Dan Condon: Sick Tunes, June 15, 2012

Hello all. I hope you're sufficiently recovered from the State Of Origin/Harvest announcement/French Open tennis/whatever that Queen celebration was and ready for some more sick tunes, or at least tunes that I deem to be so. I hear quite a few people are actually getting sick at the moment, sorry to hear that. Me? I'm fighting fit and ready for anything.

I slept on the new record from Mean Jeans, a superb power-pop group out of Portland, but I'm pretty happy I finally remembered to spin Life On Mars (which was released in April through Dirtnap Records) because it's a ripper. Catchy as hell and heaps of careless fun, it's exactly the kind of record you want blaring far too loud while you sit in your lounge room with 14 stubbies of XXXX Draught and a pack of smokes on a Friday night, lamenting how poorly your football team is playing. Okay, maybe that's just me. But, listening situation aside, it's fun pop-punk and it should be played as loudly as you can get away with.

While I've never enjoyed one of their live shows, Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti still grab me with their songs the majority of the time but this week it was with someone else's song that they had me gobsmacked. Baby is an old blue eyed soul tune from Donnie and Joe Emerson who I do not know at all, and it's a freaking excellent song. Thankfully Mr Pink and his cronies have ensured it remains excellent with their reimagining of it, which stays pretty close to the original, it must be said.

You can listen to it here, courtesy of 4AD, and search for the original on YouTube.

Some sweet as shit quirky pop outta San Francisco landed in my inbox earlier this week. It initially caught my eye because I thought it was a new record from Pagans, the Cleveland, Ohio punk rock band; but then I realised they broke up in 1982 and have done sweet fuck all since then. No, the record is called Pagans and it's by a psych-pop outfit called The Myonics who I had not heard of before, thankfully it's great and it makes me wanna hear more. Each song is sharp and pithy but packs about 100 interesting, occasionally off-the-wall ideas into its brief duration. It's another one of those records that you could well imagine being released 15 years ago in the height of the slacker indie-rock boom, but that suits me just fine. Here's Never Another. You can stream the whole record on Bandcamp, so have a listen and buy it if you want.

Little Sydney label that could, R.I.P. Society Records, have been putting out sick tunes for a few years but now people who are much better looking and own far trendier clothes than I are listening to the bands on the label and (hopefully) buying the records, which I think is just swell. Also swell is a couple of their forthcoming releases, two of which I'd like to point out to you this week.

I knew nothing about Ruined Fortune before I listened to their song Bulls Eye a couple of days back, but I really fucking liked it so I had to know more. After reaching out to Nic who runs R.I.P. and plays in Bed Wettin' Bad Boys, he revealed it's a project between him and Angie – who plays in one of the best bands ever, Straight Arrows, as well as Circle Pit and Kiosk and Southern Comfort – and from what he said it sounds like the kind of band they're not trying to overthink too much, preferring to just allow themselves to be vessels for the rock'n'roll spirits or something like that. He put it a bit more eloquently. Nic also said that the newer tunes are going to be a fair bit different to this one (which just so happens to feature Owen from Straight Arrows on drums), less straight up punk rock, with a broader kind of sonic pallette than some may expect, so I look forward to hearing more. Anyway, here's Bulls Eye, which will be released as a 7” in a couple of weeks.

The very bizarre Blues Control are releasing their Valley Tangents album through Drag City next week and R.I.P. Society are taking care of the Australian release which is set to be early July. This is one of those psych records that you wish you could have played on yourself, the music is daftly simple and deftly complex all at once, the sounds kinda cheesy but completely fitting at the same time and the overall vibe nice and loose and experimental. Won't lie to you Iron Pigs is not my favourite song from the record but it's the only one I can embed so there ya go.

Frank Ocean has finally announced details of his first “proper” album; Channel Orange is coming out through Def Jam in the States on Tuesday 17 July, no doubt we'll have details of an Australian release before long. The first song he's aired from it is called Pyramids, a song that's at times super smooth, at others woozy and generally far too long to justify listening to more than once or twice a day. Yes, at ten minutes long, it's an interesting first song for Ocean to unleash but it's a damn good one that gives confidence that Channel Orange will be injected with as many creative ideas as we could have hoped for. Of course the main star of the song is Ocean's rich voice, which is bound to be a voice we'll hear plenty more of in the future.

As always, make sure you tweet or email me your songs/your favourite songs and there's every chance you'll end up on this most prestigious blog one day.