5 songs you should hear this week - w/e 2 February

Every day we play you a track that has just grabbed our attention. As soon as we hear it, we send it into the digital ether for you all to enjoy. Sometimes it's an exclusive, sometimes it's a favourite artist and, at other times, it'll be someone brand new. Here's this week's choice selection. Just click on the links to see the full Just Added playlist:

Creep Show – Modern Parenting
This project unites big-hearted 6 Music favourite John Grant with Cabaret Voltaire’s Stephen Mallinder and the dark analogue electro of Phil Winter and Benge (the latter three record together under the name Wrangler). According to Mallinder, Creep Show is: “a beast with multiple heads and voices, so no one is quite sure who is saying and doing what. Everything is permitted and everything is possible.” Their collaborative album, Mr Dynamite, was recorded in Cornwall with a big collection of drum machines and synthesizers. It will be released by Bella Union in March and this is the second track we’ve heard (after the brilliantly named Pink Squirrel, which we’ve been enjoying on the Morning Show). It’s slinky, hand clappy, and John hits some brilliant bottom notes, whilst showcasing an impressive vocal range.

Wye Oak – The Louder I Call, The Faster It Runs
For their fifth album Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack took turns to fly to each other’s cities for a week, or so, at a time (she’s based in Durham, North Carolina, while he calls Marfa, Texas, home). Hunkering in home studios, to combine songs sketched miles apart, they found their necessarily short sessions were subject to less second-guessing and hesitation. And the result was: “an unabashed and unapologetic Wye Oak”. This is the title track for the album which will follow (via Merge) on the 6th April. Lauren loves this band and we highly recommend that you spend some time with Jenn’s Flock Of Dimes album as well (2016’s If You See Me, Say Yes).

David Byrne – This Is That
We were lucky enough to debut this track, when Mr Byrne came to visit on Wednesday, giving us a reason to be cheerful and the opportunity to hear more from American Utopia. Byrne’s creative collaborators on the LP (due out 3rd March) include his old pal Brian Eno, Mercury Prize winner Sampha, and the Brooklyn-based composer and producer Oneohtrix Point Never (who teamed up with Iggy Pop last year – to gorgeous effect – on his award-winning film score for Good Time). On this track, David appears to get a little meta, lyrically, singing about the experience of music itself: “When the song comes on, when I hear them say, everything stops, everything changed. It’s nothing special, it’s nothing profound but something about the way it sounds. When the melody ends, and the rhythm kicks in, it knows where I’m at, and it knows where I’ve been.”

Insecure Men – I Don’t Wanna Dance (With My Baby)
Band name of the week from the Fat White Family’s Saul Adamczewski and we’re always interested to hear what this South Londoner is up to. The Insecure Project unites him with Ben Romans-Hopcraft, a schoolmate and “stabilising influence” and it was recorded at Sean Lennon’s studio in NYC (while Saul was working on the Moonlandingz album). Insecure Men’s self-titled release is reported to take inspiration from sources as diverse as the exotica of vibraphonist Arthur Lyman, the early electronic pop of Perrey and Kingsley, the supreme smoothness of The Carpenters, the songwriting chops of Harry Nilsson, and the hypnagogic uncanniness conjured up by David Lynch. Or, as Saul describes more pithily: “pretty music with a dark underbelly to it”.

Laurie Anderson & Kronos Quartet - The Water Rises/Our Street Is A Black River
It’s a BOGOF deal for our final Just Added of the week: two interwoven tracks, from the multi-talented, multi-media musician Laurie Anderson and San Francisco’s long-established Kronos Quartet. Their collaboration brings together electronic sounds and acoustic strings for Landfall, which will be released by Nonesuch on the 16th February. It was inspired by Anderson’s experience of Hurricane Sandy and will be accompanied by a book (titled All The Things I Lost In The Flood). Laurie has described the tracks as “stories with tempos” while Kronos founder David Harrington has clearly enjoyed Laurie’s irrepressible creativity: “Her sense of play and fun and her continuous experimenting make her the ideal chemist (or is it alchemist?) in the laboratory of music.”

You can hear all the tracks via the Just Added Playlist

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