristine power pop, right? Well, for once, no. 7th Street Ninjas is a song more in tune with clattering Americana – as wide, open and expansive as the Mojave desert. And yet… the chord changes are just too delightful to be from anywhere else other than Finland. Lovely.
THIRD! The Paraffins – now that’s more like it. ANBAD has been missing its regular dose of stupefying mentalism, and here, on screaming, thrashing and head-hammering songs like People Like You, The Paraffins kindly deliver. Don’t judge wholly on the freak-outs: songs like Something Good are deft, sweet and charming (and mental). Brilliant.
FOURTH! Magical Beast might well be the Jabberwock himself for all I can glean from mind-altering bursts of alien creativity like Kidmurmur, a lovely song that sounds like half a dozen other lovely songs all played at once. Structure is clearly an overrated concept in Magical Beast’s world, though on this evidence, it’s hard to argue on the contrary. A bewildering delight.