The Single Life: Josh Pyke, The Kite String Tangle, Tim Wheatley & More Drop New Tunes

There’s a certain spectrum of behaviour expected of your rock and/or pop stars. OK, the old model of TVs out the hotel room window has thankfully pretty much gone, but let us have a word of praise for the good bloke, the ‘ordinary’ fella. No less than Tim Rogers – a man who’s probably on several such spectrums all of his very own – gave an onstage shout-out to Josh Pyke the other night, merely for being that nice guy that he is. To go with his well-deserved ‘Best Of..’ album that’s on the way, Josh offers Into The Wind (Ivy League), which will go nicely with his decade of work marked by a lack of pretention, and quietly swinging songs which come as utterly open and honest conversations, with that relaxedness you’d have on the couch as you settle in to watch Rage for a couple of hours to wind down after a night out. 

Conversely, sometimes you have to change it up – or down. Tim Wheatley kicked around his homeland for a while, offering his alt-folkie musings to fair-to-middling response, but eventually bit the bullet and made the move to LA. Her Wicked Ways (Sony) is an introduction to the new model. The cascades of hair suitable for moody stares into the distance has gone, the stylist also suggesting a belt and braces look to go with the new scrubbed-up-but-trying-to-look-casually-dishevelled grooming regime. Song and production are similarly organised by well-credentialed committee, but some brass seeping in from the next room, and that conspiratorial slight rasp in his voice keep it mildly interesting. 

Or you can go for the full almost-cliché rock and roll cautionary tale, like Peter Perrett's. He was responsible for one of the truly great one-hit-wonder moments of the new wave era with Another Girl, Another Planet before eventually being found in the classic investigative journalist manner of hopping in a London taxi, reading the name on the cab licence and inquiring “Hey, didn’t you used to be…?”. Insert usual story of egos, drugs, and record company fuckery – and here we are. An Epic Story (Domino) is not actually about those dramas, but a celebration of the woman who’s stuck at it with him the intervening 30+ years. His flat drawl still echoes of that 1980s era, although having two of his sons in the band kind of balances the past and present. It all appears nothing if not sincere.

The shorter comeback trail, as in ‘Oh, you went away?’ offers the return of that splendid rockstar name of Charlie Fink. The Finkster, should you need illumination, fronted the splendidly middling Noah & The Whale who’ll you recall from that video where the band frolicked about on a tugboat, the name of which I really can’t be bothered recalling, and being the combo from which Laura Marling originally emerged. Anyway, the band wound down, and The Finkanator busied himself mostly writing for and appearing in the theatre – the Old Vic, no less. I Was Born To Be A Cowboy (Hangman) has some of that staginess about it, with an arched and sardonic vocal pitching somewhere between Lou Reed and Dylan. It all comes as seeming just a little forced, but that might be what happens when you’re playing to the back stalls.

OK, let’s go for something that may have a positive result. Australian rap and hip-hop can be a fraught, and horribly hollow and culturally bereft thing. But not here. Baker Boy is a kid from North East Arnhem Land, with all the weight of good and bad that entails, and Cloud 9 (IHAP) comes at you a joyous naïve enthusiasm, particularly when it breaks down into young Danzel’s native Yolngu language.

And some cultures and nationalities just seem to always punch above their weight. Gooan dag, Iceland! Vök are an ‘electronic pop band’ from that overachieving little volcanic rock, and don’t you just love a good umlaut? with Breaking Bones (Nettwerk/Footstomp) is kind of everything you’d imagine the above descriptors would make it: spacious and atmospheric, a bit off-centre as it tumbles through a few different moods, including outbreaks of slightly restrained musical frenzy. But again you’re kind of left with the question, while nobody much ever says Reykjavik in a song, are there any bad or simply uninteresting bands there? Or are they just cast into the sea as herring bait? 

And while that last couple absolutely scream their spirit of place, our boy Danny Harley is making absolutely modern, absolutely international electronic pop under his The Kite String Tangle guise. The Prize (Exist/Warner) has its eyes on it. The best trick perhaps being that while mostly made by machines, it retains some humanity. Some of that comes from the obligatory featured guest, Bridgette Amofah, whose voice comes in to take what is already a niftily constructed artifice and take it somewhere higher.

Also getting bigger, a band always happy to bill themselves as one of Austinmer’s finest, Sun Sap. Love Is Gone (Independent) is more of the neat mix of surf and soul that’s marked them, coming at you in a suitably summery manner, with some offhand brass than swirls around before it gets a bit mid-period Hunters & Collectors as it heads into the choruses. Add the novelty of the 360-degree film-clip to make you dizzy on your touchscreen device, and they’re a band that seems worthy of wider notice, although we’re all a bit unsure about how to go about that these days.