Neil Young's 'Indian Giver' Shows He's Still Grumpy After All These Years

There’s seems to be a point many artists reach where they rationalise that this pop music thing can be a serious business. That rather than just singing about how swollen or broken their heart is they can make BIG STATEMENTS about BIG ISSUES, because people want to know how that guy who sang about partying all night and falling for that girl feels about such things.

Seems Birds Of Tokyo have reached that point. Things have got far grander and darker with their album-previewing new song, Brace (Eleven/EMI). Words like ‘cinematic’ and the ever-popular ‘dystopian’ are thrown around. They even draft in producer David Bottrill – previous credits including well-known laughing boys Tool and Muse – to add the necessary weighty gravitas to it. So, we’ve reached the point where this ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around - but it does retain some of their way with an anthemic singalong suitable for large venues.

There are other ways to make such warnings or calls to arms. The new Oliver Stone film, dealing with the life-and-death ethical dilemma that is Edward Snowden’s leaking of secrets, is coming at it in some different ways. Last week, it was Peter Gabriel’s nagging worries and philosophical ponderings of the situation, but Boys Noize's contribution is the one designed to increase your jittery paranoia that someone is collating your keystrokes. Mayday (Inertia) is the bitter urgency that the revolution may not be televised, but drone footage of it will be on YouTube by this afternoon. Depending on which side of the argument you’re on, just adjust your foil hat or clear your browser history before the AFP, ASIO and/or Border Force find out your favourite ‘actress’ on Pornhub.

And some have been taking the fight to the big end of town seemingly forever. Neil Young doesn’t need gimmicks to send out his warnings. There’s no need for impressionistic poetry: this is the plain-speaking of telling you that wanting to run an oil pipeline through pristine Dakota land is a pretty fuck-headed idea. Even the title of Indian Giver (Reprise) gives further clue that Neil knows who the villains are, as indigenous rights and land are trampled in the name of corporate dollars. You know, just like here. Neil Young, still grumpy after all these years. Rightly.

Or you can just go for an early contender for one of those feel-good-hit-of-the-summer type things. There is something brightly messy in what Hey Geronimo do. Bake A Cake (Chugg) rushes enthusiastically at you like a Labrador puppy on a polished floor, all paws flailing and colouring just a bit outside the lines. To further guarantee good-natured airplay other than via the usual sources, video also contains much footage of the man-hit-in-crotch-by-football funniest home video variety, because as Homer so eloquently observed, we all know ‘…that works on so many levels’.

As we head toward the climax of the various sportsball seasons, the football club song becomes a currency. And it can go terribly wrong. Besides running in the penultimate position this year (sounds a bit classier than merely ‘second-last’…), probably the Roosters’ worst performance of the last few years was rewriting The Village People’s Macho Man into the team song. Thankfully, that idea was fairly soon dropped. Regrettably, the Swans’ use of banjo in their anthem is still there. However, in Finland things are different. Let us hail, hail the black and the, er, black – the team colours of FC Lahti. Thus, there’s a certain synergy to getting fellow local heroes Korpiklaani to provide the team's soundtrack. So, for the prosaically named FC Lahti (Nuclear Blast), the band come on like a Scandinavian Dropkick Murphys, all accordions and fiddle at punk speed. Ylös! (OK, I went out with a Finnish girl in my youth…)

Struggling for a segue, we’ll go from Helsinki and environs, to the Bombay Bicycle Club – even if they were actually from Crouch End, north London. Ed Nash, formerly of a member of said pedallers collective, is now operating as Toothless. Rather than the straight indie of before, he now makes a music that you seem to catch out of the corner of your eye – or ear, and intrigues you that way. The Sirens (Caroline Australia) is a wobbly march, which engages fully as The Staves sweet-but-edged folkish-sister harmonies drift in.

Gordi’s international profile grows, even in such unlikely ways as being part of the choir backing Bon Iver when he turned up on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show the other week. So Here We Are (Liberation) as the saying and the song goes. Somehow lush and minimal at once, this is that sleepy conversation in the back of the Uber on the way home. Her voice remains so very human, with some doubt and pondering to all come together as something that really does seep into all of you.

It’s sometimes a little difficult to pinpoint just what Warpaint do. Some of what they do veers toward psychedelic, or even old-school prog in style. But the layered voices of White Out (Rough Trade/Remote Control) sit in different places, then overlap and sometimes almost scrape against one another to create a tension. It’s deceptively intricate in some places, and depending on your mood you may find it challenging, or just complicated. I’m prepared to go with ‘damn good’.