The ever growing list of up-and-coming dream/chill-wave artists this year has been warming my heart. Neon Indian, Washed Out, CFCF, Memory Tapes and now Toro y Moi.
Toro y Moi is the solo project of The Heist and The Accomplice lead singer Chaz Bundick. Essentially if you dig any of the above artists, you’ll fall for these tracks.

MP3: Toro Y Moi- Blessa
MP3: Toro Y Moi – Low Shoulder

I came in a bit late with Bear In Heaven I admit. Formerly sporting School Of Seven Bells’ James Elliot, the band now stands as a four piece and their new album, ‘Beast Rest Forth Mouth’, is fantastic. Full of dreamy, epic synth landscapes.

MP3: Bear In Heaven – Lovesick Teenagers
MP3: Bear In Heaven – You Do You

It always saddens & frustrates me when a promising new band that you actually LOVE, great sound, new / different / exciting EP etc, drop their debut record it’s less than amazing.

Tigercity’s awesome Pretend Not To Love EP was brimming with touches of funky Prince, Holy Ghost style disco and Junior Boys electro pop. While their debut isn’t bad per se, it feels like they’ve been shoe-horned into a more serious pop-rock mould that lacks the edge that made them interesting in the first place.
Here’s a stellar track from their Pretend Not To Love EP from 2007 and a slightly less stellar track from their debut Ancient Lover.

MP3: Tigercity – Are You Sensation

MP3: Tigercity – Ancient Lover

Love of Diagrams, Melbourne, have just released their third album, Nowhere Forever, and it is amazing. Coming from a band thats roots lie in the sounds of NY No Wave and UK Post Punk, that band has taken these sounds and grown and developed them, fusing more recently with 80’s/90’s Shoegaze and Dream-Pop, to create an instant classic. I am really digging this one, even more so than their previous releases and the Beaches album (of whom Antonia Sellbach of Love Of Diagrams is also a member).

MP3: Love Of Diagrams – Lookout
MP3: Love Of Diagrams – Winding

To be honest it took me a while to jump on the YACHT bandwagon….like up until last week. But ever since I got the duo’s newest album, See Mystery Lights, I cant turn it off. Easy, breezy, colourful pop mixed with trademark DFA sensibilities. Also, inside joke but this song will always remind me of colourful flashing vaginas. You had to be there.

MP3: Yacht – Afterlife

Now for a bit of Kid Creole and the Coconuts. If your looking for some funk/latin tunes to get people jiving like crazy, and arent cheesy, try these guys. You hear there stuff sampled and ripped everywhere (most notably The Avalanches). This is actually a damn smooth track with a disco heart.

MP3: Kid Creole & the Coconuts – I’m A Wonderful Thing Baby (Remix Version)

I cant really divulge too much information about this next bit, but for anyone in Melbourne this Saturday night at a secret location there is a warehouse party featuring 4 amazing local bands, with Waves At Night DJs playing in-between sets and keeping the dancefloor going after as well. Its going to be very big, if the last ones held by this crew are anything to go by. So ask around and come down and party.

Totally loving the new Memory Tapes LP, Seek Magic. Dayve Hawk combines his two side projects Weird Tapes, and Memory Cassette into the one sleek project, and the results couldnt be much better. Alot of this stuff has been making the rounds for some time now but its great to hear the final product. Ranging from spaced out epic disco, to uplifting poppy dream-wave, and even a hint of New Order (see the lush bassline in the second half of Bicycle). Also, sorry guys but the files are going to be via Mediafire or the like for the time being, our server is getting pretty full.

MP3: Memory Tapes – Bicycle
MP3: Memory Tapes – Pink Stones

Finally got my hands on the legendary NME C86 tapes the other day (cheers Angus). This was the compilation, released in 1986 that defined an era, gave birth to the british indie/jangle pop sound of the time, and came to be known as a genre of its own. I do loathe NME though.

MP3: The Bodines – Therese

I’ve been on an intense binge diet of The Artist when he was formally known as Prince. Everyone knows his hits, Kiss, Raspberry Beret, Purple Rain etc. but his early back catalogue reveals gold that far eclipses his later number ones. These tracks have literally been on constant rotation keeping me sane and dancing for past weeks.

Controversy and Dirty Mind are both funky electro pop simplicity at it’s BEST.

MP3: Prince – Controversy

MP3: Prince – Dirty Mind

From his peak period, Sign O’ The Times is a dark brooding, stripped back social commentary while Alphabet Street bounces along like a Sesame Street anthem on Amyl Nitrate.

MP3: Prince – Alphabet Street

MP3: Prince – Sign O’ The Times

Johnny Jewell of Glass Candy and Chromatics has yet another side project to his name, Desire, and once again it consists of him doing production duties while an ethereal female sings breathily over the top. While part of me wants to just shake him and say make another Glass Candy record dammit! it’s a welcome tide-over until then.

MP3: Desire – Under Your Spell

The Very Best’s (A.K.A Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit) debut proper, Warm Heart of Africa, came out a little over a week ago much to the pleasure of everyone who dug their 2008 mixtape The Very Best. Where that was a strange mix of covers, reworkings and samples that reclaimed African music and rhythms from those who had borrowed them, this is an album of (almost) all new material.

MP3: The Very Best – Chalo

MP3: The Very Best – Warm Heart of Africa (feat. Ezra Koenig)

This track is all over the place by now, but such a match made in heaven cant be ignored. Bradford Cox (Deerhunter & Atlas Sound) and Noah Lennox (Panda Bear from Animal Collective) have teamed up to produce one of the most gorgeous, bouncy dream-pop tracks of the past few years. I really hope the rest of the upcoming Atlas Sound LP is as good as this. Kinda reminds me of good times.

MP3: Atlas Sound – Walkabout (Feat. Panda Bear)

Two excellent purveyors of tape-hiss and ethereal pop. Ducktails have been getting a fair bit of exposure from blogs like GorillaVsBear and the like, with comparisons that they’re a tropical version of Wavves. Ducktails sound like something being broadcast from the middle of a distant heatwave on a far away island.

MP3: Ducktails – Backyard

Gary War is 60’s pop rock sent through a time tunnel and sonically ripped apart in the process. Everything shimmers underneath layers of fleeting, barely held together guitar sounds and vibrating vocal lines on the edge of falling apart.

MP3: Gary War – Clues

If you live in Melbourne and regularly go out and check out some of the local bands out there, very high chances you would have heard this trooper along the way. Popolice is a one-man shoegaze/pop experience, and Ive already posted some stuff a while back from the same EP, but its still just as good when I come back to it.

MP3: Popolice – Action

Lovefingers hails from NYC and has been producing some great disco tunes and edits for years now, along with having the privilege of guest mixing for Tim Sweeney’s Beats In Space. Track one is an mix from last year of British artist John Martyn, for the always reliable Black Disco. Track two comes from the ALSO always reliable Rvng Of The Nrds Volumes.

MP3: John Martyn – 1984 (Summer Of Lovefingers Mix)
MP3: Lovefingers – Kentucky

Ahhhh, I forgot how good this album is! I guess im guilty of burying alot of good music in my itunes from all the new crap I get and tend to forget about it. But Gang Gang Dance’s ‘Saint Dymphna’ is such a great journey and progression. I highly recommend that if you never got around the listening to this one, go back and pick it up.

MP3: Gang Gang Dance – House Jam

Beautiful track from 1989 from London band The Field Mice debut album, Snowball. That melody seems to have been pinched since then by a notorious melody pinching band.

MP3: The Field Mice – Letting Go