We here at TGTF really love those Mancunian blokes from Delphic. Or more accurately, we love the music they make.

The words ‘you’ve said enough / you’ve said too much / you only focus on her touch / you halcyon‘ start the band’s next scheduled single, ‘Halcyon’. To me, those have to be some of the most evocative opening words to any pop song of recent memory. In the promo video to go with the song, three mysterious men in hooded capes stand on a rocky bluff then have a penchant for drumming on rocks, and girls in flowing grey robes dance zen balletic moves. The song sounds so other-worldly that perhaps this is the reason for this unusual video. A gold star to whoever can explain to me what’s going on at the end with all the string!

Delphic’s next single ‘Halcyon’ (from their debut album ‘Acolyte’) will be released on 15 March.

As promised, here’s the second half of the interview with David and Peter Brewis of Field Music after their gig in Brooklyn on 30 January 2010. In this half, we discuss topics as diverse as their musical influences, music history, music piracy, “staycations” and the future of the band – aren’t you glad you came back?

Note: The audio of this interview is located below. The transcript is included below and after the cut. Descriptions of what is happening have been placed between asterisks, i.e. “*Peter enters the room*”

MP3: Field Music Interview – Part 2

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Well, to me at least, you seem to have a very unique sound. So are there bands that you listen to that influence you?

Peter: Thank you very much! Oh, yeah, yeah…

And what are some of those bands?

Peter: Contemporary bands?

Whatever.

Peter: Beatles, Roxy Music, the Band, Fleetwood Mac, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush…

David: Thelonious Monk hugely for me, in terms of what he does with melodies.

Peter: And Duke Ellington in terms of arrangement. Béla Bartók. Stravinsky. And really, Beethoven as well, but that goes without saying. Bach. Erm, Prince?

David: On the new album there’s loads of things where I’ve been “inspired” (in quotation marks) by David Bowie, i.e. I’ve stolen things from him or I’ve done a song and thought “I should do this in the style of David Bowie”.

Peter: Peter Green[of Fleetwood Mac], Eric Clapton…

David: He’s gonna list all of the different guitarists…Deerhoof, for me, Fiery Furnaces. Not in, not so much that I would take ideas from them, just that I’m like jealous of some of the things that they do.

Peter: I mean, everything that’s good. The thing about music is, that, it’s really, what’s the word, it creates dichotomies.

David: But we’re in an era which should embrace the dichotomy.

Peter: Absolutely, absolutely.

David: [whispers] Sorry!

Peter: You hear something, and you take the things that you want from it, and you edit out the things that you don’t want.

Pick and choose.

Peter: So for us, any bit of music that you hear, it might be something that I don’t really like at all, however, it might just be that we edit ourselves so that whatever happens we don’t do that.

Peter: We used to do that when we were very young. Well, not very young, like 23 year-olds, we used to write manifestos, and things that we weren’t allowed to do. Like I don’t know if you know the Futureheads…

Yeah, yeah.

Peter: They’re a Sunderland band. When we were very young, me, David and Baz and Ross and Jaff from the Futureheads, we used to write, basically, these art manifestos and things we weren’t allowed to do in the band. We weren’t allowed to cross our hands not matter what, so even if you were a drummer, you weren’t allowed to cross your hands, you had to like [mimes rotating in seat without moving his arms].

That’s a bit ridiculous.

Peter: Well it is ridiculous, it is ridiculous. BUT, it’s a process, it’s a boundary in which you can do anything that you want, within that little frame. I find that sort of thing really interesting. Really, really interesting. Giving yourself a basically ridiculous boundary…I mean, we did that with the first Field Music album, really. We said we were gonna have a really limited palette of sounds, and sonically it’s gonna be really boring, it’s gonna be pretty straightforward. It’s gonna be no sonic surprises: acoustic guitar, clean electric guitar, some distortion…just some guitar bits and drums and pinao, and how can we make that different? How can we arrange that to be a different thing?

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Pop-tastic Danes Alphabeat have announced a string of 2010 UK tour dates for April in support of their new album (which Jess reviewed here).

Tickets are on sale now, priced at £12 each, except for London which is £14 a ticket.

Sunday 18th April 2010 – Norwich Waterfront
Monday 19th April 2010 – Leeds Stylus
Tuesday 20th April 2010 – Newcastle Northumbria Uni
Thursday 22nd April 2010 – Edinburgh Picturehouse
Friday 23rd April 2010 – Glasgow ABC
Saturday 24th April 2010 – Manchester Academy 2
Sunday 25th April 2010 – Oxford Academy
Tuesday 27th April 2010 – Brighton Concorde 2
Wednesday 28th April 2010 – London Koko (£14)
Thursday 29th April 2010 – Bristol Anson Rooms

Spirit Spine is the name that 19 year old Joseph Denny from Bloomingdale, Indiana creates these pretty amazing mixes. For fans of Washed Out, Panda Bear and Animal Collective. This is his debut UK release on label Make Mine (Gold Panda, Suckers etc).

The canned bio says:

The sound is cavernous, drenched in reverb and delay and bursting with melody. But what’s surprising is that Denney records and produces his music using Garage Band, the music-making software that comes bundled with every Mac computer. This is uber-DIY stuff – free to produce, but massive in scope and vision.

This debut single begins with Crashers (Highs And Lows), a science-fiction-inspired song about the fate of the final two people on earth. “They don’t love each other enough to procreate and repopulate the earth but they also won’t kill each other to finally finish off the human race,” says Denney.

Download, listen and enjoy below:

MP3: Spirit Spine ‘Crashers (High And Low)

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MP3: Spirit Spine ‘No Psychic’

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A couple of weeks back you may have caught the TGTF review of London three-piece Cha-Cha’s single ‘Phonographic Love’. They’ve been hard at work the past few weeks shooting a video for this infectious song, and it has definitely paid off. Full of vibrant, rich colours, the video starts with a nerdy, uncoordinated girl named Rosie receiving an anonymous gift. It turns out to be a record, and when she plays it the men of Cha Cha appear and play for her. Just like anyone who hears this future dance floor filler, by the end of the song she can’t help but to dance.

‘Phonographic Love’ is now available for download. Cha-Cha’s debut album ‘We Are…’ will be released 14th March 2010 on Pop Noodle Records.

Just as Field Music travelled all the way from England for Saturday night’s gig at the Bell House in Brooklyn, I made the almost 5 hour trek up from Washington, DC, and had the privilege of interviewing them after the show (check out the TGTF review). Apologies in advance for the slightly shambolic nature of parts of the interview. We were in a room that was supposed to be private and quiet, but it didn’t quite turn out that way. Big thanks to David(above, left) and Peter(above, right) Brewis for taking almost an hour to sit down with me, even though they hadn’t slept for over 24 hours, to Skippy and the staff at Bell House for being so hospitable, and to Matt at Memphis Industries for setting it up. Below you’ll find part 1 of the interview, with part 2 to come on Monday.

Note: The audio of this interview is  located below. The transcript is included below and after the cut. Descriptions of what is happening have been placed between asterisks, i.e. “*Peter enters the room*”

MP3: Field Music Interview – Part 1

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So this is Mary Beth Howard, and I’m from the UK music blog There Goes the Fear, and we’re here after the Field Music show at the Bell House in Brooklyn. So thanks for taking the time to talk with me.

David: You’re very welcome.

So I thought the show tonight was great, how do you think it went?

David: Um, we were physically not entirely up to the task. Mainly through airplane dehydration. But other than that, pretty good! I enjoyed it, even though about 40 minutes in, the prospect of me singing in falsetto dwindled dangerously.

It’s like “that’s not happening!”

David: [Makes screeching noise] That’s about as close as I can get now.

This is a rescheduled gig, so what was the deal with the original one, somone was sick?

David: Yes, during the paranoia around swine flu, both here and in the UK, we were in a situation where I had flu-like symptoms, and we…if, erm…we probably wouldn’t have been allowed on the plane. If we did make it on the plane, and I was seriously ill while we were here, because it was something I had symptoms for, our insurance wouldn’t have covered it! Our holiday insurance wouldn’t have covered it, like a pre-existing condition, and hells bells, I could not afford any kind of medical treatment in this country!

Of course! No one can!

David: Erm, and as it turned out, I wasn’t really ill, I wasn’t very ill, just the kind of little ill that people often are over the winter.

A cold or something?

David: Yeah, which made it doubly frustrating, because it really felt like we’d wasted everybody’s time, so that’s the long version of that story.

Okay, so how did you decide to come back just for this show, I know you’re doing some shows in March or something, why didn’t you just do it then?

David: Umm, for a number of reasons. Partly because Skippy, who runs this venue, really, really wanted us to come and play. Partly because we’ve always had good gigs in New York and Chicago, people always want to come and see us. So it felt like the sensible thing to do before the album came out, just to remind people, like…

Like, “It’s coming!”

David: Like, oh, we’re back, we’re starting to play again and we’ve got a new record. And it’s very difficult for us to judge, erm, whether people in the US care.

Some of us do, the ones who know!

David: Yeah! And we only really find out when we come to play. It’s not like at home where…Well, I find the UK to have a very kind of insular music industry, which is kind of…somebody sneezes, and it’s like news! And here, I mean one of the things that we found in the past is that we’ll put a record out and then two weeks later, for instance…I mean, people probably haven’t discovered the record yet.

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It’s quite possible the only reason you’ve heard of Au Revoir Simone is because their angelic vocals feature prominently in the chorus of ‘Paris’ by Friendly Fires. You would be forgiven if you checked out their harmonies, backed by a wide selection of synths.

The Brooklyn all-girl trio have recently released the video for ‘Another Likely Story,’ their new single from their current album ‘Still Night, Still Light.’ It’s psychedelic but not overly so, and it looks like it was filmed in New York City in the middle of summer, so this video provides a great respite from this seemingly never-ending winter.

You can order Au Revoir Simone’s ‘Still Night, Still Light’ at their official Web site.

It’s all about the young guns this 2010, with the likes of teenager Daisy Dares You pitching uber high on ‘ones to watch’ lists across the board. Today, we’d like to introduce a similarly small, soon-to-be-huge pop star in the form of 17 year old Sky Ferreira.

Hailing from California, despite her young age, Sky is already making massive waves. She signed to EMI last year, and is swiftly being hailed as a young Katy Perry in waiting. But, to be frank, I truly believe Miss. Ferreira has more depth to her than the I Kissed a Girl singer. With the dreamy electro distance of Ellie Goulding, mixed with the crunchy disco beats of Lady GaGa and the attitude-spilling punk of Daisy Dares You, oh, plus a pair of genuinely decent lungs (which Miss. Perry certainly lacks in my opinion), Sky’s eclectic music is pretty much set on appealing to a huge audience of ears.

Ferreira also seems to be down with a number of celebrities while she’s at it – her MySpace page boasting pictures of Sky alongside the likes of Taylor Swift and Will.I.Am. Oh and guess what, she even grew up with Michael Jackson (at least according to the anecdotes I’ve read in several interviews with Ferreira). On top of all that, there are even whispers of Sky having blagged a collaboration with the pop goddess that is Britney Spears – not bad for a 17 year old kid that hasn’t even released an album yet, huh?

Hey, I guess I’ll let her off for her, interesting, rendition of The Beatles’ ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun’ (unpleasingly mixed with Dr. Dre), because you know what, Ferreira’s spunky-pop pretty much makes up for it.

Ahhh, Phoenix, the toast of the blogging community. They’re maintaining their cool it seems by getting Delphic to remix their “Fences” – and rather good it is too. Download and enjoy here:

MP3: Phoenix – Fences (Delphic Remix)

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Here’s a newish video from Princeton, a four-piece rock/pop band from Santa Monica, California. I saw them live last October when they opened for Art Brut here in D.C. I really liked them because they did a good job engaging the audience – not always an easy thing for a support band to do. I’d describe their sound as atmospheric, gentle pop.

I really miss story-based promo vids. So this one for ‘Calypso Gold’ caught my attention for involving all four of their members. In it, twins Jesse and Matt Kivel appear to be allergic to obtaining mode of transportation by normal means, and their drummer David Kitz plays a guitar (what, huh?). Check it out and you’ll see what I mean.

By the way Princeton boys: nice placement of Obama’s mug in the video.

Princeton’s debut album ‘Cocoon of Love’ is available now on Kanine Records. You can purchase it from the band’s store.