Anna Ternheim is a singer/songwriter from Stockholm who has just released the album, Leaving On A Mayday. Her music has a dark touch about it which hints at influences from Nick Cave and PJ Harvey.
El Perro del Mar / L-is for love I heard the song Dog a couple of years ago and was quite impressed. I love the production, the way it builds up and how the beat intensifies throughout the piece. At the same time, the song shows a great deal of restraint. It’s cold, hard, dark, and very beautiful.
Salmonella Dub have just released their auspicious seventh studio album, the dynamic Freak Controller, a medley of roots, rock and electronica dance styles. It’s been two years since Salmonella Dub released their last studio album, the platinum selling Heal Me in 2007. In 2008, the band toured with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and released the live album, Feel the Season Change.
Nick Cave / Stagger Lee I’ve always been a Birthday Party fan, but it wasn’t until Liz, my wife, played me this track that I fully realized the depth of power behind Nick and the amazing thing that the Bad Seeds had morphed into. This is rock and roll orchestration at it most cutting edge. Oh, what a story!
Bell X1’s US debut Flock earned the band incredible reviews earlier this year and the Irish trio are now primed to take on America with their most ambitious album to date. Landing somewhere a ‘little bit electronic, a little bit Bacharach and a little bit New Orleans Funeral March’, Blue Lights On The Runway, is a coherent and intriguing record from start to finish. Recalling Eno-era Talking Heads, Sigur Ros, and XTC on jagged, the album contains the vintage synth-laden Broken Umbrella, the syncopated How Your Heart Is Wired, fuzzed out hard rocker Breast Fed, the electrifying The Great Defector, and the ballad, Light Catches Your Face.
Talking Heads / Heaven I think it’s the lack of sentimentality in what’s actually quite a sentimental song that I really like, a bit like a cat wearily singing about the end of the world. Set in the manic and wiry confines of Fear of Music, it’s a ballad, and the stripped down live version works beautifully on Stop Making Sense. This is Voxtrot’s cover of the song.
The Duke Spirit are one of the UK’s most exciting and dynamic rock bands. Their second studio album, Neptune, was produced by the Godfather of Stoner rock, Chris Goss, (Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age and Soulwax), and was released almost two years after their debut album, Cuts Across the Land, which belonged more to the illustrious British lineage of My Bloody Valentine and Jesus And Mary Chain than to any contemporary ‘rock’ scene.
Bo Diddley / Who Do You Love? Still a pure statement of rock and roll intention. Gunslingin’ Bo marshaling an awesome collection of imagery into his persona, a rattlesnake-hide house with a skull chimney. A black ex-boxer, hard as nails, female guitarist, stand up drums, all in the late 50s, proper rock n’ roll pissing upon Elvis, Buddy Holly and the rest.
Hailing from London, garage rockers Brute Chorus belie their name with a sound that takes in the stomping soulful music of the late 1970s with a more delicate and melodic folk twist. The BestTuna blog sums them up succintly: ‘In a UK music scene full of non descript interchangeable bands playing mind numbingly indistinguishable indie it’s great to hear a band with the courage to forge their own identity and serve up a cocktail of breathtaking swamp rock that sounds three steps removed from the usual tepid sludge’.
Cold War Kids / Hang Me Up To Dry This is a lyrically brilliant, dark but shiny bit of indie rock. The dirty laundry analogy works in all its possible computations throughout a minimally arranged yet heavy song. The clean production seems to play against the words and feel of it all. So indie but so pop.
Californian quartet Cold War Kids not only have the best band name around, but they pack about as much indie cred as a pair of dirty Cons and a lazy side part. Their latest album, Loyalty To Loyalty, is a thumping collection of songs, full of sing-along chorus hooks amidst slow building pop gems. Bassist Matt Maust stepped up for a Playlist that takes in everything from Cat Power to Billy Childish.
Pink Mountaintops / Single Life Bankrobber by The Clash was never on any record. So I’ll go with Single Life by Pink Mountaintops. Big stretch, I know, but nevertheless. I don’t know how McBean does it.
Back in the day, Australian singer-songwriter Alex Lloyd was the frontman for the awesome blues rock band, Mother Hubbard, who released one amazing album and then imploded. Since then, he’s reinvented himself as a mellow, melodic, and beautifully introspective solo artist, with a new album — Good In The Face Of A Stranger — to be released on November 1 through Inertia Distribution.
The Good The Bad and The Queen / Green Fields I love this track. In saying that though, I’m usually always blown away with anything Damon Albarn does. He seems to have his finger on the pulse and I admire his constant recreation of himself, not to take anything away from Tony Allen, Paul Simonon and Simon Tong making a very interesting, collaborative sound.
With his latest album, All My Strangest Companions, Freddie Stevenson returns from Nashville, Tennessee a little older and a little wiser. So how did this Scottish afro’d punk poet end up in Music City, USA? Accidentally. But that’s another story altogether. Stevenson’s music catches everything from acoutsic melancholia to lap steel scratch, at times abrasive, at others so gently lulling it wraps you up and stroked you like you were a twelve day old child. His Secret Playlist is fittingly scattered. A bit of this, a lot of that.
Levon Helm / The Mountain I first heard this song on the record Steve Earle did with Del McCoury, but this version is just heartbreaking. There is something so ancient and authentic about Levon’s voice. It transports you to the lonely, broken mountain he’s singing about in this song.
My Secret Playlist is a music discovery website and weekly email publication. We invite our favourite bands and musicians to give us the rundown on their eight favourite songs right now. These are their words on the music that inspires them.
