Tall Ships provided the heartbreaking moment of the festival and even were single-handedly responsible for making my festivaling comrade cry (he claims it was simply the man menopause again) as their front-man miserably closed his case of unsold vinyl after just 10 fruitless minutes. The lack of people wading into their wallets was actually hugely surprising, as the band had just ripped through a spellbinding set of intricate and yet hugely appealing math-rock. Take the precision, passion and intelligence of Foals, remove their huge popular appeal, and replace it with the confusion and avant-garde of Battles and there you have Tall Ships. I sound enthusiastic and sympathetic, but to be fair, I didn’t buy one of their vinyl either (please don’t judge me). Give them some time to find their audience and they’ve got the sort of rare experimental appeal to actually sell quite a lot of records to quite a lot of quite infatuated fans. And we might even crack the wallet out ourselves.
We’re still terrified of Entrepreneurs, but with each release he puts out, we’re finding ourselves falling for what Abeano has called his ‘intelli-tronica’. Can’t argue with that. Double A-side ‘Fuck Tactics/Bubblegunk’ stitches together the dark production of Entrepreneurs, FOE’s deranged pop and the quick wit of Ghostpoet, and based on that description, it definitely should have been a very London-based disaster but… What can we say, except that our words can’t do this anything approaching justice; so we’ll just have to call it the finest single we’ve heard all year. And it really is.
It was out yesterday via Fear & Records, fittingly on the same day as FOE’s ‘Hot New Trash’ EP surfaced on Stella Mortos. The synth-laced ‘Bubblegunk’ has been on repeat ever since the ‘U’ve Been Robbed, Joking But Not’ EP was released last year, but once you get your head around the off-kilter swagger of ‘Fuck Tactics’, it emerges as one of those rare moments in pop music where ambition and accessibility are perfectly balanced. A moment of originality and brilliance. He still absolutely terrifies us, but from, very, very far away we’re admiring everything that he’s doing. He even used a swear word in a song title, don’t tell us that guy’s not crazy.
Can pop music be terrifying? We probably would have been conservative and gone for a “no”, but… the more we hear of FOE and her concoction of terrifying horror-pop, the more we’re starting, just starting, to come around.
“Tyrant Song” is another Entrepreneurs produced FOE track and, for some more very leftfield trivia, the above video was also directed by him, and it’s also worth mentioning that he produced the rest of her EP “Hot New Trash” released via Stella Mortos on April 7th – and, lest we forget, that FOE appeared on Entrepreneur’s EP last year as well… Now, we’re not in the business of online dating, but we really think that the two should just get married and make many glorious little musical children of songs.
Not Many Experts for the world’s first pointlessly obscure indie gossip site? In other news; it turns out that Wu Lyf are actually The Feeling prescribed to double strength cocodamol and have no recollection of what has happened in the last year; all of the members of Yuck embarrassingly reveal that they are all now Laura Marling’s new boyfriend; and Marcus from Mumford & Sons tries to spill his thoughts on the matter but is blocked by the editorial team on the grounds that he has just sold far too many records.
Anyway… Err… FOE! So that last paragraph may have not really been true at all, but the one before definitely was made up of facts, and if you don’t believe us then you can pre-order the EP if you have any money, here. And as the press release does state, “the whole thing reeks of piss, death, sex and Coca-Cola”, which may sound a bit of an undesirable fragrance, but if it proves anything, it’s that FOE is most certainly plucking her influences from the most unlikely of places, and putting them together to make something emphatically her own and even, actually… original? You heard it here first.
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