Even When Frank Ocean Messes With Auto-tune The Result Is Still Extraordinary

Friends are a handy thing to have. Particularly so in a music sense are those chums whose names you can place in brackets after your own, with their ‘Featuring’ status adding to the appeal of your tune. Luke Yeoward, once lead singer of rockist contenders King Cannons, has such a handy mate in Chris Cheney. The latter provides a typically great guitar tone and twang to Who’s Side Are You On? (Footstomp) that’s somewhere between the surf and the high plains outside of town. It’s a little different than what you’d expect from their band guises – it’s not quite Chris Isaak lounge lizarding, but has some of the echoes and retro feeling of that, with perhaps a little more real grit. 

Elsewhere, Matthew Dear has a name as an electro dance producer, who seems to be heading toward a more synth pop kind of style while sibling buddies of his, Tegan & Sara, sometimes make the trip in the opposite direction as they mess with what people think they should be. Meeting somewhere around the middle, Bad Ones (Ghostly International) has them landing somewhere near the territory of the surprisingly perfect sense of their recent cover of Tears For Fears’ Pale Shelter, as the Quin Twins never-quite-saccharine sisterly harmonies featured role play off against the Dear one’s deeper and darker tones.

Or sometimes, your friends can just offer support, various degrees of collaboration, or just let you mess around in their New York studio for a month or two. Actually, I didn’t even realise Wally de Gotye even had a New York studio, but apparently he does. Best of luck to him. For this project Jordan White works under the band guise of Braille Face – a mask that allows his live work to be whatever he wants it to – from solo guy with couple of keyboards, to a sprawling unit. Run For Your Life (Spirit Level) has already been debuted on BBC6, giving you some idea that his standing may be greater in places other than his homeland. This song is electronica that shifts from foot to foot before settling into an atmospheric pop way, with occasional outbreaks of more real instruments – like the old piano he picked up for a couple of hundred bucks on Gumtree. In other places he’s has a similar puzzling in his voice to his mate Wally, a style which obviously has its appeal. 

Where once such electronics were designed to almost drain the human element from the music, others can make the technology serve to reinforce the emotion and feeling in it. Provider (Blonded) has the superlative Frank Ocean messing with Auto-tune, but even as it warps his keening voice, it works to make it an instrument - a part of the overall, almost counter-intuitive, minimalism of the sound. It almost tip-toes along a rooftop parapet, longing for something, but wandering off on lyrical tangents – “Shoegazer smile like Aphex Twin” what now? You let it wash over you, almost like you’re waiting for something to happen. And then it ends, and you realise that expectation and suspense might have been exactly the point of it. Again extraordinary. 

Things get even more bare-boned with the aptly-monikered Lean Year. The Virginia duo of Rick Alveson – best known as a movie and video director for the likes of Angel Olsen – and Emilie Rex’s floating voice give Come & See (Western Vinyl) give it a gauzed feeling perhaps pitched somewhere between Mazzy Star’s astral detachment – although certainly not as dense in its textures – and Low’s sharp observations. It’s a hesitant waltz, worrying that if you look too closely it may all just melt away. Music for a room half-lit by a bedside lamp and the streetlight through the curtains. 

Conversely, you can pack that four elephants into that Volkswagen. PNAU'A return, Into The Sky (Etc Etc), even comes with the old-style epilepsy warning on the colour and movement of the video. And while Nick Littlemore still seems a little more unsure of his being the designated frontman, the answer on this song at least seems to be to just keep piling layers on. And on, and on. That they know how to construct big and commercial dance pop is unquestionable, but in places it seems there’s almost just too much happening. While pop can often being gloriously grandiose, maybe you can just overdo it on the overdoing it. 

The Pierce Brothers have been taking their wryly swinging #Strayan folkish manner to the world, becoming a bit of a name on the European festival circuit for such things. The Records Were Ours (Warner) is typically rambling and chatty in the style of what they do, as they speak of that most hideous division of property that seems to follow any relationship going south. Pitching perhaps somewhere between Weddings Parties and Things Of Stone And Wood, they are drily smiling through the pain of losing her - and that copy of John Prine’s Greatest Hits – getting just annoyed enough to say ‘fuck’ as the verses uncoil.

About to tour on this side of the Tasman, Mermaidens are one of those Kiwi bands on exactly the right venerable label of their native environment. Satsuma (Flying Nun) – not to be confused with the building Australian band of the same name – comes with the reverbed guitars, Gussie’s haunted vocals and distant harmonies that absolutely belong on that imprint. It breaks loose here and there, without ever completely losing its composure. Psychedelic? Not quite, but you get the feeling they could go that way without too much encouragement.