Fucked Up, Friends, Gotye -This Week’s Singles Reviewed

NME’s Priya Elan gives us a round up of this week’s single releases

FRIENDS
Friends

Fucked Up – ‘Year Of The Tiger’
Ox, Pig, Rat. Those Canadian funsters have run through more strange meats than Alex James on a fast food bender. Another addition to their ‘Zodiac’ series, ‘…Tiger’ is a 15-minute Springsteen-meets-hardcore, bells-and-whistles number. Cult director Jim Jarmusch pops in to do a spoken word turn while Annie-Claude Deschênes plays the nervy beauty to Pink Eyes’ Goliath-like beast.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmGrQH70rgo

Kindness – ‘Seod’
A slow-mo return to the dancefloor from Adam Bainbridge as he leads us by the hand around a Chicago nightclub circa 1988. It’s all retro drums, twinkly key effects and musings about how “the music becomes part of you”. You can almost see the mirror ball reflecting your neon slacks. There’s some Prince-style guitar soloing, parping Donald Fagen-like horns, echoes of Glass Candy. What’s not to love?

A Place To Bury Strangers – ‘Onwards To The Wall’
This is exactly the type of feedback-as-snow-in-a-blizzard type stormer The Big Pink should have come back with. Oliver Ackermann intones like the bastard son of Nick Cave and Royal Trux’s Jennifer Herrema, speeding along the highway of cool doom, lip curled against the wind.

Friends – ‘Friend Crush’
A swift re-release for Friends’ debut single finds the not-at-all unattractive Brooklynites on rosy-hued, funky form. As Samantha Urbani coos: “I wanna ask you advice on a weekday/I wanna plan something nice for the weekend”, your first reaction is: “Can I get a 2-4-1 deal at Pizza Express NOW so we can bond over the dough balls?

Gotye – ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’
Here we find Gotye sad-clowning around, caught between two key moments in a relationship. The first: when you find out your partner’s favourite movie is The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps. The second (approx two seconds later) when you’ve casually made your way out of the bathroom window, gesticulating for a taxi. Angsty!

Towns – ‘Gone Are The Days’
Oh hai 1989! This Weston-super-Mare bunch ‘do’ Madchester in the most fizzed up way possible. Chiming guitars waft up into the outer reaches of Bez’s armpit and vocal lines are delivered like Ian Brown’s younger, happier brother. Much like Yuck, they wear their influences like a mahoosive great neon sign placed exactly where their faces should be. But what the hell, who’s complaining?

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This article originally appeared in the February 4th issue of NME

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