If you’re looking for new music at the moment you could do an awful lot worse than pay close attention to Comfortable on a Tightrope.
I’m not sure how they’d describe themselves, but they’re part promoter, part record label and something of a musical collective as well. Through them I know the likes of Sex Hands, Waiters, Feel Right and, through their excellent Birthday Tapes series, the likes ofApostille and more.
Apostille contributed only a single song to the Pisces issue of the Birthday Tapes, but it was an absolute fucking stormer. It was the sort of odd, enigmatic stuff which struck my notice absolutely immediately. Listening to more stuff on the Apostille Soundcloud page, it quickly became obvious that whatever enthusiasm I had for The Journal, it didn’t really help with coming to grips with the rest of it.
At Sounds From the Other City earlier this year I had the chance to pick up the tape in the picture up there (now sadly sold out, it appears), and it has been a staple in the Toad Van (where I tend to listen to most of my tapes) ever since. At times the music is so muffled that I wonder if there’s something wrong with the speakers.
There are moments when you think you’re listening to dance music, albeit so sluggish and smothered that you might be buried under the covers, hearing what next door are playing way too loud on their stereo, at the same time as battling the later, room-spinning stages of excessive alcohol intake. At others there are elements of straightforward guitar pop, and yet most of it seems to verge on experimental noise music.
There are definite pop sensibilities here, though. For all the buried sounds, odd squeaks and buzzes, and occasionally rather epic song lengths, these tunes still have an immediate impact which most people respond to pretty instantly whenever I play them. So quite how Apostille have managed to make a cracking pop record here I have no idea, because they seem to be deliberately trying to do the opposite, but a pop record it seems it nevertheless is. Of a sort, anyway.