Colourmusic & Youth Lagoon

Howdy one and all. Enjoying a wonderfully rainy August? I certainly am - I don't think I've spent this much time indoors since discovering the internet for the first time. Ahem. On to this weeks musical nonsense babbling - a delicate slice of woozy, floaty indie pop and a rip-roaring psychedelic garage rock barrage covered in a multitude of nipples. Lets start there.

'Beard'

The video for the opening track to Colourmusic's sophomore effort 'My ___ is Pink' leads into one of the finest releases of the year with every goddamned cannon blazing, and it doesn't really let up from thereon in. While 'Beard' is one of my favourite tracks on the album, and showcases the Ohio Quintet (well, one of the members is a Yorkshireman, but one who clearly got lost in Flaming Lips land) at their dirty best; all searing, fuzz-drenched garage ecstasy (if one thing is clear about this band, is that they are having a whole heap of fun) the album has far more nuance than this frenetic track lets on. Fans of Colourmusic's fellow Ohio rock Legends, the aforementioned Flaming Lips will find much to enjoy on this album - the rapturous 'You for Leaving' brings to mind the Lips' Cosmic-Church tomfoolery on 'At War With the Mystics', but the overall feel of the album seems to be more about, at the core of it, fucking around and having a wicked time while they're at it. They turn their hand to a number of sounds, and the album's centre piece, for me, is the frankly epic 'The Little Death (In Five Parts)' which manges to incorporate a post-rock ear for lush soundscaping and a thought for what a track can sound like beyond the normal three-minutes, and they pull it off with aplomb. Eerie vocals creep in, and the song changes course a number of times (not sure if its quite five, but it probably is) all within the bounds of their pysch-flecked garage noisiness. Wonderful. Go and take a gander at three Ohioites and one Yorkshireman's Pink Blanks. I dare you.

'July'

Onto something rather different now; to Idaho's 'Youth Lagoon', a.k.a Trevor Powers, a bedroom indie musician whose created some stirs with his free-to-download single 'july + cannons' (available here). The two tracks have really whet my appetite for his soon-to-drop album 'The Year of Hibernation', to be released through Fat Possum Records on the 27th September. Beautiful percussive backing and haunting vocals that permeate through 'July' really lend an air of something greater, something that we can universally hold and clutch close. Its gorgeous, waltzing melody really carries you along with it, to somewhere altogether different from a rainy, grey morning in North West London. It really is one of the finest tracks I've heard all year, and is superbly accompanied by 'Cannons', a song wonderfully orchestrated around an upbeat guitar and bouncy drumming that brings to mind hundreds of clapping hands, but when you delve into the song its virtually brimming with subtle, beautiful instrumentation that delights me to no end. Marvellous stuff, and definitely the one to watch this September - if the album can live up to these nuanced melodic masterpieces then 'The Year of Hibernation' could certainly be the best thing to come out in 2011. Here's hoping.

Enjoy the rest of the week guys, and lets hope it perks up to the sound of 'Cannons' and 'Beard' like I have.