laeto - "ecuador"

First new Laeto track in five years! From the eternally forthcoming 3rd LP, picks up pretty much where 'Zwoa' left off. Good stuff. This is a nice stop motion-style video. Enjoy!

fm belfast - "par avion"

FM Belfast: Par Avion from Torfi Frans Olafsson on Vimeo.

I've mentioned FM Belfast before, briefly in my Best of 2008 round up. I stumbled accross them when I went to Stockholm, playing an outdoor stage in a small garden surrounded by office blocks as part of the culture festival. On that occasion there were three members performing (male and female vocals and synth/laptop guy), but they can number as many as eight. While they're good on record, I think they come across better live - generally good fun, and dropping in little covers/interludes and musical jokes adding to the party atmosphere.

This video for the excellent "Par Avion" has been pieced together from 2,500 still photographs of the full band's performance at the 2007 Iceland Airwaves festival. It did make me feel a little wobbly to begin with, but it's a neat trick.

I never did get around to a write-up of all the great bands I saw largely by chance over that weekend, so in lieu of that here's a list of highlights:

Rigas - Hot Chip style electro-pop.
Ost & Kjex - Norwegian funky house, live set is like Prince fronting Underworld.
Rickard Jäverling - beautiful slow-core.
Marions - lovely! Already covered here.
Yamon Yamon - brilliant melodic post-rock, very Sea & Cake, American Analog Set, Life Without Buildings.
Robert Svensson - 80's style pop.

If that's not enough, The Swedish Model is a label collective with an excellent website with plenty of MP3s to download from most of their artists.

In predictable fashion, I took quite a few photos of most of those bands, which you can find here.

annie - "anthonio"

Full version of the new Annie single "Anthonio" finally been online. I've been trying to make up my mind based on clips for weeks now, so this is A Good Thing. Produced by Richard X, and hopefully from a forthcoming album.

dananananaykroyd - "black wax"

In order to counter the grumpiness of the last post, here's the video for Dananananaykroyd's great new single, "Black Wax". It's all about the Byker Grove "Woo!"s. I missed them due to work that time they actually made it to Dundee, and it looks like work will again stop me from going to either of the Edinburgh or Glasgow dates on the forthcoming tour. Maybe one day!

findo gask - "one eight zero"

This has been out a while, but I've only just spotted the lovely animated for it - Findo Gask's recent single "One Eight Zero". I have fond memories of playing shows with the early incarnation of Findo back in 2004, when they were barely out of school and before they had migrated to Glasgow. They were great then too, but pretty different to what they are now - pretty shoegazey. "Bright Ideas" was a great tune, would love to hear an updated version of it.

Anyway, things seem to be going really well for them, 2 well received singles in the last year or so and remixes for Bloc Party, Psapp and the Long Blondes. Can't be long now before there's an album and superstardom - frankly, if La Roux is the best that the "industry" has to offer, it'll be a massive crime for Findo Gask to become anything less than gods.

As for the single itself, all three tracks are fantastic - it actually sounds more like the opening three songs of an album. "One Eight Zero" you can hear for yourself above, "Jigsaw" is similar but more downbeat, with big trancey synth stabs and "Nubo" is gorgeous, all languid trumpet lines, vocal harmonies and chiming guitar. Overall, the sound is somewhere between Hot Chip, Cocteau Twins, Cornelius and Barbara Morgenstern.

Buy/download here.

kaput: fat sams, fri 06 feb 2009

Here, in handy playlist form, is the video of our set supporting The Hazey Janes at Fat Sams a couple of weeks ago. Filmed by Mr Christopher Lee-Marr, of the wonderful Esperi. The audio is quite quiet, so you'll need to turn it up loud.

kaput: drouthies, thu 16 0ct 2008

A few videos of three of the five songs we played at our gig in Drouthies back in October. Only just got the files to put online this week. We're playing at Fat Sams on this coming Friday (6th Feb), should hopefully get that filmed too.

1. "Happy Birthday"


2. "Captain Capo"


3. "Eyes Like Palaces"

king creosote - "twin tub twin" (live)

In honour of the amount of laundry I've been doing over the last few days, here's a YouTube video of King Creosote performing "Twin Tub Twin" at the 2008 Green Man festival. I've long wished that he'd record a studio version with the band in the style of the live version, but I know that's pretty unlikely. There's an edited version with slightly better sound here. The original version of "Twin Tub Twin" can be found on the album 'Rocket D.I.Y.' (Fence/Domino, 2005).

In the summer I had the idea of a laundry or housework themed CD, but got pretty stuck after this song so had to give up in the end.

kaput - captain capo... (again, live at drouthies)

Another video of "Captain Capo...", this time taken on a camera phone by Maxi at our Drouthies gig on August 16th, with Esperi and White Heath. There's photos that I took of those bands here, and more video to come once it's been uploaded, courtesy of Cat.

I have clearly failed miserably in my attempts to write regularly in this blog (last post in July!), but I guess I've just been pretty busy (and very lazy). Still, I think it would be good to force myself to write regularly, even if just to keep my brain ticking over, so will persevere with it.