The New Cue #404 August 9: Fontaines D.C. , The Smile, Lerryn, Peter Perrett, James Adrian Brown, The Belair Lip Bombs, Adrianne Lenker, OSEES, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

"Rock’n’roll means escape and freedom."

Morning,

It’s Friday, it’s 10' o’clock and it’s Recommender! (A bit of Crackerjack nostalgia for some of our younger readers, there. You’re welcome). Often, we get asked: guys, what exactly is Recommender Friday all about?

This is what we tell them. Recommender Friday is the sacred time of the week when The New Cue’s editorial team gather around our laptops to present to each other, and then the world, all our favourite sounds that we’ve excavated from music’s new release schedule, so that our subscribers can enjoy the very best records out that week.

Non-subscribers can also do this, because we put the playlist here. (Niall’s on holiday and I can’t log on to the New Cue account so this is my personal Spotify account. Apologies to Apple users for this week only.)

But, for just a monthly fiver, subscribers also get to read about the music and their creators in depth, as well as enjoying other first class editorial benefits, such as albums to blow your mind picked by the stars and an archive of over 400 interviews with music’s greatest minds. The other really important aspect about paying a modest fee for the service is that it encourages us to believe that our council tax direct debits might stop rebounding on us one day.

Anyway, enough of my yakking. Enjoy the edition.

Ted, Niall and Chris.

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An Album To Blow Your Mind #1

South-East London singer-songwriter Lerryn picks an underground avant-pop great.

We’ve been enjoying the songs of personal revolution contained on Lerryn’s forthcoming As A Mother EP (see Ted’s entry below), so we asked the stalwart of the fertile South-East London creative scene - and one-time owner of Peckham’s premier hang-out, Lerryn’s Café - for an album that reliably blows her mind. She told us about an underrated post-rock pop career high from Brighton’s Electrelane.

Electrelane
The Power Out (2004)

“For me this is the ultimate -  it’s timeless and written by female underdogs. The Power Out was produced by the legend Steve Albini, after Mia Clarke had contacted him to try to get a spot on the ATP line up. I took this record to my producer, Liam, when we wrote ‘As A Mother’: no frills, and keeping effects to a minimum. The Albini approach.

Written in 2004, by a band that started in 1998 in Brighton, it’s an understated recording by four women at a time where music was being transported into another realm by groups like the Spice Girls etc. The record never had commercial success but garners respect in the right places. Enter Laughing is one of the best on the record, it holds moments of my life like frozen chalices holding up a building. I play it to capture the best memories, my trusted keeper of a life so far lived.

When I opened Lerryn's Café aged 23, my friends would be hungover in bed as I would open the shutters and arrange the tables with this on full on LP.
It now punctuates Saturday mornings with my family, train journeys home to care for sick parents and late night walks home from pubs. Songs for life. Thank you Electrelane.”

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Recommender

Ted Kessler

I really love Lerryn’s As A Mother, the newly-released lead track from the South Londoner’s EP of the same name, which is out on September 13^th. It’s a five-song set filled with precise instrumentation and Lerryn’s earnest singing, like a kind of Estuary Mary Margaret O’Hara who is similarly focussed on bodily change, delivering gentle but intense songs about young family life, the feelings of love and other overwhelming emotions that this new domestic reality can trigger. There’ll be time for more biographical and song detail around the EP next month, but until then feast upon this manifesto of private internal revolution: “as a mother it’s hard to believe/that your body and mind are different things…”  

While writing about As A Mother, the heavy new song from Peter Perrett called I Wanna Go With Dignity arrived: hard to imagine a starker contrast. Here the subject is not the magical force of birth, but the keen necessity of death and our power to manipulate that departure. The former-Only One, a master of post-