Familiars: Track-by-Track

Hi. How are you feeling today? Chipper? Perhaps a little over-chipper?

Well, if your good mood needs extinguishing, you'll be pleased to hear that The Antlers have a new album out and that, today, we're going to listen to it. Long-time patrons of The Album Wall may remember that I dubbed Hospice "the most depressing album in my entire collection, if not the whole damn world", and I stand by that hyperbole; such is the stunning misery of the band's 2009 magnum opus that 2011's Burst Apart - which, mind you, contained songs about car accidents and canine euthanasia - seemed oddly uplifting by comparison.

Tame Impala: Another Try

Earlier this month, on the last day of the Primavera Sound festival in Porto, we met a girl from Montana. She never told us her name so for the purposes of this blog post I'm simply going to refer to her, Zombieland-style, as 'Montana'.

Anyway, once we'd helped Montana to get on the right train at Casa da Música's metro station, the three of us started talking about music, and it quickly transpired that she was an avid Tame Impala fan. She spoke enthusiastically of their music, and of the time she met Kevin Parker (although she quickly conceded that this was a celebrity encounter that "only hardcore Tame fans" would find particularly impressive).

Now, it's always cool when someone is that into a band, but Tame Impala never really struck me as an act to obsess over. She was talking about Kevin the way some people talk about Benedict Cumberbatch, and it made me wonder if I'd been too quick to give up on TI.

The Klaxons Clean it Up

Nostalgic readers of roughly my age will be pleased to hear that Klaxons have a new album out. It's called Love Frequency and it came out about a fortnight ago. I haven't listened to it yet, but it seems to have elicited a somewhat lukewarm response from critics.

But what I want to talk about is the artwork. The Klaxons have released three albums to date; here are their covers, side by side:

From left to right: Myths of the Near Future (2007), Surfing the Void (2010), Love Frequency (2014)

Criminy. I'll concede that Surfing the Void's space-cat was a little more minimal than Near Future's psych-bug collage thing, but this new one is barely even there. It's like if Enter Shikari released an album of minimalist piano music (that's right, today's theme is 'Noisy Buzz Bands of 2007').

Glastonbury: Tips for JR

My friend Joshua 'JR' Robson is off to Glastonbury tomorrow (the bands don't start until Friday, but he presumably wants to make damn sure that he's down the front when they do) and he's asked me to recommend a few bands for him to see.

Now, I've never been to Glastonbury myself, but I've had a look at this year's line-up, and there are quite a few acts whose awesomeness I can vouch for. For the benefit of one man, then, here are my Top 5 Bands to See at Glasto '14:

Note: I haven't checked for clashes, so I apologise if any of these artists are on at the same time.

John Grant (The Park Stage, Saturday)
Three times I've seen John Grant now, and three times I've been bowled over by how powerful his songs are. He's got a great knack for welding plain-spoken emotions to big, brilliant tunes, and I personally think he's got one of the best voices in contemporary music. Oh, and his stage presence suggests that he's one of the most genuinely amiable people you'll ever encounter.

Neon Neon's Next Album

I've no idea whether or not Neon Neon (the synthpop nostalgia outfit helmed by Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip) will ever make another album. I sincerely hope they do, but frankly, the world is lucky to have seen even two LPs from the duo; after the release of Stainless Style, an '80s-themed album about John DeLorean, Gruff Rhys told a BBC interviewer: "I don't know about making another Neon Neon album because it was quite a specific record about DeLorean's life story." When a sequel (Praxis Makes Perfect) did materialise five years later, it felt like an unexpected bonus, and it would be ungrateful of me to demand yet more material from Camp Neon.