This City have been described in reviews as ‘like The Travelling Wilburys, if it was made of members of Bloc Party and At The Drive In’. If you throw in the eyeball-popping nuances of Blood Brothers, the same turn-on-a-sixpence disco-jerk rhythms of the more danceable end of punk (think Les Savy Fav or !Forward Russia!), the impassioned cacophony of mid 80s Dischord Records-led emotional hardcore, the pop sensibility of tykes such as The Automatic and subtract the reference to Tom Petty and co, you might be getting close.
WHY? / The Hollows One of my favourite songs of recent years. The lyrical description of being robbed in Berlin is hilarious. The music is driving and haunting. Yoni Wolf is a consistently brilliant lyricist who has a really unique way of describing everyday situations to capture the imagination. The beats are great to chill out to.
Terra Naomi is a singer-songwriter from upstate New York who gained international recognition through YouTube. She was the first artist to do a music video comprised of fan-generated video clips (it won a YouTube award in 2006) and was invited by Al Gore to play Live Earth in London after he heard her song, Say It’s Possible. She signed a deal with Island UK, released a record, and toured the UK and Europe extensively. After leaving Island and coming back to the States, she is getting ready to release a new studio album that was funded by fan contributions and the sales of an old 2002 record re-release.
Why / Gemini (The Birthday Song) This song is like its own complex little universe. It starts somewhere and then goes somewhere else and then ends somewhere totally different. Listening to this song while driving has been shown to cause intense euphoria.
Cocoon is a two-piece French band formed in 2006 by Mark Daumail and Morgane Imbeaud. ‘I wanted it to be a male-female duet. A duo like the The White Stripes are in rock — we wanted to be the equivalent in folk music’, Daumail says. Their songs are entirely sung in English. ‘French artists singing in English isn’t something new. It goes back to groups like Les Thugs and Syd Matters’.
Bon Iver / Flume This is the best song of the last two years, hands down. The vocals, the sound, and the lyrics: ‘Sky is womb and she’s the moon’. Sheer genius!
Jesse, Tommy and Ben from Washington indie rock starlets, Jukebox The Ghost, ponder the inponderable in their somewhat scattered, but never dull Secret Playlist.
Paul Simon / The Obvious Child [Jesse] It’s upbeat. I love the marching band drums on his album, Rhythm of the Saints. I can’t understand the lyrics at all, but they sound pretty profound. So I’m sure they are, right?
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.
