What We've Been Listening To This Week...Deadletter, Cowgirl, Osees, Sunstack Jones, Shame, USA Nails, In Earnest

Home Counties and Lord Loud aside, last week week was pretty quiet for new music. Thankfully this week has been a bit more fruitful with some tasty new releases from Deadletter, Sunstack Jones, Cowgirl, In Earnest and Shame, as well as a couple more tracks released by Osees ahead of their new album being released next week.
 
First up we have the rather splendid ‘How it all Went Down’ by Sunstack Jones. Taken from their forthcoming album ‘Golden Repair’ which is out next month, ‘How...’ follows on from 'Glass Boat' released earlier this year and is another piece of shimmering psychedelic rock. Fans of The Verve will love this as it has their influence (and that of The Stone Roses, Primal Scream, the Stones, The Byrds and The Bees) all over it. That's no coincidence of course though, as its produced by Simon Jones (The Verve) and the band have also had Nick McCabe at the controls with earlier releases. The way the guitar glides along throughout is wonderful, and the song is beautifully crafted and thoroughly charming. 

Staying with the sixties psychedelic vibe is the new single by York’s Cowgirl, a double a-side consisting of the excellent ‘Hold Me’ and ‘Only Lasts a Minute’. Something about ‘Hold Me’ (which is our pick of the two) reminds me of ‘Up in the Sky’ by Oasis from their debut album which can’t be too bad can it?

Moving on to post punk, Deadletter are a relatively new band who are also from Yorkshire but are now relocated to South London. The band released their new single ‘Fit for Work’ this week, a song about bureaucracy, and one say the band that ‘provides a mirror to the world, and specifically the Britain of today.  The ideas explored within the track are seemingly exaggerated accounts of reality but, upon close examination, have worrying roots in true experience, with the track aiming to parallel the savagery of the narrator in the song with the actual brutality of our government.’. Musically the song leans on the Fall and Gang of Four, albeit frontman Zac Woolley’s vocals are very much in the vein of Black Country New Road. 

Staying in South London, Shame have a rather fine new single out ‘Alphabet’. Beginning with a squall of feedback followed by insistent, shuffling drumming, cutting guitar and an anthemic chorus, Alphabet is a big tune and we look forward to hearing more from them.

One new single that we missed initially but has now popped up on Spotify this week is ‘I don’t own anything’ by USA Nails. It’s short (1 minute 20) thrashy and to the point and taken from the bands forthcoming album Character Stop which is released in late October and can be pre-ordered via Bandcamp here.  Brevity and noise is also the order of the day with Osees, who have just released a couple more tracks from their new album ‘Protean Threat’ which comes out this coming Friday. ‘Scramble Suit II’, which kicks off the album is 2 minutes of noise, and ‘If I Had My Way’ is a quick slab of slightly more conventional garage rock. Both are very good as you would expect from a band who rarely fail to deliver the goods. We’ll have more on the album next week. 

Lastly this week we have the  beautiful new single from In Earnest, '29'. We featured the band when their first single came earlier this year here and interviewed them a couple of months ago here and this is their third release, which also features on their new six track EP which comes out next month.