Into New Music: Singles round-up November 2024
Hot on the heels of ten excellent album recommendations, Grant McPhee is back with another batch of tunes for you. This time, however, Grant is concentrating on five singles so sit back, read on and do check out these belters…………… .
Artist: Sonic Boom/ Dean & Britta
Single: Snow is Falling in Manhattan
Label: Carpark Records
What an utterly, utterly gorgeous song and in a fair world this would be the Christmas No.1. And what credentials: written by David Berman and covered by Dean and Britta from Luna alongside Sonic Boom from Spacemen 3. Magical and wondrous production on top of a gorgeously enchanting and sleepy melody, the musical equivalent of sitting by a cosy fireside with a warm blanket on Christmas Eve while peering out of a snow covered window and watching the world getting ready to snuggle up too. Music doesn’t get much better than this.
For more, head to the Carpark Records website here.
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Artist: Looking Glass Alice
Single: Season of the Witch
Label: Lucky Break
Excellent new single from Looking Glass Alice. An innovative and compelling witches brew of prime era UK Freakbeat/early Psych and a seriously pumping and groovy dance-beat; the best of both Summers of Love which make for a deliriously dark spiral dance, equally valid in a club or a moonlit wood. This is a band who pay as much serious adherence to precisely looking the part as sounding it, and that’s important. Donovan would be happy, though also might claim to have been there.
Head over to the Looking Glass Alice website here.
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Artist: Avo
Single: Cheers My Dears
Label: Stephen Lindsey
A fabulous new track from Deaf School’s Steve Average. A loaded cornucopia of pop excellence, taking in the psych-pop of Magical Mystery Tour, some Music Hall, Deaf School at their best and a twist of modernity, all put together lovingly to feel like a classic pop single.
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Artist: Kynsy
EP: Utopia
Label: Nice Swan Recordings
Powerful and melodic Indie Rock with a carefully balanced mix of strength and vulnerability. Quality songwriting and certainly a future star.
For more information, head to the Kynsy Bandcamp page here.
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Artist: Edgar Jones
Single: Here’s to the Holidays
Label: Steropar Records
Along comes another Christmas cracker, this time a welcome Northern Soul stomper from Edgar Jones. It exude class, from the rather lovely string section to the rich voice of Edgar himself (never sounding better) as well as his backing vocalists. This has a really clever balance of the warm familiarity expected of Christmas songs but imbibed with an ever present danger, that somehow this party might spectacularly unfurl at any moment, which of course it never does but that sense lingers and lifts this above the hundreds of would-be-Christmas-contenders.
Thinking about it, that same danger is what also lifts Spector’s Christmas Gift from the plethora of saccharine Christmas efforts. Something else which I love about Here’s To The Holidays is the inclusion of real instrumentation, which is clean and precise but with an inbuilt hind of that same lurking menace, this time a garagey kick. Ironically this decision to record using older technology, rather than samples, emulations and synths makes what easily could have sounded dated surprisingly modern. Definitely one of the great Christmas songs and in a fair world this would be playing in every shopping centre alongside the usual festive dross. It’s far better than almost all of that. Excellent stuff indeed.
Grant McPhee
@GrantMcPheeFilm
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