High Places - 'Vision's The First...'

One of the invented traditions of the household is that over the course of the festive period - roughly defined as covering the spell between Christmas Eve and whenever we must depart to bring light to the lives of our adoring relatives in a series of small, drab and not even particularly snowy northern towns - only appropriately seasonal music may be played. Fortunately or otherwise I have over the considerable stretch of my existence acquired a vast quantity of poor grade yuletide indie tuneage by the yard. There’s about a solid day’s worth of such, which each December 24th gets duly transferred to the trusty MP3 player and before New Year’s Eve (and there are, of course, even one or two decent songs about that particular dark night of the soul too) is equally quickly removed to free up some space for further swathes of live Fall bootlegs. The thing is, Christmas tunes can’t be innately bad, because even The Fall have recorded several of them over the long, long years. It’s just, they’re never as good as a band’s proper, non-festive work, are they? Would you choose to listen to even The Fall’s Xmas offerings ahead of their regular stuff? Just like in the real world, in music, no one saves their best for Christmas.

So it will come as some relief on the train north when once again regular listening habits will be resumed. First up will be this tune, from High Places, with which I am thoroughly beguiled. As usual, I am late on this one, and, as is equally customary, I know next to nothing about the band. This surfaced as a single on Upset the Rhythm, who also put on catchable gigs in old London town, and subsequently led me to a CD available from the redoubtable Thrill Jockey label. It’s a mysterious, slight and charming thing, distorted, like an favourite old tune found mangled on a chewed up Memorex tape (and I swear, cassette tapes are about to make a comeback). It’s a jaunty pop number - I hear Rihanna’s immortal Umbrella in this - mingled with and undermined by the shimmering clutter you get in A Sunny Day In Glasgow and the by now customary global village rhythms. It's a fractured kaleidoscope of a song. A smidgen of steel drum I hear at one point, for example. You could dance to this, but you'd probably dislocate something.

This is not the sort of website that offers up top ten lists of the year, but if it was, there's a good chance this would be on it. Once again I note in closing they're from New York. They own us these days.

The Wave Pictures - 'Long Island'

Our love for the Wave Pictures is already a matter of record, although when they first crossed the path of attention, we admitted some doubts. Not so now. We’ve since been utterly sucked into their world, and there seems to be little we can, or indeed want, to do about it. That single, I Love You Like A Madman and subsequent LP Instant Coffee Baby were our gateway drugs. Live they then clinched the deal. They’re pretty much the ultimate finely honed, value for money, good time guaranteed live band, inheriting the mantle - not that any criticism is thereby implied - from our old friends the Broken Family Band, as the act you could catch time and again at one of their frequent live shows and always know you were going to enjoy yourself. Now we see the Wave Pictures whenever we can, and we raid backwards through their back catalogue, past previous LP Sophie (while noting with bewilderment the inclusion of Instant Coffee Baby on the best debut LP of the year shortlist of those with it hep cats the Guardian) to the slew of early, rough and ready and utterly charming CD-Rs.

Long Island - wherein someone looks beautiful in lubricant - first surfaced, unless you know better, on Sophie, and was recently given a wash and brush up as part of a digital only EP, Pigeons, from the behemoth iTunes. Being venerators of the physical object, we’re not sure if we approve of the idea of the virtual only release (although we love seven inchers that come with free download codes, which help us sleep easier at nights) but this would appear to have been done for good, green reasons. Hey, we care about the planet here, even to the extent of reducing our meat rations and taking the occasional holiday in Wales, so this is to be applauded. This is the one where they walked to the studio, ran the equipment on wind power, mastered it using discarded brown, organic bread crusts, had only fresh rainwater for lunch etc. In its original form Long Island was a firm family favourite and in its new guise it only gains from a more muscular re-working. You could dance to this one, prior to hoping to win a grand in your hand on a Friday night. It’s all pianos and handclaps and sparkly, slinky clothes. You know when Orange Juice went disco? It’s nearly as good as that.

In short, we like. But then, you knew we were always going to do. And now we're off to see them live again.