4th February 2016
Animal Collective – ‘FloriDada’
First up this week is this fantastic new release from quirk-electro-popsters Animal Collective. ‘FloriDada’ is the first single from the band’s upcoming album Painting With, which is due to come out on 19th February. If ‘FloriDada’ is anything to go by, it could well rival 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion as the band’s most commercially successful to date. It’s a four minute blast of upbeat chopped up nonsense which echoes the likes of ‘Summertime Clothes’ but with the addition of an incredibly catchy chorus. I fully expect joyful commuters to be singing “Flori Flori Flori Daaaa; Flori Dada; Flori Dadaaa” for the rest of the winter. Except for Al Gore, of course, for whom the song will serve only as a reminder to the cruel chad incident of 2000 when he was denied control of the free world by an inanimate piece of cardboard.
The song benefits from having the kind of whimsical production that is usually avoided by the corporate bigwigs at record companies. The song is full of squelches and farts, as well as Dale Smallin’s famous babbled intro to The Surfari’s ‘Wipe Out’. It is also accompanied by a violently colourful video which carries a warning for those who suffer from epileptic seizures, and features a kind of planetary dance which resembles the intro to 3rd Rock From The Sun. An all round winner then.
Shift K3y – ‘Gone Missing’ ft. BB Diamond
Is it just me or is Shift K3y the laziest name a musician has ever come up with? It’s as if his manager has given him thirty seconds to come up with a name and he’s just stared at his keyboard going through the options. “QWERTY? No, too white. Open Brackets? Num Lock? Print Screen?” Ironically, if he had actually hit the Shift key when typing his name it would have replaced the ‘3’ with a ‘£’ and his name would be the much more readable Shift K£y. Anyway, Shift K3y it is, a name which must make him quiver in fear every time he hears an IT technician shouting at someone to “Hit the Shift key! HIT SHIFT KEY!”
Anyway, ‘Gone Missing’ is the latest single from 22 year old Lewis Shay Jankel, and features the vocal stylings of Essex singer BB Diamond. It’s a mixture of house, UK garage, techno and 90s girl pop, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster that lurches from one boring noise to another. I’m not really sure who this kind of music is targeted at, although if the video is anything to go by it appears to be young lads smoking weed in their Vauxhall Cavalier. Whatever happened to lighting up a J and sticking on Dark Side of the Moon to see if it syncs with the Wizard of Oz?
Ash Koosha – ‘Mudafossil’
Also released this week is something less-than-ordinary from Iranian London-based musician Ash Koosha. In the 90s Koosha spent his youth in Tehran secretly watching MTV by night and buying smuggled cassettes and copies of Rolling Stone on the black market, before internet use was deregulated and the country was suddenly flooded with new music. His love of rock music saw him join the band Font, whose last-minute gig in the suburbs was raided by commandos abseiling from helicopters, and Koosha served time in jail.
Now London-based, he works mainly with his own field recordings, distorting and moulding units of sound and combining them with his background in Persian and Western classical music. He calls the process “finding geometry in sounds.” With ‘Mudafossil’, from the upcoming album I AKA I on Ninja Tune, the result is a spiralling, dark and wicked amalgamation of sonic structures.
Conal Dougan