Last week we declared that Entrepreneurs’ “Uv Been Robbed (Joking But Not)” EP was the best we’d heard all year. This week, we can’t stop listening to Pariah’s “Safehouses” EP and are considering challenging last weeks assertion… Word of mouth spread the name of Pariah late last year wide throughout the music community, with many suggesting him as the obvious successor to Burial, and he is now even described on his press release as “hotly tipped”. We were finally turned onto him via the home of moody electronic atmospherics, No Pain In Pop. Now, however, Pariah will be releasing his “Safehouses” EP in October on the already legendary R&S records, early home of Delphic and James Blake.
Comparisons to Mount Kimbie, James Blake and other post-dubstep artists are easy to make, but Pariah’s quivering, optimistic tone is distinctly his own. There’s nothing flashy or ostentatious about the music he’s making, not an enormous wobble in sight (luckily), but the genius of his music is that he’s doing relatively simple things exceptionally well, with the result that it has an instant appeal that has eluded many of his peers. It’s almost indecent to choose a favourite on such a strong EP, but “Railroad” is a powerfully percussive track will stutter and shake its way into dark, sweaty basements everywhere come the end of the year. * More importantly, though his press release only claimed that he was “hotly tipped”, the evidence on this EP suggests that Pariah has already justified early whisperings and established himself as one of the most skilled producers around.
*(Fittingly, “Railroad” was also the soundtrack to me sat on the floor of the inexplicably rammed train from London back up to Liverpool late last night, and at the exact moment this track came on somebody running off the train knocked one of my shoes onto the track. I feel sort of inclined to blame Pariah, but I guess it may have been a coincidence.)
As a rule; free things are always, constantly and without exceptions absolutely depressing. By definition, they’re usually designed to make you buy other things which, obviously, is detestably sneaky and therefore worthy of hate. They’re almost by some unwritten rule of thriftiness underwhelming and weak, like that Chemical Brothers “album” of remixes by drugged up bedroom hermits that the Sunday Times seems to give away every week, and that watered-down free shot of beer brewed solely to force you to feel guilty about not buying an entire bottle. In fact, the only free thing that I’ve received recently that packed a punch was, literally, a punch in the face from a terrifyingly furious chav for trying to protect my idiotic friend who, quite predictably, had made some sort of perhaps unnecessary comment about said chav’s mother. I preferred it to the shot of beer, anyway.
I’ll have to admit at this point that I am actually lying. The term “without exceptions” above was probably misleading. There is an exception. Now, I think you probably know where this is heading. Except I’m not going to lead this into an anticlimax by giving you away a free impotent remix of a fey, untalented indie band who’s manager happens to be an old friend of mine. Downloading music for free, legally, is no longer new or exciting. Thousands of artists are struggling to grab your attention right now, each one trying to convince you to steal their music with their consent like some sort of musical self-flagellation that has become necessary to build a following of interneted music geeks, but I can barely remember the last time that a free EP was worth the listening time alone, let alone two enormous paragraphs of frankly irrelevant pre-amble.
London’s rising producer of the minute Entrepreneurs has definitely changed those perceptions. Of course we’d seen the name flung across all of the right places, and recently come across him again in the guise of FOE’s producer, but not once did we consider that it was possible he’d release an EP of ball-swallowingly terrifying industrial pop that, quite simply, is the most original, breathless and focussed EP we’ve heard all year. Somehow, it manages to be both as accessible as Lady Gaga pummelling her record label execs to death with the heel of her shoe and weirder than, well, Lady Gaga. For that feat alone you are sort of obliged to download the EP. And if you don’t agree with us, well, you can have your money back; because this is 100% guaranteed to be better than a punch in the face, but hit you just as hard.
I get myself into this situation often. I’ll try to claim that I’m just making attempts at achieving some sort of perfect-seasonal alignment for the tone of the band name, but the truth probably lies nearer to my being quite busy most of the time. So I feel stuck between feeling like I should have posted about Summer Camp a few months back, and being “too late” and just bandwagon jumping. But the whole one-upmanship of trying to post about bands before everybody else is blatantly ridiculous. So it’s late. But it’s here.
The unpretentiously shining pop music that Summer Camp are making sounds like all of those teenage summer months condensed into three minute rays of burning nostalgia, fleshed out with a sense of purpose, not-giving-a-fuck and bursting raw drums that all pull them back from the wrong side of twee and excessively sentimental. That said, if you’re looking to exercise your macho-ears then you’re better off slobbering over the knuckle dragging legacy of Britpop; Summer Camp are unapologetically fey at times, but their bravery to attempt something completely different is far bolder than aping 1995, and as a result they are only something to be admired. And if they’re anything like as good live as we have been hearing, then it won’t be long before every crevice on the internet will be declaring their keyboard based love. Bleeding bandwagon jumpers.
