It’s January, which means it’s time for the annual “BBC Sound of...” pasting to begin. There’s admittedly schadenfreude to enjoy watching shooting stars burn, but scoffing at such lists has become a peculiarly popular pastime. Anna Calvi finds herself in the top fifteen this year, so place your bets: will she live up to industry expectations and shift a shed-load à la Florence, or fumble and fade like Joe Lean?
The odds are noncommittal, though it’s heartening that an album incorporating instrumental spaghetti-western fret-work alongside pseudo-Bond themes and Patti Smith-style high drama can be widely considered a strong commercial prospect. The Devil encapsulates her enigmatic style, a ballad balancing on the verge of quivering exhaustion. Sales potential aside, here’s another bet: will Calvi stick to her bombast and potentially consolidate her debut’s considerable promise, or be meekly turning out weak Elton covers by the year’s end? Pray God the former.Out Now
Merge and Warp set high benchmarks for label retrospectives last year with their respective 20th anniversary archive-trawls. Thirteen-year-old UK label Rocket Girl proffers 3...2...1... with more modest aims: a reappraisal of the last decade on CD one, with previously unreleased exclusives on disc two. A Place To Bury Strangers appear on both, with debut album cut I Know I’ll See You delivering dark, abrasive noise-pop on the first, and Just Out of Reach adding menace and bite to the second.
Other high profile acts include Lilys (whose A Diana’s Diana kicks things off), Ulrich Schnauss (his remix of the Howling Bells’ Setting Sun is a highlight) and Television Personalities (represented by You’re My Yoko, sounding refreshingly simple amidst the dream-pop wash that surrounds it). If you’re fond of synth-lullabies and reined-in feedback, the whole slots into sequence so smoothly you’d swear label-founder Vinita Joshi made the mix-tape for you personally.Out Now
The sight of woodland shards in the artwork, and the sound of Maschine trickling into life via stuttering bells, syncopated handclaps and double-tracked vocals, intimate a solid metaphor for Conquering Animal Sounds’ aesthetic: the organic and the electronic coexisting beautifully.
Various comparisons flicker into earshot: Anneke Kampman’s vocals are Björk-like on some tracks, reminiscent of Sally Shapiro on others; the gentle instrumentation has close affinities with Iceland’s Múm or Sweden’s The Deer Tracks throughout; while a domestic thread is traceable from Wild Things’ mechanical wash to Mogwai’s Rock Action. But following such threads never threatens to unravel Kammerspiel’s gracefully busy tapestry of scuffling electronic loops and toy-box tics.
It’s difficult to believe this is their first full-length release; all parts interlock with crystalline clarity, the complexity of the whole is secreted beneath precisely-placed layers of sound. For some, this is confirmation of the significant promise demonstrated live; for others, it will be a remarkable unveiling.Out 7th February
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