Don’t go there girlfriend, mmmm hmmm…

On my recent travels across the land of MySpace, I found this:

Girlfriends is the work of Jerry Joiner. A one-man band of sorts with a love for loop pedals, psychedelia and cosmic jams. His music incorporates the same angular and intelligent guitar elements as the likes of Foals and Three Trapped Tigers. Everything’s instrumental and layered up like a lovely math-rock trifle.

It’s some of the most interesting and original music I’ve heard in a quite a while. One can only hope that he makes it across the water to the UK in the near future. Did I just say “one can only hope”? How posh.

You can hear a whole load more music on his MySpace page.

www.myspace.com/heygirlfriends

Cymbals Eat Guitars

You may remember last week, I posted a bunch of bands from New York  that I recommended you all check out well I decided that Cymbals Eat Guitars are so good that they should have their own post.

So who are they? Well, Cymbals Eat Guitars are a beautifully epic and anthemic indie rock quartet from Staten Island and when I say indie, I actually mean it. They are the very true definition of indie – their breathtaking debut album ‘Why There Are Mountains’ is self funded and self released. And you can really sense the honesty that the band portray. With no record company bosses breathing down their neck telling them to write radio friendly unit shifters, the band have complete freedom in their creativity and you can really sense that when you listen to them. As well as that, you feel a sense of freedom that you have the almighty power to do anything. Although, remember kids, you can’t fly. So don’t even try.

Cymbals Eat Guitars have more hooks than a prize winning fishermen’s tackle box and their uplifting  floaty indie pop is something that I think you should all embrace into your lifes. 

The band, who played at the ICA last night, are in London all this week playing the following shows:

Tonight – Camden Barfly, Tomorrow – Brixton Windmill, Friday – Pure Groove (in store), Saturday – Proud Galleries.

www.myspace.com/cymbalseatguitars

For fans of: Pavement, Modest Mouse, Built To Spill, The Joy Formidable, The Flaming Lips and My Bloody Valentine

Introducing… Royal Treatment Plant

I was unfortunately unable to make Royal Treatment Plant’s last gig of 2008 last night however, I thought I’d do the next best thing and email them to ask them a few standard questions just so I could get them up on this blog until I get to interview and review them properly.

The reason being that they are shit hot and it’d be a shame to not mention them until they make their live return.

And to top it all off, as well as answering a few questions via email, the band have been lovely enough to let me post an mp3 of their amazing tune “Hope Is Not Enough” on here as well. You can find this at the bottom of this post. I think this tune is epic. It’s the sort of musical noise that makes you want to drive on an empty motorway at 3am at 150mph with the lights that guide you becoming nothing but a blur. Your foot hits the floor and the speed cameras flash but do you care? No of course you don’t.

So read on, learn about a very very exciting new band and then download a tune to excite your ears on this horrible winter afternoon. Now ain’t I good to you lovely people?

Who are you? Describe where you’re from and how the band came about…

We are royal treatment plant. we like haribo star mix and music. music is the shit. right now we love fleet foxes, the presets and cold war kids. our (and we quote) ‘minx in chief’ is pp, she met DJ (bass player/beatboxer/video maker of our music vids and so much more…) at a bus stop in uxbridge. it was love at first sight. they chatted, rehearsed played some acoustic gigs, got bored and wanted more friends to play with. slowly and over time royaltreatmentplant were born. Tall tom(and he really is TALL – he can see everything like giraffes do) on keyboards, Sam the man on guitar and Chris ‘hodgo’ on drums. so for about 2 years we’ve been like this, pp and the boys, gigging till we drop, writing choons, recording them and getting them to people to listen.

What got you into music? Any particular genre or artist that inspired you to become a musician?

well pp had this weird religious upbringing; seventh day adventist missionary parents, raised in the highlands of papua new guinea, not allowed to listen to non-religious/classical music, leaves her home in australia and hits london, starts to write and sing and get it all off her chest…ta da! Anyway. she’s built a bridge now so sometimes the songs arent so angry anymore.

Give me a bit of history of the band so far, any amusing stories or interesting facts?

DJ makes great watercress soup. PP once scuba dived with sharks in an aquarium. Sam is an annoyingly talented musician who plays cello. piano, guitar and can sing like and angel, really, like a real live angel. Tom loves crisps more than just about anything. Chris loves liverpool, but not more than Tom loves crisps.

Amusing stories? Tall tom once smacked PP in the head with a black cab door and gave her the biggest black eye in the world. she kind of deserved it cause a) she was very very drunk and b) she had just tried to paint over a painting in a restaurant with oil paints cause she thought it was a bit rubbish and she could do better.

Future plans looking ahead to 2009?

Well we just signed a deal with Universal records in Australia so our album Hope Is Not Enough (which we just self released here in the UK and you can get on itunes and in HMV nation wide) is coming out in Australia and New Zealand in March 2009. That’s pretty exciting. Like a real label and stuff. We’ve just finished making a video for Half As Much which will be released in the UK in January. The video is all stop motion and DJ has almost gone insane editing it as its just lots of photos that we took put together. We shot it ourselves which is why you never see the whole band in the picture. Someone had to hold the camera.

Anything else you wish to add?

Not really. Thanks for asking us to be involved in this interview thing. oh and our myspace is www.myspace.com/royaltreatmentplant.

pp dj sam chris tom xxx 

 Royal Treatment Plant – Hope Is Not Enough