Beck, British India & More In This Week's Bumper Edition Of 'The Single Life'

Obviously, the glory days of the music video – when the budget for the clip often equalled what it cost to make the music in the first place – are long gone. But there’s still some artists immediately identifiable by their visual footprint, even if only because it’s entirely different than what they’ve done before.

Case in point: Wow (Capitol) could easily be picked as a new Beck work, even before he appears to dance in his perfectly unselfconscious awkward manner somewhere on the streets of Los Angeles. Slow motion cowboys and broncos, dancing kiddies – including his own ideally named celebrity offspring, Cosimo and Tuesday – and other weird shit tumbles by, as a tune that is actually quietly funky in spite of its inherent whiteness unfurls. As ever, the world’s favourite musical Scientologist – with apologies to those Will Smith enthusiasts among you – crams a typical million ideas into a few minutes.

Of course, your production values need not be of Scorsese standard to get the feeling across. The Strums, for the cost of a slab and a bottle of cheap vodka and use of friends with iPhones, make the ideal philosophical punk point of She Only Loves Me ‘Cause I Love The Ramones (Lifeboat). Further boxes are checked: animal onesies, the local Centrelink office, drinking in the daytime, glimpses of Brisbane’s many-storied Story Bridge in the background. All this they manage in less than two minutes. Well played. 

Telling a story in somewhat more impressionistic and cryptic terms, All Our Exes Live In Texas set the deceptively sweet harmonied twang to a storyboard that seems to alternate between Picnic At Hanging Rock, American Gothic, and an episode of Winners & Losers, with added cult siege. The Devil’s Part (ABC Music) is suitably ambivalent in its moral tone: wrongdoing is being done, retribution is likely, but they’re gonna do it anyway. And probably enjoy it while doing so. This comes with their voices intertwining with their usual country-gospel purity, with hints of knowing more than they’re letting on. 

As mood-setting locations go, the ramshackle and just slightly unsettling charm Melbourne’s Luna Park is hard to go past. And since there’s no new Scooby Doo movie currently in the works, The Kills go out of their way to give their Impossible Tracks (Domino) the correct feeling of unease. Mosshart is forever the girl dragging you to go for a ride on the Ghost Train, while Hince’s guitar winds in and out with the desperation and threat of 3am phone message. 

And sometimes all you need is a few fairylights to set the atmosphere. Calling what Sleepy do ‘slacker pop’ might undersell it a bit. There’s a line between carefree and careless. And the dozy ones aren’t quite ashamed of the effortless effort they’re putting in. Edelweiss (Independent) is, perhaps sadly, not a take on the old Sound Of Music tune but probably owes some of it scruffy boy/girl harmony style to the likes of frayed ‘90s pop gems such as The Hummingbirds and their ilk. And there’s no element of wrong in that. 

Probably no musical artist of the last 30-or-more years has been more defined by their video imagery than Peter Gabriel. So, of course there’s an irony that his first new work since recasting so much of his back catalogue via orchestral arrangements of late is a song to soundtrack someone else’s pictures. The Veil (Real World) is the theme song for Oliver Stone’s new movie about the world’s ultimate leaker (that phrase sounded better in my head…) Edward Snowden. Now, while the style throws back to the beds of technology and beautiful architecture of his Gabriel’s best work, the words are mostly just bald-faced propagandising – which you worry might be the film’s approach as well. Part of Gabriel’s charm was keeping some mystery among often-political statements – Games Without Frontiers, Shock The Monkey, f’rinstance – but maybe the world just needs to be hit over the head with the moral and the message in these boneheaded times. 

The world may have changed in the ten years since the various strands of Grandaddy last made music under the name, but they return still wistfully odd as ever, as they laugh and point at some of the world’s stupidities. Much as they always did. Now under the auspices and oversight of Danger Mouse of all people, Way We Won’t (30th Century) still comes with their weary countryish tones underscored with perfectly wonky old-school synths. Long may they do so. Again.

The band is called Palace – but is nothing to do with any of the Will Oldham/Bonnie Prince Billy-related combos. This is English pop music of that thoughtful sort, encouraging you not to be embarrassed by the fact they’re making softly melodic music that won’t scare the horses. Have Faith (Fiction/Caroline Australia) is echoey and shimmering, but never quite jangly. They’re clean cut, but just a little fashionably scruffy. Will success spoil them? Yeah, probably. But whether that turns them into Snow Patrol, or Muse, or Travis, or (*shudder*) Coldplay remains to be seen.

Having noted various degrees of the eccentric in the rock and/or roll last week, there’s thankfully another flood of them this fortnight to keep us going. Long may it be so. Thing was, among those mentioned last time were those few whose determination to be outsiders was almost part of their career plan. Where you kind of hope the majority of those I’m about to lead off with here can’t help their idiosyncrasies. Revelling in them, sure – but not feeling the need to put the neon pointer over their head with ‘LOOK AT ME!’ flashing and buzzing through what they do.

Sometimes, it can almost be genetic. The Steele family seem to have certainly have some of it as a dominant trait. The many guises and attendant silly hats of Luke have maybe overshadowed his sister’s equally singular talent, but the former Little Birdy now has the confidence to work under her own Katy Steele name on her return to the fray, Where’s The Laughter (Love And A Shotgun/Create+Control). Song comes with that distinctive slightly cracking warble of hers, and it soars in the way that suggests she still knows how to make pop music, and getting out before it might have become that bit too quirky for the mainstream of the alternative to accept. 

Even attacking the release of their music in a newish way, those increasingly grand iconoclasts Dave Graney & Clare Moore. They’ve been offering up a song-a-month for most of this year. The Lord Graney’s musical worldview is coloured as much by the beat poets, noir crime authors, and old jazz cats as punk rock. But there’s a view from our red-brick suburbia as well, which manages to see through the bullshit of what any or all of the above can fall into. There’s also a bit of a political angle of late, as the title of Rupert’s Pet’s Grave (Cockaigne) may suggest. Between a studiedly plucked twelve-string guitar and Ms Moore’s tom-tom tattoo, mortality and influence are sagely pondered. 

With the collection of the big and sometimes bent personalities within The Pixies, you’ve come to be pleased that whole seemingly ramshackle machine hangs together without shaking itself apart. Which it actually has at some points, I suppose. But somehow it does. Tenement Song (PIAS) is rooted in a dark reality free of aliens and other oddities that have often appeared in their work. It broods and shrieks as it should, illustrated with mix of Python and Sgt Pepper cut-ups as Travolta, Marilyn and Bowie flash past between rats, cats, blood, and the occasional blood-splattered human organ. That list reflects the kind of pop music they have always made, and which will continue to puzzle and/or delight many.

With previous guises that included the spectacularly-named Salvia Plath, Michael Collins’ give-no-fucks credentials are without question. Add to the list naming his latest band guise, Drugdealer and things are a curious mix of whimsy and jaundiced observation of the shit going down around. There’s a discomfort lurking just out of your peripheral vision, but Easy To Forget (Weird World) – complete with added input from the similarly ‘unusual’ Ariel Pink – seems surprisingly fuelled by 1970s Laurel Canyon weed rather than anything harder. This means there’s some advanced melodicism among the weirdness. Enjoy in moderation. 

There’s a shed out the back of his parents’ farm on the Sunshine Coast, and Edward R holed up in there for some months making music of an intriguing big intimacy. Some use reference points like The National or Bon Iver, but he’s maybe not trying to reach that far. Who’s Going To Love You Now (We Are Golden) builds layer-upon-layer from an opening sprinkled piano that grows and breathes and then seeps away, but the emotional clench of it stays with you even after it’s gone. There’s a feeling he’s still trying to work out exactly what music he wants to make, but this will make you inquisitive about what comes next if nothing else. 

A break-up song of a slightly different manner and form comes from Opposite Sex. They are from New Zealand, specifically Dunedin – the southern town famously birthplace of a whole genre of Kiwi music, the famous Flying Nun school of spiralling guitars and strangulated vocals. And there’s actually still some of that in this. Although Oh Ivy (Dull Tools) would put itself more on a line between art and punk. Maybe. There’s an increasing desperation as a relationship and a psyche both seem to crumble from verse to verse, but it somehow holds itself together enough to make it to the end of the song. You wish them well, and hope they have the Lifeline number. 

There’s something very Brisbane about Mudshadows. Across seven minutes Carpet Head (Independent) unfurls through what seems like a humid heat. It’s gazey and gauzey, heading toward psychedelic, but it’s probably more the result of the end of a couple of hours jamming, when the beers run out, and maybe that plastic cup of goon-bag red from the back of the cupboard was not the best of ideas. But somehow, it too seems to know where it’s going – even if taking a slightly circuitous route to get there. 

British India have become a bit of a conundrum. Ten years in they might almost be too familiar, too comfortable for their homeland audience. Just taken on its merits, I Thought We Knew Each Other (Liberation) is a neatly constructed thing: big clean guitars, utterly catchy chorus, with just a little angst. It’s maybe more suited to an English audience, who wouldn’t take them as just a part of the furniture as we might. And their (in)famous Neighbours appearance of a few years back might even have more cachet there than the damage some claim it did to them here. Such are the mixed blessings of Erinsborough.