Erland and The Carnival - Erland and The Carnival

Singer/guitarist Erland Cooper, The Good The Bad & The Queen’s Simon Tong and drummer David Nock from Paul McCartney’s The Fireman make up this heralded new offering from the UK.

Deriving their name from Jackson C Frank’s song, My Name is Carnival - a cover of which appears on the album - the trio play catchy, psych-freak folk with a mix of romantic and unsettling subject-matter. Lyrics and music are gleaned from bits and pieces of existing poetry and songs. Words from the likes of William Blake and Leonard Cohen are used and reworked, while Derby Ram takes from newspaper cuttings in its true story of teenager who - coaxed and filmed on camera-phones by a crowd below - jumped from the top story of a car park in an English town.

Britain has a rich tradition of bands that make slightly odd yet irrepressibly jaunty psychedelic folk music, and there are reference points aplenty here. Love Is a Killing Thing opens with the pots-and-pans instrumentation of Mystery Jets, You Don’t Have To Be Lonely has a Jim Noir-esque chorus, the aforementioned Derby Ram has a Super Furry Animals electo outro and there’s barely a song on the album that doesn’t sound a bit like The Coral. There are a few nice pace changes too, like the hushed Disturbed This Morning, with Cohen’s poetry given a pretty backdrop of acoustic guitars and horns.

Quintessentially English in its sound, Erland and The Carnival is a weird and wonderful treat, and potentially one of the best debuts from a UK band this year.

The Bundles - The Bundles

The Bundles’ eponymous debut album may have only taken a few days’ studio time to record but, in reality, it was over eight years in the making. Beginning with a get-together between Kimya Dawson and Jeffrey Lewis in 2001, The Bundles became a full band a year later with the inclusion of Anders Griffen on drums and Jeff’s brother Jack on bass. However, due to the growing success of their individual projects, it took until 2009 for the quartet (along with troubadour Karl Blau) to record an album.

The Bundles sees those original Dawson and Lewis’ demos tidied up and given depth with extra instrumentation and some rather nice choral singing at appropriate junctures. There are a few new tunes too, which were written on the spot by all five artists in the studio. A mix of sweet, slow acoustic ditties and lo-fi garage, the album’s ten songs often have a Moldy Peaches-style structure to the vocals, with Lewis and Dawson alternating or singing different lines on top of each other at the same time. This sense of ordered confusion layers the songs, as different snippets of each lyrical thread take prominence randomly.

While possibly only for existing fans of the anti-folk genre, this DIY, raw and ramshackle album has warmth and charm without the slightest hint of pretension and is another example of the honesty of the individual members of The Bundles. As Dawson herself puts it on Over The Moon, “Everything that I am doing isn’t the means to an end/It’s the means of creating a meaningful existence/And I just wanna sing with my friends.”

Slow Club - Yeah, So

English duo Slow Club have a familiar boy-on-guitar/girl-on-drums dynamic. However, while this may suggest that Charles Watson and Rebecca Taylor are a couple of White Stripes wannabes, in truth their sound is closer to the cuteness of Noah and The Whale than the ragged blues of Jack and Meg.

On their debut long-player, the gentle acoustic melody of opener When I Go is followed by the foot-stomping indie-pop of Giving Up On Love. This dichotomous pattern continues throughout, as slower tracks are interspersed with more upbeat numbers. While the softer songs show off some pretty harmonies (imagine The Magic Numbers going anti-folk), the high-points on Yeah, So are largely more upbeat, like the Rockabilly romp of It Doesn’t Have To Be Beautiful. With a big chorus that’s hard not to sing along to, it’s one of a few really memorable, uplifting tunes. Similarly, the shouty skiffle of Because We’re Dead is good fun. Throughout the record, Taylor proves herself to have a lovely voice, with a touch of the Laura Marlings about it.

Amongst an array of innocent love songs there is some darker wordplay, and plenty of wit too (“The bones inside my shins are crumbling/It’s from all the crunking I’ve been doing,”). Largely though, for all their unconventionality (in amongst bashing the stand-up drums Taylor finds percussion from bottles, spoons and chairs) the Sheffield pair actually offer fairly simple and accessible boy/girl melodies and, while Yeah, So might be more twee than Belle and Sebastian going cardigan shopping, it’s certainly charming enough to be a worthwhile listen.