Os Mutantes… Trop of the pops (Image: Amy Hope Dermont)
The Best of This Week’s Singles: Os Mutantes, Deerhunter, Tunng and more!
Published on April 9th, 2013 | Jonny Abrams
I reckon those are The Best of This Week’s Singles down there. Looks like each one has a review stapled to its underbelly, too.
Right, I’m going in…
Beaty Heart – “Seafood”
This = bonkers! It’s also supremely colourful, melodic and rich of rhythm section, so allow us to implore you to do each of the following: watch the video, listen to the song, wonder to yourself where on Earth this could possibly have come from, be glad that it did. Er, come from somewhere, that is.
All together now: “Sea-ea-ea-ea-EAFOOD!” Tremendous.
Rocksucker says: Four Quails out of Five!
Big Black Delta – “Side of the Road”
We’ve only just reviewed the self-titled album, so let’s just repeat what we said about this one in there:
“Side of the Road” is a great example of how many seemingly oppositional styles the music of Big Black Delta draws together and makes work with a one hundred per cent success rate: it’s like ELO meets Depeche Mode with a Ween-like proclivity for weirdly modulated vocals. No, wait – it’s like Neon Neon meets Daft Punk. Featuring David Byrne.
Its chorus comes in the form of a Steve Mason-esque chant, and the whole thing somehow manages to sound fun and exuberant even with a haunting synth choir loitering in the background, which we’d barely even noticed until the brief isolation of it on the track. It’s incredible, one of those songs that just keeps going from strength to strength within itself.
It’s also got a rather spiffing video. This is how to do pop singles in 2013, folks.
Rocksucker says: Four and a Half Quails out of Five!
Deerhunter – “Monomania”
Sometimes Deerhunter are sublime; sometimes they’re damn near unfathomable. This title track from their forthcoming sixth album rocks donkey balls, some pretty weird ones at that, and for that we welcome it with open arms. Furthermore, it’s fuzzy, frenetic and all sorts of other things beginning with F.
Fun, yes, that’s one.
Four Quails out of Five!
Os Mutantes – “Ganjaman”
The Brazilian Beatles are set to release their second studio album since reforming in 2006, and here they are sounding oddly like The Police: granted, a Tropicalia-infused, more eccentric Police, but Sérgio Dias’s vocals have a decidedly Sting-like twang to them on this one. An unexpected twist from a band who’ve made unexpected twists something of a strong suit over the years; goodness knows what the album holds, but we’re dying to find out.
Rocksucker says: Four Quails out of Five!
The Stepkids – “Sweet Salvation”
Forget salvation: so beset by anticipation are we for this lot’s forthcoming second album that ‘salivation’ might have been more appropriate. Arf! Anyway, their self-titled 2011 debut was desperately unlucky not to make away with Rocksucker’s none-more-prestigious Album of the Year award for 2011; it narrowly lost out to w h o k i l l by fellow Connecticutter Tune-Yards but has has received more plays since then.
This new one, then: it continues in a technicolour, psychedelic funk/soul vein, doling out killer hooks like nobody’s business and setting it all to a brilliant, Jesse Mann-directed video featuring a laboratory, tentacled cartoon aliens and without doubt one of the great lip-synchs of our time, when a puzzled-looking Tim Walsh holds a strange contraption up to Dan Edinberg for the line “show me how”.
These guys are brilliant – barnstorming live, too – and it looks like they’re about to get brillianter. Let’s get that album out, now.
Edit: apparently this has been out for five months. So you don’t feel cheated, here’s something newer:
Also ace. Utterly fluttery and with more of the classic soul strings that lit up “La La” from the first album. We’ll take it!
Rocksucker says: Four and a Half Quails out of Five!
TV Girl – “Girls Like Me”
We adored their The Wild, The Innocent, The Tv Shuffle mixtape/album of last year, and now the San Diego duo are ‘back’ with a song they actually released a couple of years ago. It’s still a ray of sunshine, and you can be in the video without even moving from where you’re sitting right now (no lie, click here), but we want some new stuff.
More! (bangs cutlery on table like an impatient child)
Rocksucker says: Three and a Half Quails out of Five!
Tunng – “So Far From Here”
The first single to be taken from their forthcoming fifth album Turbines, this flaunts all the pastoral loveliness and sense of adventure that have made Tunng so beguiling with and without Sam Genders, who now puts out ace music of his own under the name Diagrams.
We’re really quite taken with “So Far From Here”: it’s tangential without ever making uneasy transitions, it’s weird without beating you over the head with it, and it appreciates that there is more to making a great recording/production than simply writing a good song: dig that crackling organic rhythm section, for example.
Sublime stuff from an underappreciated band.
Rocksucker says: Four and a Half Quails out of Five!
Stay tuned for The Worst of This Week’s Singles on Wednesday and The Rest of This Week’s Singles on Thursday!
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About the Author
Jonny Abrams Editor of Rocksucker and the website's founder, Jonny is passionate about the music he listens to, both good and bad, as well as interviewing his favourite musicians.
