🐣 RALLY CLUB — TWELVE TATTOOS

⊚ LISTEN TO RALLY CLUB, TWELVE TATTOOS ⊚

Conversational lyricism weaves through the sunny strumming jangle of Rally Club's 'Twelve Tattoos', the effect basically feels like climbing inside the head of its female protagonist. Her observations and thoughts sprinkle the lyrics, whilst she's also described her in third person from the point of view of the singer.

The chorus, with its hook-laden far-off broken radio vocals, mentions this explicitly: "I gotta feeling that I’m seeing what she’s looking through / cause she talks in her sleep, she talks about being with you."

The sparkle of its chords feel like starfish washed up on the beach, the breeze shunting clouds across a cool blue sky, the tinny bump of the drums skittering in coastal somersaults. There's this surf feel, with these effortless vocal harmonies that feel Beach Boys crossed with beat poet – or West Coast Weapon-era Brand New – as you can see from Rally Club's opening gambit:

"She looked pretty even keeled if you looked from afar. Her makeup barely covered up her blatant reactions to songs as she mumbled the words if she knew them at all.

She looked pretty damn full from all the meals in her car; the times she spent driving chasing constant attractions added up and the math in her head was getting harder to solve."

There is this delicious wordy detail in the strings of words that whirl around, rhythmically solid and pulsing with the bounce easy scansion. Even the ABCABC (bones, palate, remind her / known, mallet, behind her) rhyme scheme feels poetically sound.

Next to the detail, the words remain methodically cryptic; lines like "Twelve tattoos in the entire home, the perfect situation to display on the surface" and "A polished reputation, could it really be worthless? she thought as she filled in all the cracks in the living room wall" – as well as the sad "nobody found the letters she was leaving behind her" – mix everyday minutiae with mystery.

And then besides the airy detached jangle, there's this angular guitar riff that jumps in loaded with chorus; the sort of glitzy, towering thing you'd expect from some early metal band, but with a lovely lack of distortion. Besides the superficial everyday of the protagonist, the light strumming, there's the inner turmoil of what she's actually going through, displayed in the mild aggression of the thumping riff sections: clutching at reality and trying to make sense of it.

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• 🔔 Feel free to stream or purchase this Rally Club track on their Bandcamp or the single release it appears on, Space / Twelve Tattoos'.
• 🔔 The fun hand-drawn video is by Nathan Henning.

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☟ Internet Presence ☟
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🐣 DRENS — BICYCLE RIDER

⌾ LISTEN TO DRENS, BICYCLE RIDER ⌾

A frantic wallsmash of an ode to riding bicycles, the theme of German band Drens' pogosticking 'Bicycle Rider' doesn't need to be guessed at. The drums are destroyed as the thud fuzz of the snare and splashing razor cymbals become a crashing cutlery drawer of mayhem, setting the rocky terrain where the rest of this track tumbles and divebombs.

We asked the band about the background to 'Bicycle Rider'.

"Our rehearsal room is in a rough area in Dortmund, so we park our bikes inside. [Drummer] Joël saw them and started to shout this "bicycle rider" thing," Drens co-founder Fabian Livrée (vocals, guitar) told us. "The special thing is that we didn't replace the lyrics, because we started to like it. It's our kind of humor and we really like riding bikes."

It's just over a minute of wiggling arpeggios, thrashing guitar and thick galloping bass – complete with stringbreaking guitar solo and vocals overflowing with breathless bite – for a punch-in-the-face parody of the surf sound: instead of hitting the waves, they're tearing up the streets by pedal power.

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• 🔔 Get this brash and bouncy bike ballad via your fav streaming service.
• 🔔 'Bicycle Rider' is taken from Drens' recently released Nowhere Beach EP, which you can/should listen to on their SoundCloud.

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☟ Drens Internet Presence ☟
facebook ⚘ soundcloud ⚘ official site ⚘ youtube ⚘ instagram ⚘ spotify

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SUMMER TWINS FORGET ME (ROLLERGIRL REMIX) [FREE DOWNLOAD]

Hello how is it all going? Well I hope. Now that we've done away with the pleasantries, let's get down to business shall we? The nitty-gritty. The crunch. Whatever you call it: let's do it. And by that I mean, I'm about to start writing about some music that I have found so hold onto your hats, tuck your shirts in, finish the food that's already on your plate and do everything else you need to do in order to read words with your eyes. You ok? No, neither am I.

So, what do we have here? We have Summer Twins – oh! That rings a bell. Yes it does because I wrote about Summer Twins at the beginning of Summer. I wrote about two of their songs, 'I'm No Good' & 'Forget Me' – they're a duo (twins actually) who specialise in creating retro-Americana sounds, full of surf-rock twang and doo-wop 60s prom night romance. It's nice, generally gentle stuff. But here marks a change: enter Rollergirl. Yes, Rollergirl. He – or at least I think it's a he (???) – has remixed Summer Twins' beach-friendly tune 'Forget Me' and it sounds pretty much very different from the original I'd say.

Preserving the twinkling melody of the original, the remix instantly puffs out its chest in bold and ballsy fashion – this is pretty much indie dance at its dirtiest and fuzziest. The bass flaps like a loose telegraph wire powered by people's dancing feet as a thumping kick and crashing hi-hat create an uptempo disco groove. By the end of the song, the sound is a veritable explosion of gloriously live-sounding instruments, everything half-distorted and super-powered with the sound of someone basically "going for it" on the drums and everything else, punching out the sound with glorious gusto.

The vocals are like the only part of this song that's kept wholly intact. At first it was kind of strange hearing the soft tones of the Chelsea and Justine Brown – the "twin" parts of Summer Twins – but then it allowed the remix to remain true to the California sun-pop vibe of the original, whilst still being able to turn up the roughness on the other elements to the track.

Rollergirl's self-titled debut album is out and has been out for a month courtesy of Nah Collective. And you can also download it from Rollergirl's Bandcamp (below).

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Like Rollergirl on Facebook
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Hear more Rollergirl on Bandcamp

Like Summer Twins on Facebook
Listen to Summer Twins on Soundcloud
Visit Summer Twins' official site
Follow Summer Twins on Twitter
Check Summer Twins on Tumblr
Watch Summer Twins on YouTube

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DYGL I'M WAITING FOR YOU // NASHVILLE [FREE DOWNLOAD]

This bit of music is really quite nice. For some reason, I haven't been able to shake the feeling of just having woken up all day today, leaving me with a hazy, fuzzy mind/brain. Not my favourite feeling. Just makes everything slow and depressing.

Then I re-discovered this band. I first heard them when I... well I can't remember, but I remember thinking, "Yeah, I'll write about that one day" - a few months on, here I am. The first song itself is four months old (second is 6 months old), but who caresss. Not I. They both comes from a Japanese band from Tokyo called DYGL (pronounced "day-glo") and it's called 'I'm Waiting For You'. It's a very nice number that brings to mind miscellaneous Americana - long drives, long beaches, surfing. That kind of sound.

Beginning with a delicate bit of clean guitar work that is very pretty with its reverb, almost fragile sounding, the rest of the song kicks in. It's a lo-fi number, that's for sure. The drums are so fuzzy that you can barely hear them, but it fits the distorted jangle of the guitars just fine, as well as lazily yelping vocals. It suits my mood.

There's a retro hint to it, especially in the way the guitar chords in the chorus move up and down the fret board with that stop-start, foot-tapping pattern. The refrain is yelled out and it all fits together perfectly. A great, catchy song, soaked in a nostalgia for something that is wholly un-Japanese - something I can relate to. You can watch that song live, too, at MARZ - a live venue in Shinjuku, Tokyo.

As for this other song, 'Nashville', there's that same nostalgia, but this time it's tinged with a tragic air. It makes this one more beautiful than 'I'm Waiting For You', simply because of the slow sadness that this song. The bass and chord progressions are something that we've all heard before, but they are just done with such a different attitude that makes them sound fresh.

I think it's the vocals in this song that make it stand out a little more, too. They switch between regular and falsetto, sounding at times as if they are longing for, aching for, something. Some memory or present desire that can't be attained. Given that the song's title is 'Nashville' and the band are from Tokyo - which are worlds away geographically and culturally - I think it can be guessed that it's a lovesong to the American city.

The guitar work is really nice, not just the chords, but far off twanging guitar solos like distant memories, the country-song swing that it has to it. This is a really underrated song that I think a lot more people should know, or at least hear once in their lives. A wonderful sound. There's a video too. Watch it.

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Listen to DYGL on Soundcloud
Follow Nobuki Akiyama (one part of DYGL) on Twitter

HIBOU DUNES EP [STREAM]

A friend of mine often sends me songs to listen to or tells me to listen to something and it's become a bit of a running joke that I sometimes don't like what he sends me. Or I like it, but I don't like it enough to write about it. Well, he told me to listen to Hibou a while ago, and I did. I liked it. What Seattle-native Hibou (pronounced 'ee-boo') - real name Peter Michel - makes is a kind of lo-fi, mournful-yet-energetic surf-indie-pop (I'm not very good at defining things, sorry). His Dunes EP was released recently and I decided to write about it now.

Beginning with 'Sunder', a pogo-sticking minimalist dark surf-rock-type song, we're introduced at once to one of the clear points: nice guitar work, which in this song outs itself as tasty jangling harmonies zipping up and down the fretboard, fitting the speed of the track. That focus on little guitar ditties is carried over to the delicate twiddlings in 'Valium', which appear sprightly in the middle of the song with an oriental twist on their melody. The bright guitar sounds contrast, purposely I would reckon, to the otherwise soft and muffled shade of each song, especially with the almost-mournful strings in 'Valium'.

The brightness of the guitar really comes across in the glittering ripples of guitar in 'Above Us', each note like an echoing flash of light in a darkened landscape, tremolo guitar zooming past as a solo later on. It's this guitar that also provides the totally groovesome hook in last song 'Motion'.

The general sound of the EP ranges from the speedy and intense, as in 'Sunder', to the still-quite-speedy-yet-tranquil as you can hear in 'Above Us' and which is followed by the dynamic 'In The Sun', whose final part is noisy and beat-driven. It is all blanketed over with thick reverb that gives the impression of each track being overcome with a blurry fog, where the sharpness of the instruments is replaced with softer tones that seem to merge into one another.

This almost muddy merging of sounds is a lo-fi quality that, whilst channeling some of the bleak atmosphere that typified much of Joy Division's music, gives each song a wide, warm tone - every space is filled by an instrument playing or reverb of that instrument playing. And in the midst of that full sound, the vocals come through not searching for anyone to hear them but still distinct with their own trail of echo - nonchalant.

Overall it is a rich sound dotted with flights of adept guitar brilliance. There. Nice one Mr Hibou.

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Like Hibou on Facebook
Listen to Hibou on Soundcloud
Hear more Hibou on bandcamp
Follow Hibou on Twitter
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Watch Hibou on YouTube

YOUNG DREAMS YOUNG DREAMS

This Bergen-based Norwegian band, presumably named after the Elvis Presley song of the same name, is a euphoric addition to the wonderful dreampop genre (though describing themselves as "Tropical Pop-Symphonies). Below is the wonderful video of the song, featuring two kids running around an empty (though wonderfully Scandinavian) house, playing and getting up to all sorts - perfectly fitting the sentimental energy rushing through every second of their eponymous track.

This is summer music, full of major scales, soft, heavily-reverbed singing, tropical listen-to-me melodies, and a nostalgic atmosphere that wraps your heart in its warmth. Full of the hope and expectations of being young, the music is quite frankly beautiful - it's folksy, surfy, and totally dreamy; think Animal Collective and you wouldn't be far off. Though, arguably more a 'collective' than their New York counterparts; there are 12 members in the band, headed up by founder, Matias Tellez.


Young Dreams are at the moment signed to the Norwegian electronica label, Tellé Records, and have released two EPs in 2011: Flight 376 and Dream alone, wake together. Both are beautiful.
You can read more about them on their Facebook page and listen to all of their songs on SoundCloud.
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