Tracklist: Other Lives - Tamer Animals

Having already given us Colourmusic's blitzkrieg album this year, Stillwater, Oklahoma ups its batting average for 2011 with Other Lives, currently over here and at Green Man this weekend (and End Of The Road a fortnight beyond that) ahead of an August 29th release for their debut-to-this-territory album, also Tamer Animals, on the beleagured PIAS. We saw their first UK date ever at the end of last week and were mightily impressed by their post-Grizzly Bear sweep of keyboard textures and multi-instrumental washes, a lushly arranged chamber odd-folk in which every layer, voice and instrument adds something to the cinematic scope.

Other Lives - Tamer Animals by Stayloose

Tracklist: Ute - Brother

Eclectic AlcoPop!-signed mainstays of Oxford, Ute are a folk band but not in that way. The careful acoustic and plaintive vocal at the start may suggest otherwise, but as it sways and drums crash in every so often it turns into something less peaceable and more haunted. There's wordless choruses but layered and melodic rather than radio-friendly crescendo.

Brother by alcopop

And the other thing is Ute don't always sound much like this. Sometimes, as on the B-side, they get upwards of 30 mates along, including agents of the Blessing Force bunker and a number of Spring Offensive, and maximise/magnetise the backing for a proper communal moment. Photos were taken, and the CD is being released encased in a photo album. What did you expect from an Alcopop release, a jewel case?

Brother (Featuring Oxford Hearts Live) by alcopop

Tracklist: Clock Opera - Lesson No. 7

More of Guy Connolly's 'chop-pop', this time with a new found urgency. Where Belongings took its time to make full impact, this time a sonorous baritone vocal leads into a jumpy rush of cracked falsetto with more than a hint of emotional paranoia and eventually layer upon layer of percussion, copy and paste microscopic synth noises, and unsourceable noises. The slow build intensity eventually coalesces into hammering on the walls in frustration. It's out first week in October accompanied by a Tom Vek remix. Oh, suddenly the boy's a workaholic.

Clock Opera - Lesson No. 7 (Full Version) by clockopera

Tracklist: Artery - Civilisation

Artery appear somewhere back in the books when UK post-punk is analysed but they turn up regularly enough in turn of the 80s Sheffield retrospectives, had a Festive 50 number nine and Jarvis Cocker, who briefly employed some of them in Pulp's early days, once said of them "without their inspiration a lot of what took place in the intervening years probably wouldn’t have happened. Sometimes you see something and it opens a door somewhere in your head. I hope this does the same for you." This is described by the PR as "their first original material in over 20 years", suggesting they don't think much of their 2009 EP. Like the not dissimilar Gang Of Four's return album their first single after reformation, from a forthcoming album of the name, sounds more studio-bound and loud but little less spiky and darkly dystopian, Mark Gouldthorpe's proudly, pointedly accented lyrical barbs about recession, war, politicians and consumerism seeing only a darkness as the bass probes and staccato guitar richochets.

Artery - Civilisation by Bright Lights PR

Tracklist: Race Horses - Benidorm

Around last year's debut album there was some talk that Aberystwyth's Race Horses' psych-surf could fit them into the Welsh oddity space left untended when Gorky's split. Gleefully eclectic, this first new material since then is more immediately widespread approachable, with hints of pre-Moroder Sparks (via, erm, Euros Childs solo) and the hi-hat and synth-strings of early 80s pop-disco production. No, stop that, it's by no means as overwhelming or blatantly neon-signed obvious as most do in that sphere. Hell of a set of hooks too.

RACE HORSES Benidorm by FANTASTIC PLASTIC

Tracklist: Dent May - Fun

First time we came across May he was demonstrating with no little zest His Magnificent Ukulele. No fun-size stringed instrument this time, more a reach for those ubiquitous just-second-hand synth sounds. Not like that, though - like his label bosses at Paw Tracks May takes Beach Boys sunshine pop production values into a much more psychedelic place, one where wheezing, shimmering keyboard patterns and cheap beats, like Still Corners getting their 808 on, frame a luxuriant lay back in the sunshine. Check how he also throws the peaceful summer jam vibes off course with a clanking solo.

Fun by Dent May

Tracklist: Loney Dear - My Heart

Over six albums Emil Svanängen's consistency in effortless folk-pop radar terms has picked up a few stray objects and been jolted off course. This first cut from October's latest LP, Hall Music, sees him stick somewhere akin to what he does best, using his quavering vocal to consider where his life's optimum has gone. It sounds both fragile and grand, Svanängen's directness layered on with chamber strings, muted horns, tubular bells and synths arpeggiating above and buzzing underneath. Even as the production consumes the air somehow he remains pleadingly introspective.

Loney Dear - My Heart by theswedebeat

Tracklist: Remember Remember - John Candy

Glasgow's Remember Remember, signed to the label of and having been tour support for Mogwai, share DNA with Tall Ships in the way their ever tightening riffs loop back on themselves and create an ever evolving Mobius strip of Steve Reich-meets-the-Kinsellas precise noise and confusion. There's little shred of post-hardcore here, though, more in hock to Tortoise's layering, buffeted ambient motorik and Brian Eno's ideas of pitching soundscapes. Building and dropping away to disorted, cymbal crashing peaks and from drawn out passages of anticipation while remaining fundamentally repetitious underneath, it ends by breaking through the white noise wall into a bliss marked by that same needling central conceit. Marvellous.

REMEMBER REMEMBER // John Candy (Radio Edit) by TheArtOf...

Tracklist: I Break Horses - Winter Beats

An optimum lesson to bloggers here - don't sleep on a track, eventually everyone will post and play it and you'll lose traction. I Break Horses are a duo from Stockholm, signed to Bella Union, who we were always going to post about eventually, such is the pull of their crisp dreampop, the gauze punctured by warm layers of insistently glowing synth that build ambient traction waiting for the right moment to break through. It instead takes its own sweet time in doing so, the wordless chorus and syn-drums not too far from Beach House. Then it breaks down. And then it breaks through into the white before accelerating and dipping for the line.

I Break Horses - Winter Beats by Bella Union

Tracklist: Runaround Kids - Can't Lose Lover

Sorry, is there some reason why the acutely interlocking indie guitar set aren't all over Runaround Kids long before now? Their debut album Linked Arms, out today and orderable through Bandcamp, is clearly hewn from the same streets as The Cribs - literally, they're also a trio from Wakefield - but takes them in the direction marked 'young noisy British band who mainline early 90s US college rock' - Copy Haho, Tubelord, Stagecoach, Calories. Basically they're Johnny Foreigner tour supports in all but actuality (further proof of possible connections: when we saw them at Long Division 71.4285% of Los Campesinos! were in our eyeline), and there's nothing at all wrong with that if it means a band of melodic vulnerability and fuzzy, straight to the point energy. It's translated into their raucous live show too, shown off tonight at the Bull & Gate with the hype band of weaker men Bos Angeles, then York Tuesday, home on Friday, Liverpool on the 20th and towards the end of August Leeds Festival as part of Thursday night's Dance To The Radio shindig.

Can't Lose Lover by Runaround Kids

Tracklist: Jens Lekman - An Argument With Myself

Oh you're so perplexing, Jens. The title track from an EP out September 19th, four years on from Night Falls Over Kortedala, sees Lekman switch out the warped AM radio stylings for Graceland references, because clearly there's not been enough busy hi-life recently. Lyrically he's still as bemusing as ever, considering photos left in pockets and writing on petals as his schizophrenia tells himself to fuck off.

Jens Lekman - An Argument With Myself by DOJAGSC

Tracklist: This Many Boyfriends - Young Lovers Go Pop!

An unlikely current resident of 6 Music's playlist, the latest from the self-referencing Leeds youths is one of those elegantly scrappy records that only ever sounds at home on coloured 7". The guitars are set to rough hewn jangle through a fuzzbox, the chorus lifts off into wordless arms aloft joy and all is generally pastel coloured and wide beaming.

Young Lovers Go Pop! by This Many Boyfriends

Tracklist: Widowspeak - Gun Shy

What with the cinematic score poise of Lana Del Ray yesterday and all the surf love of late there seems to be something of a hip-swinging 1950s throwback sound emerging into modern buzz band-dom, maybe because it's the one area that hadn't been mined much before recently. From a recent 7" on Captured Tracks produced by Woods' Jarvis Taveniere, backed with a not entirely out of character cover of Wicked Game, the Brooklynites have a woozy take on adding wistfulness to David Lynch-like twanging guitar dustbowl nirvana, fronted by Molly Hamilton's quite Nina Persson-like cotton wool wrapped seductiveness.

"Gun Shy" by Widowspeak by forcefieldpr

Tracklist: Lana Del Ray - Video Games

What's this? This, the song of which Caitlin Moran says "when it's this hot all I can do is listen to this over and over again", is Lizzy Grant originally of Lake Placid, who fancies herself as the "gangsta Nancy Sinatra". Other accounts peg her as either the next big teasing shiny pop star or some sort of Nicki Minaj for red spotlights, and this video received a viral push from Skream, but her own description of "Hollywood Sad Core" will do for now. Styled like Bardot and singing like an ingenue, gorgeously gloopy cinematic strings rise and fall over smoky cadences with a hint of vibrato and a lot of love-as-dependency cares on her shoulders landing somewhere in the Feist/Spektor ballpark. Dark rumours circulate, by which we mean Guy Chambers involvement on other tracks, ahead of a planned EP in September but it's hard to see what she could more comfortably suit, slipping in between Cat Power's zonked-out reflectiveness and creamy Hollywood endings.

Tracklist: Yr Friends - How You Feel Every Night (Probably)

Yr Friends is Alexei Berrow on his own and... yeah, that'll be comfortably enough for Tracklisting. yr friends have been lying to you is a four track release, one of which is an Irving Berlin song. Berrow dedicates it on Facebook to "Equita, debt recoverers and bailiff agents for Birmingham City Council". Musically? Those who've been concentrating, specifically on the "country band with pretensions" circa We Left You Sleeping And Gone Now, will know his love for Wilco, Sparklehorse and such woozy lo-fi Americana, recorded straight to tape in small rooms with variously mixed echo, self-examining and finding the patient variously deficient, this track inspired by a Brothers Grimm story. As for JoFo? Album in November (same month as Los Campesinos!' newie), which might harbour 18 tracks.

Tracklist: T E Morris - Trust

If you were concentrating last time we posted something by him you'll know that that's the formal name under which Her Name Is Calla's Tom Morris puts out home recorded, very close miked, all acoustic, rarely comfortable solo recordings. A new EP, Moon, out at the end of August, continues in much that vein, broken and desperate for company. Meanwhile, "There will be some important news regarding Her Name Is Calla very soon". Sounds ominous.

Tracklist: Pinkunoizu - Time Is Like A Melody

New signings to Full Time Hobby, Copenhagen's Pinkunoizu cite Akron/Family and Jim O'Rourke as influences, and it's in that core of experimentally freeform psych-folk they dwell. If the recording of the vocals will lead to knee-jerk Fleet Foxes comparisons (oh, it will, it will) the music around it - crosshatched rhythms, bits of kalimba, a wailing guitar solo, nods to Animal Collective's campfire oddness - is far from being able to tastefully restrain itself. Swirling and uncoiling and endlessly fascinating.

Time Is Like A Melody by fulltimehobby

Time Is Like A Melody from Pinkunoizu on Vimeo.

Tracklist: Man Without Country - King Complex

Not often an outfit manages to find a happy medium between overarching ambition and low-key microdetail, but the duo from south-west Wales are close to it. If the vocal pitch and its sentiments betray a man approaching the end of his tether, the five and a half minutes the undulating, M83-ish synth textures develop a sense of ease out of a frantic, stadium-ready chorus with nods to hip ambient IDM throughout.

King Complex by Man Without Country

Tracklist: Victories At Sea - Swim

Birmingham trio Victories At Sea couldn't be more like the sound of 2008 at first, as a post-punk guitar figure and tricksy drumming sounding not unlike Jack Bevan of Foals gives way to big keyboard chords and rushing chords not too far from the Cure. Eventually, though, it becomes something that fits more comfortably alongside Tall Ships and co in the way it twists outsider interlocking complexity into guitar-pop shapes and then gives the result a vigorous shake to make it sound more like a wind tunnel.

SWIM by victories at sea

Tracklist: Laura Marling - Sophia

Marling's image seems to change slightly with every record, from callow youth to brunette ingenue and now world-wearied and wised up. Her voice has aged and grown richer with her, the more lived-in vocal of I Speak Because I Can now developing into something earthier and far, far beyond her years (not too far past 21). With maturity comes great responsibility towards your songwriting, and on first listen that's something she's capable too of facing up to. As with the last album it was recorded in a room by Ethan Johns, meaning it develops as it goes not in the heavy-handed Mumfords crescendo sense but steadily growing strings, multi-tracked backing vocals and Marling coming to terms with her emotions. Three minutes it breaks into a trot of west coast folk-rock of a thankfully restrained hue and then we're talking, not to mention looking forward to September's A Creature I Don't Know.