Mystery Jets - Flash A Hungry Smile

While we wait with bated, eel pie tinged breath for The Mystery Jets third album, they’ve kindly decided to follow the trend and swap a preview track for your email address. However, unlike a lot of seemingly altruistic bands, The Mystery Jets have chosen to give away a really good song (all Kate Nash could muster was three minutes of wailing album filler). ‘Flash a Hungry Smile’ manages to somehow blur the line between potential Christmas single and something you’d put on your summer BBQ playlist. Despite this seasonal sporadicity, the song makes perfect, simple sense.

The song wouldn’t be too out of place on their second album, ‘Twenty One’ but it shows a clear progression. For a start, it just sounds insanely, almost self-mockingly happy. Blaine’s vocals range from sound inanely gleeful to exhaustedly strained, stopping for the odd whistle and whoop. All of this gaiety makes the suggestion that ‘All the birds and bees have caught STD’s’ sound in some way friendly. I suppose after being used to represent sex that many times, those poor birds and bees are bound to have caught something nasty. I just hope for the band’s sake that the rest of the album is as promising as this. If they’ve given away the best song for free that’s just terrible business sense.

You can download it for free from their website now.

Interview with Radio 1's Huw Stephens

After the initial hilarity of his Welshness and the realisation that somehow it's illegal for him to utter a single word related to the closure of 6 Music (have a go at saving it, apparently Facebook campaigns ALWAYS work), I resorted to my back-up questions.

Me: A few days ago Edith Bowman spoke out about the 6 Music closure and how important a station like that is when programs like the X Factor and people like Simon Cowell are having such an influence on new music. What do you think about programs like the X Factor and that method of finding ‘talent’?

Huw Stephens: I think X Factor is just pure Saturday night entertainment and there’s nothing wrong with that but I think that you and I and hopefully everyone reading this knows that there’s so much more new music out there than what’s on the X Factor. It’s everybody’s job just to push it, find it, nurture it and discover it. I think the X Factor is so far removed from what a lot music lovers actually want. It’s relevant to some people, it’s not relevant to others, in the same way that my show is relevant to some people and not to people who watch X Factor probably, but there’s room for everything. If people want to watch it then there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, I’ve watched X Factor plenty of times

Me: What do you think of sources like Spotify and Mflow and their benefits (or lack of) for small bands?

Huw: I think it’s really good. Everybody gets their music in different ways, some people still buy CD’s and vinyl, other people…don’t want to pay for music and get it from services like Spotify. Some people just listen to the radio to get their music fix. As long as the music industry can work a way of carrying on with all these free services then I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

Me: What small bands at the moment would you like to see make it big?

Huw: I think Frankie and the Heartstrings are a very exciting band who I like a lot. They’re from Sunderland, and they’re just a brilliant band because they take it seriously but they’re not po-faced about it, they’re really fun and they enjoy being in a band and their tunes are amazing. I reckon Washed Out will do well at some point too, but that’s the beauty of music really because you know who’s going to big next, because it’s up to the people to make them big.

Me: What festivals and line-ups would you recommend for well-known bands, and for scouting out smaller bands?

Huw: Green Man festival is brilliant. I think for new bands the inner-city festivals are good like Great Escape in Brighton and Camden Crawl. For festivals in a field, Bestival is always good, Rob Da Bank always books lots of really good new bands there, and Reading and Latitude as well have always got good new bands on the smaller stages. So hang about the smaller stages at those and you’ll be all right.

Me: What do you think of this year’s Reading and Leeds line up and reunions in general at festivals? Do you think they block the path for smaller bands who have the potential to headline stages or do you think it’s a good chance to see a band you might not have seen the first time round?

Huw: I’m not sure you know, there are so many festivals and so many stages at festivals that I think there’s room for everybody. I think reunions are fine, if people want to see The Libertines or Guns N’ Roses or Blink 182, and they’ve never seen them before, then seeing them at a festival is going to be incredible. I do think there’s room for newer bands to headline. There are so many festivals now that you can chop and change what kind of bands you use to headline them.

Me: What band would you like to see re-united at a festival or elsewhere, whether possible or not?

Huw: I’d love to see Talking Heads live, they haven’t played for years, that would be amazing.

Me: How likely do you think that might be?

Huw: I don’t know, are any of them dead?

Me: I’m not sure. I don’t think so.

Huw: Well if they're dead, it's probably quite unlikely, but if not, let's start the campaign here!

Looks like another Facebook campaign barely worth bothering with...

Doo-Wah-Don't - Ahaha! A pun!

When it comes to being female and playing popular music to people on a piano, Regina Spektor has always dicked all over Kate Nash.

You could claim that Kate Nash's additional guitar skills give her a boost over Regina, but she does guitar as well! Regina doesn't over do it either, she keeps it simple and does it in a way that's...just cool.

Regina Spektor - That Time

Fair enough for Kate though, everyone's got their influence, no music is completely organic anymore, she even spoke about the influence in an interview;

“Oh, I love Regina Spektor – she was like the first person I found when I was 16. You know who certain people are, all the great artists in music, and you’ve gone through your shit stage and you’re now looking for some really good music. Regina Spektor was the first person who really hit me and really touched me. Everything she said I just wanted to hear. I just wanted to hear every message that she had. I just love her and her music. She’s a really great writer and she’s really quirky. The main thing is that she doesn’t conform to anything in any way. She writes and performs the sort of beautiful music that saves peoples lives, and she gives you hope, makes you wanna cry and makes you laugh. To be honest, I think Regina Spektor is my biggest influence musically, definitely.”

That said, I think her new single might be pushing it a bit. In the sense that it has just lifted the riff from 'That Time', and stuck it into this;

Ok, so she's padded it out with some far less interesting lyrics, a 'dum di dum' pop chorus and one of those minor chaos on an aeroplane videos, but it's hard not notice the similarity.

To her credit though, it's at number 13 in the mid-week charts and if it stays there till Sunday she'll have outdone Regina in chart terms by a long way.

It would just be nice if on the cover of the single there were clear instructions telling customers to buy some Regina Spektor albums, to put it all in perspective.