The Saturday Surf #10

The biggest two enemies of the sole-author music blogger are the email in-box and time. Put these two together and the maths add up to potentially exhausted looking creatures once known as human beings staring wide-eyed, crushed and broken at their laptops.

To avoid such situations its necessary to have the weekly equivalent of a wardrobe clear out. We call it The Saturday Surf. It’s a musical jumble sale, where we’ve already creamed off the best of the bargains and hidden them in a bag at the back of the room for you.

These are the best tracks that didn’t quite get their own full posts this week, but probably deserved to. As always we make sure that it takes you no longer than about 15 minutes to listen to everything here.

Fixers - Swimmhaus Johannesburg

Oxford’s Fixers are no strangers to this blog and we thought we had them sussed with their Brain Wilson vibes and playful sack of psychedelic fun. We were wrong. New single Swimmhaus Johannesburg takes a very different route. There’s an italo-house piano, squealing siren-like sounds and proper guitar riffs. It’s utterly bonkers but shows that they’re no one trick pony. This song doesn’t get a formal release till August and we understand that the album isn’t out till January next year. Could they be a BBC Sound of 2012 possibility, or are they just too batty for serious consideration? We’d like to think not.

Swimmhaus Johannesburg by Fixers.

[ Strangers ] – It Was A Sin

Another group who we’ve featured before at Breaking More Waves, first in a new waves feature back in March is [ Strangers ]. We’re still not convinced about the brackets around the name, but they’ve caught our ears again with their second EP and this song It Was A Sin. It takes all the best bits of Depeche Mode – dark lyrics, big church like synths and stern vocals and makes us want to don our black leathers and do the side-to-side Dave Gahan arm dance.

It Was A Sin - [ EP2 ] by [STRANGERS]

Monarchy – Maybe I’m Crazy

More electro-pop comes from blog world favourites Monarchy who are finally about to release their debut album Around The Sun. Monarchy are a strange proposition – a pop band who can really play live, completely look the part, have received extensive blog /media coverage and possess some cracking tunes like Maybe I’m Crazy. Yet at the moment they’ve not crossed over and attained mainstream public love. The debacle of the album leak last year and the subsequent regrouping probably hasn’t helped matters, the window of pop opportunity quickly pulling the shutters. It is, all in all, a shame.

Maybe I'm Crazy by Monarchy

Peggy Sue – Cut My Teeth

Finally, in a world far away from electro pop, news reached us this week that Peggy Sue are due to release their second album Acrobats on September 12. Produced by PJ Harvey collaborator John Parish the groups sound has evolved significantly from their early wacky lo-fi folky doo-wop days when they were known as Peggy Sue and the Pirates. We featured the band a number of times in 2009 on the blog, and back in the day, when we did interviews Peggy Sue was one of our victims. This new track Cut My Teeth, is darker, edgier, more guttural and not that dissimilar to some of the work Ms Harvey has produced with Parish.

Cut My Teeth by Peggy Sue.

Wardrobe cleared. Jumble sale over. See you next week for some more tunes dragged up from the ocean of music.