Bent Statues

One of the most interesting new bands I've heard this year is Eternal Summers. Their first album Silver just came out on Kanine (home of The Depreciation Guild et. al), following an ep and a download single on Beko. Apart from the two tracks from the excellent single, the album includes 10 new songs showing a welcome diversity in songwriting and structure. The duo, augmented by bass and some guitar overdubs, manage to sound like everything from Brilliant Colors (expected) to Pylon (less expected) to Galaxie 500 on the closing jam "Bully In Disguise" (unexpected).

Black Time quite recently put out what is rumoured to be their last record. More Songs About Motorcycles & Death with the excellent cover art you can see above is a 6-track ep on Wrench, following last year's fantastic split with Ty Segall. Over the last five years the band have actually recorded a whopping 10 singles, most of which have been sadly over-looking. I've only heard four of them myself! The best tracks on the new ep is the "Psycho" homophone "Cycles" and their cover of Brigitte Bardot's "Harley Davidson" (how can that not be great?). She seems a popular artist cover recently seeing as Fair Ohs just did a take on "La Madrague"...

M'Lady's are as slow as ever, and we have to wait for the La La Vasquez 7" a bit longer. But Coasting on the other hand (Fiona of The Coolies + Madison of Dream Diary) have a follow-up to their M'Lady's single already, available from Group Tightener now. It pairs the instrumental "Coasting" with "Hot For Teacher".

There have been a few good gigs in Malmö for a change. Just saw Cheap Time, whose excellent new album Fantastic Explanations (and Similar Situations) is out on In the Red now (as well as the third Fresh & Onlys album). After their 20-minute set I picked up a flyer for a Cola Freaks gig next week. They're playing with Captured Tracks head honcho Blank Dogs in Copenhagen tonight and is another piece of evidence of the reversed trend in quality of Danish bands. They just released their first album on Douchemaster, and judging by the generous amount of songs from it on Myspace it's well worth a purchase - even if you don't understand Danish. Apart from that, they also have a great 7" out on the hip Rob's House label (pictured above) and a live lp.

And as if that wasn't enough, I've just updated the list of recommended new releases in the sidebar with a bunch of new items.