Hours turn into days, and another week of new bands rattle by. When will this relentless pace ever cease? It’s Friday now, and time to slow down. Deep breaths.
Speaking of slowing down, the oft-spurious, always-compelling scurrilous gossip website Popbitch claims that the NME’s circulation has dropped to a lowly 32,000 a week. This may well indeed be true – the sight of a person actually purchasing a copy has become hens-teeth-rare.
To put that figure in perspective, I know a music blogger who receives over 32,000 visitors each day. Ouch. Hey – the world’s changed quickly. No-one pays for music, let alone music criticism any more, especially when you can log onto some half-arsed website, like this one, for free.
Like the rest of us, Under Alien Skies may be wondering why they even started to get involved with the pop music world. And as a result, they’re making fabulously unravelled, slow noise-scapes.
Papillon isn’t a cover of the Editors’ song from a year or so ago, or if it is, it’s been mercifully slowed down to about a tenth of its original speed. The song, such as it is, winds and meanders with delicate poise and and ice-crystal fragility.
It’s slow, it builds, and it’s strangely affecting in its bits-and-pieces approach to noise-making. It ends on a weirdly euphoric note. Papillion, like the band, is a mass of pleasing contradictions. Lovely.