Heave Media

Your Listening Pleasure

A small taste of new music. Babyshambles, White Williams and A Place to Bury Strangers in this week's YLP.

A Place to Bury Strangers – To Fix The Gash In Your Head - LOUD. That's the best way to describe this Brooklyn three-piece. APTBS combines Joy Division, Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine into a powerful wave of distorted sound. Kicking off with a catchy drum machine beat, "To Fix The Gash In Your Head" abruptly lashes out with grinding, fuzzed-out guitar until the verse mellows out with a whispery JAMC-style vocal delivery. A word of caution: if you have hearing problems, A Place To Bury Strangers will probably all but make you deaf. On the plus side, hearing loss never sounded so good.

A Place To Bury Strangers is out now on Killer Pimp Records.

Babyshambles – You Talk - Pete Doherty, ex-Libertines front man and British media circus poster boy, returns with a new record from his current project, Babyshambles. While Doherty's distinctive guitar style has spawned a number of imitators (Arctic Monkeys, Hard-Fi, The Kooks, etc.), he proves that he's still got it with catchy guitar riffs and song structures that vary in tempo and progression. "You Talk" is the perfect example of this, starting off with a familiar-sounding 2-chord guitar riff and handclaps, and shifting into a subtly complex song, while Doherty sings "You talk/you talk a good game/wish I could talk the same/a song is just a game I'm getting good at cheating at." Sure could have fooled us, Pete.

Shotter's Nation is out now on Parlophone Records.

White Williams – New Violence - If you've heard of White Williams, it might be because he has toured extensively with Girl Talk and Dan Deacon. As you might guess, the 23-year-old Cleveland native twists around and plays with pop music in his own eccentric manner, much like his tour mates. However, instead of the eclectic bursts of Dan Deacon or the mash-up sensibility of Girl talk, Williams combines mid-tempo power pop with glitchy sound effects. "New Violence" is sprinkled with quirky 8-bit keyboard bursts, but at the base, it's driven by a combination of drums, bass, palm-muted guitar and Billy Idol-style vocals. The track resembles such 80's one hit wonders such as The Vapors or The Knack – that is, if any of those artists used Casio keyboards or laptop computers in their songs.

Smoke is out now on Tigerbeat 6 Records.

Posted by Jason Prechtel on Nov 02, 2007 @ 12:00 am