STRICKEN CITY | MySpace |
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In the meaty (and bunting) flesh, Stricken City is just as creative and haphazard as their London-based guitar-pop act. Fronting the jangling guitar-synth band, the towering designer stunner Rebekah Raa, flawlessly woos lusty indie boys-a-plenty with her slurring glossy vocals, refusing “grammatically correct” pronunciation all to add to the spaghetti synth and Iain Pettifer’s guitar skips. The “real and not too shiny” four-piece (Michael Highlandl on bass, and Kit Godfrey on drums) arrive this year as your natural Prozac with mini-album Songs About People You Know, dissipating depression with a candy-assortment of beautiful tracks.
Creation of Stricken City: Everything about Stricken City screams their suburb mentality, with down-to-earth drawl, their over-quoted trial and error motto as “mistake-ists” and high-school roots between Iain and Rebekah. Reigning in the laidback art rock, countryside members, and professional musicians Kit and Mike were recruited by the double-act with post-pubescent hugs.
Song to win over an audience: The effortlessly fashioned ‘Pull The House Down’, with wooden processional knocks takes the favourite of SC, happening “by accident...recorded straight away”. Iain proudly plays the “Joseph Kay” guitar riffs with an ending reminiscent of Scottish symphonic act The Delgados.
Secret Sixth Sense 1: Conversing with brutally honest views, the sincere rich four-piece easily will situations into being, from deliberations of Rebekah’s prediction of lost luggage “I knew that our bags would be lost”, to the failing Leeds gig which won over their booking agent by concluding the performance with defiant persistence, the catastrophic opener despite beginning with false starts, and the voice over demand to “do another track”. Ouch.
Secret Sixth Sense 2: Though Rebekah’s a whizz at Chopin’s Revoluntary Etude, Iain peers through bowl-cut hair and rimmed specs Iain smiles that he is relatively talentless, but saving his self-esteem Raa reveals his un-relentless memory in all sporting statistics and Geography trivia. So for an improvisational whim, expect one day to see Iain performing a Geography lesson to “the backing track of Chopin”.
Failed Ambitions: Money-hungry Rebekah isn’t fazed by the financial struggle of the music industry yet regretfully wishes “she was really good at making money.... I wish I had the knack”. Comfortable with avoiding friendless future, Raa lends to Iain’s hunt for lost motivation, joined with his dreams of being a butcher, and a better guitar player “I’ve been playing guitar at 13 and I haven’t got any better”.
Stricken City Fans: From youthful fun-loving tea-enthusiasts to post-natal depressed mothers yearning for a natural triumphant high.
The Stricken Experience: If you take away the sensational joyful tunes, the band will still deliver the band package: “You can come round our house, and have a nice cup of tea with Michael Hyland and do a poker-night, put on some Marx Brothers films. Nothing to do with music. We are just fun people!”
ESBEN AND THE WITCH |
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If we could produce a soundtrack for our darkest, most esoteric dreams it wouldn't sound all too different from Esben and the Witch. This gloomy three-piece hailing from Brighton sound like a fantastical Halloween version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream with spine-tingling electronics and brooding female vocals haunting enough to put you straight under a spell. So let your senses succumb to the thriftily imaginative, nightmare inducing, enigma worshipping, Rachael Davies, Daniel Copeman and Thomas Fisher of Esben and The Witch.
Creation of Esben and The Witch: The Brighton connected band opened up The Pink Fairy Book by Andrew Lang, and was at once overpowered by their namesake narrative: a delightful Danish fairytale of slaughter, sorrow and cruelty, and ta-da the sadistic fellows were formed. But evidently it’s their name alone that sums up this trio's music better than any words could.
Song to win over an audience: The curiously entitled 'About this Peninsula'. At first sounding like an eerie ode to a post-rock Radiohead, the song kicks off when Rachael's fragile yet definite vocals overflow with a sense of energy and immense beauty. Adding to the perfectly constructed noise-fest, Rachael’s chanting sighs seep delicately through soul-ripping melancholy and the dirty post-rock tension.??
Secret Sixth Sense 1: The band give themselves the unusual label of 'nightmare pop' and their EP, 33, is one of the most bedevilled collection of twisted tales that we have ever heard.
Secret Sixth Sense 2: As intensively sincere and scholastic E&W are in their mysterious escapades, there’s nothing better than their open embrace to good-hearted pop, proudly covering live Kylie Minogue's 'Confide In Me’. Eat your heart out Kylie!
Failed Ambitions: So thoroughly acedemically spoken in interviews when revealing the brimming talent of the band, we were memerized by their intellectual creativity, and simply gobsmacked to find any failing ambitions to elaborate with. With a light-popping moment, the grammatical four piece felt all rather Pinky and The Brain...first stop, Esben and The Witch lure you in with musical hypnosis , next stop, total world domination! Ah!
Esben and The Witch Fans: Passionate History intellects obsessed with Gothic architecture, Victorian art and foreign mythology seeking for the tortured musical equivalent for a daily backing track.
Esben and The Witch Experience: Using mesmerising stage props from glaring owls to glowing globes, Esben and The Witch will entangle you with cobwebbed Björk siren calls, swirling guitars like a dirtier Siouxsie and the Banshees and a drum machine set to a Radiohead arrhythmic heartbeat, dead-set on comprising your sleeping sub-conscious.
Words: Gemma Dempster, Aimee Albans
Photography: Elinor Jones, Lucy Johnston