Perennially brilliant but frequently overlooked, New Young Pony Club are never less than interesting. Their new single You Used To Be A Man is a case in point. An electronic rumble that rubs shoulders with Prince's Forever In My Life. A musical cocoon that slowly unfolds to reveal its deadly allure. A rather good pop song indeed.
Here's what lead singer Ty Bulmer had to say about it to The Quietus: "It's about betrayal. A situation where trust is continually extended and destroyed to the detriment of that relationship and ultimately your view of that person. He's not a man anymore in your eyes anymore. He's a mole or a mote of dust or a hatstand or whatever."
If you sign up to the band's mailing list, you can have the track for free on Monday. Until then, you'll have to content yourself with the video.
The recent New Young Pony Club album, The Optimist, is very listenable. It's not going to change the world or anything, but it has a clutch of brilliant melodies and an art-school vibe that'll make "real music" snobs feel better about listening to a record where the average tempo exceeds 100 BPM.
The band have just sent out their new video, We Want To, accompanied by a handful of press quotes written by those self-same music snobs. Look at how they trip over themselves trying to imbue a cheery 80s pop song with importance and meaning.
"We Want To opens as a chipper ESG/Delta 5 stomper before efflorescing into aching and injured pop brilliance" (NME)
"A bouncy juggernaut" (Time Out)
"A pulsing, metric disco chant-a-long" (Artrocker*)
A quick scan of reviews for The Optimist, reveals that NYPC are custom-designed to elicit pretentious bollocks from anyone with a pen. Thank goodness for The Independent, who managed to pin down the album with the simple phrase "like The XX learning to dance".
Like the reviews, the band's new video isn't half as clever as it thinks it is - but don't let that distract you from a very, very good song.
When you read interviews with pop stars, one of the most frequently asked questions is: "How would you describe the sound of your new record?"
Why? Because it means the journalist doesn't have to go to the effort of thinking up flowery adjectives and eovcative descriptions of their own. They can just say, "Tom from Kasabian describes his new album as 'very normal'" (note: this actually happened). That way, the musician sounds dense and ineloquent, not the writer. Clever, huh?
Anyway, to get to my point, I recently wrote on Twitter that New Young Pony Club's new material showed not one iota of musical progression from their debut album (not in a derogatory way, for I love their first album). The band's petulant reply is one of my favourite tweets of all time. Here it is in all its technicolour glory.
See if you agree by listening to their new single, Chaos.
James Murphy, lead singer of LCD Soundsystem, is annoyed. It's 20 minutes into his set at the 02 Wireless Festival in London and he's still not happy with the way he sounds. He's constanrtly gesticulating to an off-stage sound man, trying to tweak something - his monitors, his microphone, a portuguese prostitute's nipple… we're not sure, but it's clearly irrirtating him.
By the end of the set, one of his band's keyboards has failed and Murphy storms off the stage in a huff. Someone rushes after him to see what's happening (clearly, the instruments that are working can just play themselves) before returning to the stage and telling the band to wind things up, shrugging her shoulders by way of explanation.
It was a pathetic showbiz strop. LCD Soundsystem actually sounded fine, and Murphy committed the cardinal sin of being so wrapped up in his own muso world that he forgot about the audience.
He would have done well to watch New Young Pony Club earlier in the day. They, too, had a few sound issues (lead singer Ty Bulmer drifted in and out of key seemingly at random) but the London five-piece threw themselves into the show with what can only be called gay abandon. They'd even dressed up for the occasion - keyboardist Lou Hayter had on her best blue party frock - and the crowd responded to their energy by bouncing up and down like over-inflated space hoppers. "When you react like that, it's almost like you've heard of us," remarked Bulmer.
Plan B was up next, rapping like a child who has just discovered the word "fuck". I went off to the beer tent.
For CSS, however, I was right up at the front and they were an absolute riot - of noise, of colour, of fun, of gleeful lunacy. Lovefoxxx appeared in a sequinned catsuit, which she later stripped off to reveal… erm, another jumpsuit (thus achieving levels of genius hitherto uncomprehendable by womankind). Bounding around the stage like a multicoloured bunny rabbit, she paused only to show off her patting-your-head-while-rubbing-your-tummy skills, and to sing a song while inhaling helium from a balloon. My new favourite band.
Rounding off the night were Daft Punk. I really don't get Daft Punk. They came out dressed in robot suits and stood in a "pyramid" for an hour-and-a-half while a ropey display from B&Q's lighting department blinked on and off around them.
The crowd went wild, but it could have been anyone in those suits. There weren't even any instruments on display, so who's to say it wasn't two out-of-work plumbers bopping around to a mix CD? All told, a massive and particularly crap practical joke.
:: Play 80s coin-op classic Asteroids - but with jazz. You get a really kick-ass bass solo if you score 10,000 (nb: I made that up). [go to Fingertime]
:: Download some superpop MP3s from Sophie "my husband is in a band too" Ellis-Bextor and New Young Pony Club on Fluxblog. [go to Fluxblog]
:: Marvel that Beyoncé and Jay-Z are still dating. Wasn't her whole last album about being cheated on and dumping your boyfriend? Am I missing something here? [go to Perez Hilton]
:: Learn to play drums from the amazing Bernard Purdie (this is my favourite clip ever and of all time in perpetuity).
One of the greatest things about music is discovering a new band and falling absolutely head-over-heels in love with them. Here is one of those bands:
Yes, they may look like a bunch of language students on their way to a Flashdance-themed S&M party, but they are in fact a super electro-pop combo going by the magnificent name of New Young Pony Club.
Right now, the NME is undoubtedly calling them "new rave" in some sort of attempt to prove it is behind a major new musical movement. A more helpful description would be "they sound a bit like LCD Soundsystem genetically spliced with Miss Kittin and Deee-Lite". The sort of the music that, if you're listening to it on the bus, makes you do embarrassing, involuntary seat-dancing.
I would love to pretend that I am the very first person to "discover" their "sound", but a quick glance around the web reveals that every other blogger in the universe has been writing about them since last summer. The band have also toured with Lily Allen and made waves in America, where their Ice Cream single was chosen as soundtrack for the Intel Duo advert with all the body-popping. So much for having my finger on the pulse, eh readers?
Anyway, here is the video for Ice Cream. A new single, The Bomb, is out in March and their debut album follows in April.
