The Single Life: St Vincent, Hot Chip, Morrissey & More

For a medium where you’re probably meant to see with your ears, pop music still has various balances of sound and vision - even though we’re well past the era of cinematic budgets for those four-minute commercials called music videos.

In the case of Hot Chip it sometimes reaches the point where the visuals are perhaps more memorable than the song: Y’know, that one where they shoot lasers from their eyes, and then the other guys come into the gig and push through the crowd, and…stuff. Anyway, Need You Now (Domino) keeps up the tradition of filmic storylines as this gets all David Lynchian with doppelgangers, time-slips, and angst-ridden stares into the middle-distance, but with the bonus they’ve actually built something truly melancholic and longing around a 1983 disco tune of the same name. The artist of said tune was Sinnamon – remember that, it’s very likely to be a question at a music trivia night fairly soon. And just as you think you’ve worked it out, they throw in a storm of 10cc infinite layers of harmonies. And then your brain melts. 

And some just change their entire aesthetic as the music goes elsewhere. Following the acclaim of her eponymous album, St Vincent chooses to offer her first something new after that via letting it play over the credits of Girls. Then appear, barely recognisable, on one of the talk shows – the electric shock hair and nervous teetering replaced with a slicked-back and kohl-eyed look to go with the new melodicism of Teenage Talk (Loma Vista). Whether this is the new way, or just a sidetrack we’ll have to wait and see.

Others are perhaps trying to find something of the grumpy power of their more youthful days. Conor Oberst – yes, he of Bright Eyes and that potentially horrifying cross pollination known as ‘emo-folk’ – revisits his even more unlikely kinda punk racket of Desaparecidos, although City On The Hill (Epitaph) is apparently a precursor to a full-scale album project from the nameplate. There’s a restless energy to it, which may well be Oberst exorcising some of the darkness he’s endured over the past year. Or he might get bored, and go back to something else.

And then there’s music where an unexpected element somehow fits, even when you wouldn’t expect it to. Little-to-nothing has been heard of Gypsy & The Cat for a couple of years, but Climb Into The Music (Independent) shows their warm electronica intact, here with the wild card of a very human ghost in the machine as Paul Kelly’s unmistakable tones waft through. That so simple, but so felt, addition takes the song to a somewhere higher place which cajoles you in and holds your attention.

Of a more frayed charm, Darts. Second offering from their Westward Bound album is Aeroplane (Rice Is Nice). It’s quiet then loud, then quiet, then loud - as can be the fashion. The delivery is oddly nervy as it finds its anxious way to a chorus that never seems to quite resolve its own worries. But in its apparent detachment and mixed feelings it somehow falls together to become something provoking a strange affection – which you’re not even quite sure they would appreciate. I think I love it, but feel they need to be approached carefully, lest you alarm the fragility, and spoil it.

Although with its membership somewhat rearranged and reconfigured, Rainy Day Women still make the languid summery noise so suggestive of their Western Australian native habitat. Matter Of Time (littleBIGman) sits under one of the few shady trees and watches The Triffids’ station-wagon disappear into the heat-hazed distance leaving some dust behind. That said, there seems to be some hope in it, that whatever they’re waiting for will come back around. You kinda hope they’re right.

Then back to some more perhaps puzzling colour and movement. Catlips was once a keyboardist for Kucka, and has some of the sideways glances of her former collaborator among the synthesised bubbles and squeaks of Fade (Pilerats). It’s of a slightly alternative nightclub, but maybe not quite of said venue’s dancefloor. More like sitting in one of the booths down the back, deciding whether you should get angry or sad as the bubbles in your $17.50 Cosmopolitan go flat.