When I was younger, I was camping by a river. It was a cloudless night, and the stars completely filled the sky. I looked up at them, trying to stop my thoughts from drifting into that terrifying corner of the mind that cheerfully, and optimistically, tries to comprehend infinity. My theory is that if you try to think about the size of the universe, then one day your thoughts will spiral away at an unstoppable exponential rate, your eyes simultaneously widening with overwhelming realisation, with the words DOES NOT COMPUTE flashing up before your eyes forever.

As a distraction, I fiddled with my 12-band nerd-tastic short-wave radio, trying to find John Peel's weekly show on the BBC World Service. Faced with such a bewildering frequencies, and lacking the fine-tuned motor skills to rotate the tuning dial, it wasn't an overwhelming surprise that I failed. Happily, at the bottom of one of the short-wave bands I found a squealing, bubbling mass of space-electro, semi-random interference noise, which perfectly accompanied my mildly hysterical gaze into of life, the universe and everything.

If any lesson is to be learnt from all of this quasi-hippy yapping, it's that sometimes even the most obscure sounds can fit the right occasion. Today's New Band, Keyboard Choir, aren't so deliberately obtuse that they sample radio static, but their songs do conjur up the same, icily distant feeling. Bugs samples an eerie clip from a 1960's radio recording due to be played post nuclear war, and leaves an echoing, metallic shimmer of worry behind it.

In some ways, I suppose, there is a backwards-looking stripe running through Keyboard Choir's songs. Skylab's plaintive electronic sounds are the noises glum, lonely astronauts would force out of their simple onboard computers in the 1970's. The loneliness of space and the anxiety from the confines of their mechanised life enclosure is all there.

It's rare for a band to actually get within spitting distance of the sounds that they originally wanted to make, but it does seem that Keyboard Choir have done it. Ethereal and delicate. Super. Listen to them, here, right now!

Labels: camping, human-computer hybrid, spaceman

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Labels: camping

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Labels: camping

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Labels: camping

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If you were to draw up a list of all the necessary things to make an acers band, it'd probably be surprisingly light on ingredients. The list might read along the lines of: great choruses, satisfying chord changes, Keep-It-Simple,-Stupid Lyrics and a working knowledge of what makes the audience decide to get sweaty and excitable - a list that's temptingly short and sweet. It's probably this innate simplicity that is the reason for hairy teenagers everywhere to ask for a £69.99 Argos guitar for Christmas in the first place.

The truth is though, that, like unicycling whilst juggling flaming chainsaws, combining all of these things is a lot easier said than done. It's also why we have to settle for bands like the Kooks et al whilst we wait for the really good bands - who can alchemically squeeze all the simple stuff into their songs - to come along. So, tip your hat, then, to Today's New Band, The Gravity Crisis, who might just have got it all right.

What's most exciting about their un-self-consciously fun, catchy songs is that just when you think they might start to wander dangerously close to convention, or repetition, or conservativeness, they veer off in a burst of fuzzy guitar happiness, tails wagging and tongues lolling. Japan is HUGE and crunchy, Animator has all the whoa-oah choruses you'll ever need and Medicine has howly, simple guitar lines that you'll spontaneously hum when you're pouring your cereal next week. The Gravity Crisis are the indie dictionary definition of early promise. Fingers crossed!

Listen to their bounce-a-delic songs here - it's like the feeling of meeting an old friend you've not seen for ages.

And Finally...

A Brief Overview of 2000 Trees Festival -

1. Mud
2. Rain
3. Cider
4. Hayfever
5. "Gong Showers"
   
6. Lovely People
7. Sunshine that comes too late
   
8. Best band of the weekend - Art Brut. Like, durrrr.

Labels: camping, chorus-mageddon, singalong

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Mmm, camping. My last experience in a tent was at Glastonbury 2007 , and while I wasn't shivering, soaking wet under a tree, scooping wet food into my mouth trying to keep warm whilst listening indifferently to the music being played, I was vomiting into black bin bags in my tent, having hilariously contracted sickness and diarrhea. Not great times, but memorable at least.

So to make New York's Tent today's New Band Of The Day was a minor, slightly pathetic, personal triumph of eschewing awful canvas-related memories from my mind. Still, it was worth it, because Tent make some great music. Stop and Go is alternately dense and sparse, with thin drifting vocals - and Tight Squeeze is similar, basic and minimal but coupled with a dreamy vocal melody.

In some ways Tent are like a groovier version of Kings of Convenience, but without any of the blandness that that may imply. Their music is a tightly contorting glide, slightly spaced-out and wide-eyed. I'd be tempted to describe it as techno-folk if that didn't sound like the worst genre of music of all time. Perhaps the best thing to do is to listen to it for yourself at their MySpace page.

Labels: bleeps, camping, slightly mournful

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