Photo: andrewellisportfolio.tumblr.com

What a state the world is in. It’s 2015, and new guitar music still arrives burdened with thick swirls of philosophical innuendo over its very existence.

But maybe we’re making progress. The debate has abated a bit, perhaps because all the hand-wringers are distracted by bright young things in identical n*ormc*re garb nodding and making clicky noises come out of their MacBooks.

Is asking if guitar music is dead dead? Is the concept of “guitar music” even a thing any more? Are we post-genre? In a world where the playlist is king, does it matter if your niche post-2-step banger shlubs up next to some polyrhythmic guitar noodling?

Maybe that’s an unnecessary introduction for Cavalry, a Liverpool band that are making “guitar music”, but really should be simply credited as making “music”.

Cavalry are the first guitar band to really catch my ear for a long time, and while that could just as easily be my fault, there is a suggestion of something silvery and transcendent in their supple songs.

An Understanding has heart, soul and meaning: all those words that mean so much and get devalued when they’re attached to pious, serious and “authentic” guitar music.

But Cavalry’s songs seem to have them woven into their being. Maybe it’s the warm weather we’re having right now, but you know — these songs sound just right.

I guess I’ve written endlessly about my listening habits skewing towards music produced in the most basic of fashions.

My drive for Simple Music Done Dirt Cheap™ has accelerated at about the same pace as the general adoption of laptop DAWs as the primary music making resource. There’s just so much going in in music that doesn’t need to be there.

This life-affirming video of A Guy Called Gerald fiddling with analogue boxes in his studio and creating – off-the-cuff, on-the-fly – some huge tunes, cemented my point of view.

Anyway, Erika Glück’s Caress is a seven minute, simple-as-possible workout: all thump, no flimflam. It’s a song to get lost in; a terrific, meditative reminder that simple isn’t scary.

The temptation to plump for a British Sea Powers headline pun was too hard to resist. I am but a flawed individual, forgive me.

C Powers is also known as CC Powers and is quite possibly releasing stuff under a plethora of pseudonyms for all I know, but in an age of meta-nom-de-plumes, who cares?

Anyway, Shit Remix is, indeed, a remix of Shit by Future, and is so overwhelmingly more fun than the original, there’s no need to listen to it any more, should you have been inclined.

It’s also a reminder of the power of simplicity: this remix doesn’t add or remove much at all: C Powers just sticks in the bits that always needed to be there.

Here are the tags that accompany Attic Space‘s music:

ambient chillwave christian drone electronic experimental Millersville

Thought: Maybe Ambient Christian Chillwave is a sub-genre I can fully buy into, for once.

Anyway. Attic Space‘s music is right up my street, as it’s pieced together out of nibbles of this, kibbles of that, and big swathes of the other.

My main attraction to this kind of music is that it’s usually the vision of a solo performer: this doesn’t mean it’s automatically any good, but it does mean that the music is unsullied by outsiders, or surly drummers, or what-have-you.

Spring Tides is, however, very good: Attic Space has assembled a true collage of lo-fi sounds and made a song of quiet, odd beauty.

Most lo-fi anything is tripe; this is good, simply because I get the feeling it’s lo-fi out of necessity, as opposed to some dreary attempt at nostalgist revivalism.

So when the drums sound a bit like a cardboard box being hit by a wooden spoon – it really probably was exactly that, and was done so because there were no actual drums to hand. I like that a lot.

PS: For those of you who didn’t get the Atic Atac reference

There’s something about Krista Papista’s rough ‘n’ ready, cut ‘n’ paste, chop ‘n’ change pop that is deeply satisfying, deeply jarring and deeply un-now.

By being all those things, Bad F is also 100% now. And yet it sounds like daring music of the past. Argh.

There’s something in the attitude, the delivery, the lyrics and the snarl that bypasses the tedium of Tumblr-first Image-House™ music and drags her songs straight up to the edge.

It’s so odd to hear something even slightly out of step with the banality of most new ‘edgy’ music, that this song made me sit up in my seat. Good stuff.