Tag Archives: hair

>Lissie, Apologies and Besottification

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Sifting through new bands is ultimately a pleasant task, though inherently flawed – everyone has experienced expressing dislike for a specific band only to later find that actually they’re rather good. So it was with Lissie, whom I initially dismissed as another lightweight country-folk-esque crooner.

Now of course, I feel foolish, as I mistook the simplicity of her genuinely heartfelt and utterly charming songs for an absence of substance.

My apologies for such callous cynicism are soundtracked by such delightful songs as Little Lovin’, that begins as a quaint love song and morphs unceremoniously into a foot-stomping paean to desire.

Lissie – Little Lovin’

And Wedding Bells may well take a well-worn woe-is-me failure-in-love path, but is so engagingly downtrodden and shuffling that only the coldest of hearts could hold it against her.

Lissie is a Mississippian via Paris, London and LA. Her wanderlust coils, ribbon-like, through her songs. Quite frankly, her songs and her voice are a dream, and we’re just all playing bit-parts as she sweetly dictates the terms. And if that sounds hopelessly besotted, it’s because I am. A delight.

Photography by Andrew Calder

>Today’s New Band – The All New Adventures Of Us PLUS! Hair!

>I snuck into one of the local university’s end of term parties last night. It’s been a while since I was a first-year Uni-botherer. This is what I learned about 18-21 year-old Film and Media students:

  1. The more swept-across your fringe is, the higher your social status. Some fringes started just above the ear. Men appear to have the monopoly on hair-straighteners now.
  2. The Youth are fat. I was nudged by one student who was so rotund that it felt like I was hit by a milk float.
  3. The songs that filled the dancefloor were by MGMT and Kings Of Leon – but you probably guessed that already.

The upside to all this is that, apart from having a good time at someone else’s party, I left feeling more masculine and slim than I have for a long time. It felt like I’d hopped over the dividing line between us men who hit their late teens at the turn of the century, and those doing it about now, in a flurry of careful coiffures.

What will happen when the same young women, currently enjoying the empathetic sensitivity of these men, decide they want shelves putting up, but don’t fancy doing it themselves? You can’t put an Ikea sofa-bed together with nail buffers and eyebrow tweezers.

Today’s New Band, The All New Adventures of Us, also apparently cross great divides – to rehearse, though – as for them, ‘home’ is listed as Northampton and Dundee. There were about 400 miles between the two cities last time I looked, which must make those weekly meetings in the pub to discuss the fine details of the liner notes for the next single just that bit more complicated. (A note to the band: Barrow-In-Furness is about your half-way meeting point – and they have a nightclub on a boat, complete with pole dancers and intimidatingly pumped men. Ah, good times.)

Still, all that supposed trundling up and down the M6 must give them plenty of time and cramped space to write their nicely bitty pop songs. And for the second day running, there’s have a song with horns driving the melody – the bouncy Firetruck Doki Doki, full of vim and gentle rhymes. It scores extra bonus marks for having a kind of double false ending – biggest and best rock trick in the book. St. Crispin’s Got Our Backs is expansive and large, but TANAOU still manage to keep their indie-ness intact.

Maybe The All New Adventures Of Us are a band for today – young, sensitive and wide-eyed – but without the mindless hair fixation or flab. Listen here!