Ones To Watch: Dog Is Dead to Scott & Charlene’s Wedding

This week’s Ones To watch looks at Biggles influenced garage rockers from Sheffield, Japanese brit-poppers and Kylie and Jason’s finest moment, especially for you dear reader.

Dog Is Dead
The Nottingham quartet have a simple agenda: The take the outsider-melodies of all your favourite bands and wrap them in a perfect alt-pop bubble to wonderfully encapsulate the music of now. There have enough Bombay Bicycle Club and Foals elements to keep the typical 6Music listener interested, but are not afraid to throw in a massive stadium crescendo and sing-a-long chorus – listen to ‘Teenage Daughter’ it is epic in the truest form. Their forthcoming album ‘All Our Favourite Stories’ is bold, exciting and ambitious, and their live shows are blitzkrieg snapshots of future populist rock, and it looks good. By shunning melodramatic pomposity for melodic perfection they have secured a route which will inevitably lead to superstardom.

Taffy
Japanese indiepop used to be super-alt: Grand Royal signed Buffalo Daughter, Cornelius wowed the discos and Pizzicato Five made Hokkaido seem like a Parisian Spector-esque fantasy. But then Banzai and Lost In Translation made it so mainstream. For Taffy, however, it is forever 1995 and Salad and the Boo Radleys are Adidas wearing space-poppers with catchy-cutesy riffs. It’s not all being young free and keeping teeth nice and clean for this Tokyo quartet though; ‘HaaH is coated with the angelic fuzz of Juliana Hatfield while ‘Flower Chain’ has more jarring punchy energy than a thousand Louise Weners. Taffy have forsaken retro and ray guns for something more remarkable – catchy as hell bubblegum, punk pop, disco. Don’t stop.

Lord Huron
Ben Schneider’s nom de plume has been circling hipster-land for a couple of years, but only now is he ready to reveal his debut album ‘Lonesome Dream’, so we can claim him as an OTW, right? He is a pretty slow worker, a fact which isn’t missed in the relaxed meander of his casual country folk, but that adds to the air of freedom permeating his songs. There is a sense of wild adventure, of travelling the dusty road from Michigan to LA to wrestle hobos and snakes, to his music – ‘Time To Run’ even has gun shots audible over the rail road rattle and wind chimes. Schneider has created the classic Americana of a blue collar Arcade Fire.

Death Rays of Ardilla
Noisy guitar and drum duos have been the invigorating sound 2012, and they keep getting better. This time it is Sheffield pair Thom and Nick Tietzsch-Tyler dragging us into trashy late-night bar rooms to consume rock n roll and watch Lux Interior shoot pool with Max Décharné. New single ‘Diamonds’ is a pummelling ordeal of garage-jazz rhythms and vintage effects which leaves you as excitable as the Biggles story their name references. Their frenzied valve amps and psychedelic tones could soundtrack the Yellow Submarine, re-imagined as a particularly sinister Manga film featuring The Horrors as garage rockers fuelled on snake blood drank from the devils armpit. Dark, claustrophobic and invigorating stuff indeed.

Scott & Charlene’s Wedding
Yep, these guys are Australian, but they sound like from Slackerville College, USA. The have so much fuzzy lo-fi beauty to their kitchen sink tales it is a wonder Craig Dermody managed to get off the sofa to record them at all. Although the revolving line up is now Brooklyn-based, debut album ‘Para Vista Social Club’ remains an invigorating diary of an Adelaide life of smoking fags and drudgery. Their awful name seems to come from trolling a Twitter hashtag of favourite TV scenes, but it seems the only hash Dermody, with his fuzzy-Malkmus drawl, tags is the ‘medicinal’ kind. At least it provides some quality afternoon procrastination with #tvscenebandnames; I’ll go for Morse’s Quadrangle Collapse, Citizen Kahn’s and the TV Turn Offs or Steve O’s Ass Staple.

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