Zach Braff's long-time indie favourites, we're-not-new-ravers, Brum guitar heroes, backpack hip-hop revivalists - these are the 10 bands ready to step up to the big stage during the course of the coming year.
The Guardian
Lend them your ears... (clockwise from left) The Shins, Art Brut, The Kidz in the Hall and Findlay Brown
In short: sensitive indie-poppers poised for the breakthrough
James Mercer, singer and songwriter with the Shins is skinny, sweet and slight, as regulations require for leaders of indie bands; as gentle in appearance as a long-eyelashed lamb and as polite as a church verger. He looks like his music sounds. But over two albums, his band have carved themselves a sizable niche within US alternative music: you've probably heard them, even if you don't realise it. Perhaps you saw the movie Garden State, in which Natalie Portman played the Shins' wistful ballad New Slang to Zach Braff in a doctor's waiting room ("You've got to hear this one song," she said, handing over her headphones, "it'll change your life").
"That makes us sound emo," Mercer laughs when the lyric is read back to him. "Well, we were called emo, you know, when the term was used to describe Fugazi, and in a way, it made sense. They played emotive punk; we played emotional songs. Emotionally tough stuff. But then, suddenly, I was hearing this emo, candy-ass bullshit." He smiles and shakes his head. "But I guess the last three years of my life have been very emo."
Three years ago, Mercer says, "I'd just bought my first house, the dream of my life. I found out one night at two in the morning that next door was a crack house. So much hope ... So much hope was there, and suddenly that was gone." He'd also come to the end of a destructive personal relationship and was falling out with friends who'd helped the band out financially before the cult success of Oh! Inverted World in 2001 and Chutes Too Narrow in 2003. "I was all, 'Hey, I need help. My neighbours, these gangsters, are threatening me.' Late at night, when you can't fucking sleep, obsessing about these negative things, you go places you never would go." He shudders. "So there was a lot to write about."
Songwriting to Mercer is therapy, pure and simple, then? "It's catharsis. You get this chaos and cut it to bits and suture it together and then go, 'Yes, done.' I wanted to get rid of this bitterness, resentment, this darkness. I wanted to fucking expel something." Suddenly, Mercer is interrupted by a power ballad coming through the speakers in the west London hotel where we meet; a silky-knickers kind of baritone bellowing a lovelorn "Woaahhhh!" Mercer crumbles into laughter and addresses the bar. "Jesus, hear me here, man! I'm trying to turn this shit into something polished." He shakes his head. "This happens all the time. It's impossible for me to appear ever manly or," he laughs, "masculine when I'm trying to get my point across, without something embarrassing happening." His raises his eyebrows. "I live a very Woody Allen kind of existence."
It's useful to think of Mercer of the Woody Allen of indie: literate, self-deprecating, witty. And, he says, he prizes intelligence in songwriting more than anything else. "The most enjoyable part of this all is the craft. The trying to be clever - the 'math' of pop music."
English pop music has always driven him, making him care for cleverness and catchiness in equal amounts. He fell in love with the Beatles as a child, "the really sentimental, soft-hearted stuff like Yesterday", then landed in the middle of British indie's golden age when his air force father moved the Mercers to RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk in 1985. "1985 to 1989 - 15 to 19 years old. What luck, man. The Smiths, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Cure." He didn't find those bands depressing; they were, to him, uplifting. "It was like: wow, I feel right at home here with this music. It's so powerful. It made me feel like I was connecting with somebody, this person singing, turning your shitty life into something beautiful. It's such fucking validation."
When he got back home, "here I was with my curtain haircut, into the Stone Roses" and his friends were head-banging to Poison and Mötley Crüe. But as the 90s wore on and the American indie scene kicked off, Albuquerque, New Mexico became a good place to be. It was the only stop-off city between Texas and Phoenix, Arizona: "You had to play Albuquerque to get gas money to keep going." So Mercer's band opened up for Rocket from the Crypt, Polvo and Tsunami, bands that he reasons "really changed us, and really changed the music scene of the States. We felt really part of that American indie scene." But now in 2006, with the Shins long since uprooted to Portland, Oregon, where do they fit in? Mercer has no idea. "It's actually unnerving. What kind of person would like us? We've come from nowhere. I feel like we don't fit in anywhere. But everything's going so well with us, so we're giving this a go. People love us. People do. And I have no reason why." Surely Garden State was part of it? "For sure. Zach did an amazing thing for us. And what was great was that he did it as a fan. Zach gave a little band a platform. He introduced us to people who may never have known us otherwise." Mercer shakes his head and returns to his earlier fears. "I guess the doubts are more to do with my damn personality."
These doubts are a throwback to the old James Mercer. The new one is much brighter. Some time ago, he moved out of the house with the crack dealers next door, and two years ago met a woman who recently became his wife. "And the positive side is that I really went through all that shit, and this record came from it. I'm happier now than I've ever been." But can you make a good record again, if you've got nothing to be mad about? Mercer swigs his beer. "I still have a dark side, you know. I can go there on demand." And suddenly something makes him laugh: "You know, I planned ahead anyway. I saved some of the hard shit for the next record just in case."
Jude Rogers
Hear them: Wincing the Night Away is out on Transgressive on Jan 29; www.myspace.com/theshins
New Young Pony Club
In short: partying like its 1988, with squiggly synths and glowsticks
Tahita Bulmer's voice takes on a pained tone. "What," she demands rather haughtily, "does new rave actually mean?" It's a fair enough question. Despite a lot of music press hyperventilation about a new movement headed up by the Klaxons and apparently primed to irrevocably alter the musical landscape in 2007, no one seems to know precisely what new rave is supposed to entail, apart from the consumption of ecstasy and the waving of glowsticks. Neverthless, it's slightly disappointing to hear it coming from the lips of a woman recently proclaimed the Queen Of New Rave by the NME, which also bestowed upon her the hotly-contested title of 15th Coolest Person in the World: reward for her band New Young Pony Club's ascent from minority interest with "quite a big following in Scandanavia" to hotly-tipped indie-dance act (equal parts Stranglers, Tom Tom Club and the DFA, according to their website). You might know them from their recent single, the aloofly funky Ice Cream, which ended up soundtracking an advert for Intel Core 2 Duo processors, a curious fate for a track that examines food as a metaphor for oral sex more thoroughly than any record since Serge Gainsbourg's Les Succettes. "I suppose we can sketchily use the term new rave," she continues, "but I think it's best to say 'bands with songs with a dance influence underpinning them'."
That is not the snappiest title ever devised for a nascent musical genre, but in her defence, Bulmer doesn't seem much like the Queen of New Rave. Rather than the saucer-eyed, platitude-spouting flower-child the title implies, she sounds eminently sensible and rather head-girlish. She abandoned her previous band, who specialised in chill-out, because "they wanted me to stand still on stage, which was anathema to me, it just wasn't the visceral thrill I signed up for." She dismisses indie music as "four skinny boys in leather jackets singing songs that don't really mean anything about their ex-girlfriend that they don't like anymore and ripping off bits of William Blake", but is far more clear-eyed about the chances of imminent new rave musical revolution - or, rather an imminent bands-with-songs-with-a-dance-influence-underpinning-them revolution - than anyone at the centre of a storm of hype has any right to be.
"You get people writing oh, new rave is taking over the world and it isn't, it so isn't," she says. "The kids don't give a shit. You do kind of worry that there's all this hype and everybody is going to expect one of these bands to cross over and do really well and to be honest, I don't think the overall musical palette of this country is ready for it. It's just not going to happen and the idea that it's going to happen is ridiculous. Almost any band, regardless of how underground they want to be, has one song that could potentially be a hit single. But that doesn't mean that their album is not going to be something sonically challenging that a lot of people won't be able to get their head around."
But then she brightens, perhaps bolstered by the thought of New Young Pony Club's eagerly-anticipated debut album, or their forthcoming tour with the Klaxons and Brazillian electro-rockers CSS. "There's loads of potential in this scene. People seem to be developing a sort of supermarket of style ethic in their music taste, they're quite happy to have a Prodigy record next to an old Rolling Stones record. It's ripe time for things to be changing, because how many more Libertines-like bands do we need?"
Alexis Petridis
Hear them: www.myspace.com/newyoungponyclub
The Twang
In short: either the new Happy Mondays or the new Flowered Up, according to preference
It has been, Phil Etheridge is happy to concede, a surprising few months for the Twang, the band he fronts. First, Radio 1's Edith Bowman turned up at a gig in their hometown of Birmingham. Thrilled by the Twang's admittedly impressive collision of loose-limbed dance beats, echoing guitar lines and Streets-like sung-spoken vocals that unexpectedly erupt into terrace-rousing choruses, Bowman began enthusing about the unsigned quintet on her show, which was, says Etheridge "a mad compliment". Then the music press began not merely taking an interest, but calling them the best new band in Britain, about which Etheridge doesn't "want to give it the fuckin' big one ... I don't want to sound really boring, but if we get a record out, we've achieved more than most fuckers do, innit?" Next, the Twang signed with record label B-Unique, home of Kaiser Chiefs. The label teamed the band up with Steve Osbourne, co-producer of the Happy Mondays' Pills'n'Thrills and Bellyaches, and packed them off to Peter Gabriel's plush Real World Studios. "You get en suite bathrooms," marvels Etheridge, "and three meals a day. They do a great chicken."
But perhaps the most striking thing Etheridge has noticed is a sudden change in attitude towards the Twang among Birmingham's rock venues. "We've been fucking banned from everywhere for about three years," he says, "but now they're all asking us to play." The problem, Etheridge is quick to point out, is "never the band", but "the lads playing up". "The lads", it transpires, are the Twang's local following, who display what a recent press release tactfully described as "a tendency to squeeze as much fun out of every show as possible". Etheridge sighs in a slightly exasperated manner. "No. Well, yeah. It's bollocks though. Most venues, right, you've got no doorman and one student on the bar and if 50 lads turn up, you know, they're going to play up, aren't they?" He brightens up. "It's getting good now, though. Most people are starting to get it and enjoy it and have a dance. It's not pogo music, you know. That's more of a riot," he huffs, "people bouncing around and fucking jumping on each other."
Despite his protestations, a certain reputation for misbehaviour has already firmly attached itself to the Twang. If, as Etheridge complains, this sort of thing has nothing to do with their music it seems unlikely to do their public profile any harm: in a rock world populated by decent blokes Making Trade Fair, there's clearly a vacancy for a band who can generate juicy copy. But mention of it brings on another weary sigh. "There seems to be a lot of concentration on the fact that we're mad lads or hooligans. But we're not mad lads, man, we're just mischievous. They're dying for a bunch of lads who are writing good tunes, though, ain't they? I'm not knocking them, because we've met a few of them and they're top lads, but most bands start at uni, don't they? And they write songs about ..." - he searches for the right word - "rivers, man. And because we don't, they fucking love us. But they said we pulled out a samurai sword in the middle of a club! I mean, where would you hide the fucker to get into the first place? I weigh 10-stone-eight mate, I ain't built for fucking rowing. It's all about your tunes, it ain't about your jeans." He emits a filthy cackle. "Even though I do wear really fucking good jeans."
Alexis Petridis
Hear them: www.myspace.com/thetwang
TTC
In short: the new wave of Parisian hip-hop
Though the history of French hip-hop is far from bare, with acts such as MC Solaar and Saïan Supa Crew having achieved domestic success, its presence on the international stage has been limited. So it's a surprise that Paris's TTC could be one of this year's breakthrough hip-hop acts.
Tido Berman, Téki Latex and Cuizinier - the three MCs who comprise TTC; the letters also stands for toutes taxes comprises, the "all taxes included" stamp found on most French price tags - are smart and literate, but never let that get in the way of the more important issues - namely rapid-fire wit and chat about how great Paris, girls, parties, girls at parties in Paris, and TTC themselves are. Set over beats that take their cues from European electro (Parisian dance producer Para One is responsible for over half the cuts on their album 3615ttc , and the trio have worked with Berlin techno pranksters Modeselektor) as well as American hip-hop (tongue-twister raps and squealing crunk synths), the result is irresistibly bouncy music destined to set dancefloors alight throughout 2007. And - pay attention, hip gunslinging French teachers - it could well be a way to enliven those écoutez exercises as well.
Alex Macpherson
Hear them: 3615ttc is released on Big Dada on Monday; www.myspace.com/inbedwithttc
Findlay Brown
In short: the interesting James Blunt
Don't judge Findlay Brown by his new song, Come Home, which is currently serving as the tastefully strummy "soundbed" to a MasterCard TV ad. It's a deceptive introduction to a songwriter whose true metier is haunting, indigo-hued acid-folk. But if MasterCard helps point the way to Brown's more sensual work, it will have been worth it.
Growing up in the countryside near York, Brown was going to join the army, until, at a teenage party, he encountered both LSD and Jimi Hendrix's Electric Ladyland album. It was a pivotal experience that inspired him to buy a guitar (paid for by selling off a set of Beatles autographs that had belonged to his grandfather), and start making his own lysergically twisty music.
A limited-edition single, Losing the Will to Survive, got repeat Radio 1 airplay a few months ago, so he's in the right place to edge out the two Jameses (Blunt and Morrison) who dominate this corner of pop.
Caroline Sullivan
Hear him: myspace.com/findlaybrown
Last Gang
In short: the Yorkshire Clash
What's in a name? Wakefield's upstart punks were originally called Last Gang in Town, after Marcus Gray's biography of the Clash. The trouble was, everyone they knew shortened it to Last Gang, and so the band followed suit. The result? Major labels sniffing around.
The four members - Kristian Walker (vocals, guitar), Maff Smith (bass, vocals), Ritchie Townend (guitar, vocals) and Matt Knee (drums) - do have the gang mentality of bands such as the Clash and the Who, getting involved in endless scrapes and immortalising them in song. October's debut single Beat of Blue (on the small Leeds label 48 Crash) saw them crying out: "You're going home in the back of a police van" over a ridiculously catchy melody, which saw them hurriedly snapped up by Sony, the label that owns the Clash back catalogue.
Comparisons are not inappropriate. Like Strummer and co, Last Gang specialise in head-rushing harmonies and are more than capable of experimenting with reggae; the Rock Against Racism logo features prominently on their myspace site. However, their sound has a poppier edge, referencing other British pop hallmarks such as Madness, the Housemartins and Buzzcocks. Stepping up into major-label territory is a quantum leap from their feverish gigs in pubs, but the band has some killer tunes and a bittersweet northern effervescence that may take them from Wakefield to the world.
Dave Simpson
Hear them: www.myspace.com/lastganguk
The View
In short: the Libertines, the Fratellis, the View
While Pete Doherty barely bothers with his own career, it's him that the View have to thank for kick-starting theirs. In September 2005, bassist Keiren Webster thrust a demo tape by the View into Doherty's hands before Babyshambles played a gig in the quartet's hometown of Dundee. After listening to the songs - and perhaps hearing echoes of the exhilarating life, humour and charm of his former self - Doherty offered the band a support slot for that night's gig and recommended the View to the man who discovered the Libertines, James Endeacott. The View are now signed to Endeacott's 1965 label and following the success of singles Wasted Little DJs and Superstar Tradesmen, the band are releasing a debut album, Hats Off to the Buskers, which should see them enjoy the kind of success the Libs squandered.
They share a similar spirit too, though the View have softer hearts. "I don't want money, I want the thing called happiness," sings Kyle Falconer, "I don't want cash, no, I quite like memories." Blessed with Falconer's adroit vocals, which shift from angelic to depraved at toddler tantrum speed, their adrenalised punk and boozy pop celebrates the Dryburgh housing estate they grew up on and eulogises the local heroes hanging around outside the corner shop. Always exciting, if sometimes unintelligible, the View are set to become the new favourite band of those who those who snapped up albums by the Kooks and the Fratellis last year. As Falconer sings: "You'd be amazed at what you can achieve in a year."
Betty Clarke
Hear them: www.myspace.com/dryburgh
The Kidz in the Hall
In short: graduates take hip-hop back to the source
Despite hip-hop being in the commercial doldrums - the genre that has dominated US record sales for over a decade produced only one album, TI's King, that shifted more than 1.6m copies in 2006 - there may be some benefits if the music stops pandering to the lowest common denominator. If so, the Kidz in the Hall - Chicago rapper Naledge and New Jersey DJ Double O - will clean up.
The pair met at university in Philadelphia, and after various guest spots and mixtapes, their debut album proper was released in the US in October on a resuscitated Rawkus, the imprint synonymous with the rise of the "backpack hip-hop" of Company Flow, Mos Def and Talib Kweli in the mid-1990s. School Was My Hustle is released in the UK in February, and has already been hailed by Hip-Hop Connection as "by far the best LP" the label has ever released.
A succinct 12 tracks, the album is a classic: eschewing the flab and flam of today's bloated rap LPs, it concentrates on lyrical firepower and cohesive musical muscle. Like fellow Chicagoans Kanye West and Lupe Fiasco, Naledge leavens his street talk with words of consciousness and wisdom, while the production pays exciting, enticing homage to hip-hop's sampled roots. Set it alongside albums from the golden age hip-hop duos - Gang Starr, Pete Rock & CL Smooth, even Eric B & Rakim - and it more than holds its own.
Angus Batey
Hear them: www.myspace.com/thekidzinthehall
Art Brut
In short: they're not jokey, they're quirky
Dismissed as a novelty band when they bounded out of south-east London back in 2003 - despite acclaim overseas - Art Brut have spent the past year proving they're anything but a lame gag. They've been on the cover of German Rolling Stone, toured the world and have been lauded by the tastemaking Pitchfork media website; now they intend to be taken seriously at home.
Frontman Eddie Argos is both the point of Art Brut and the reason some have dismissed them: he's a fiendishly arch budget amalgam of Morrissey, Mark E Smith and David Niven. He is the anti-Johnny Borrell, a man with wit, bucketloads of charm and a bit of a tummy. The band's second album is set to be released in June 2007, and, says Argos, "it's a pop album." He smirks. "I dunno if it'll be popular, though."
That's because, even as he strives to be taken seriously, he can't help treating things as a joke. Art Brut's first album featured a song called My Little Brother, so, he says, "I've been joking with people about writing My Little Sister for a while, but I've actually gone and written it now. I see her and she's having loads of fun and I'm just jealous of her and of being 16."
Leonie Cooper
Hear them: Art Brut's first album, Bang Bang Rock'n'Roll is available on Fierce Panda; www.myspace.com/artbrut
Pull Tiger Tail
In short: it might be pop, it might be punk
They look a little like a chiselled boy band, but Pull Tiger Tail have already served their apprenticeship in the nether reaches of indiedom. The trio previously made up three-quarters of John Peel favourites Antihero, and before signing to B-Unique, the label of choice for indie crossover success (Kaiser Chiefs, Ordinary Boys), had released a limited-edition single, Animator. The style - cemented on follow-up Mr 100 Percent - is punchy, catchy and ever so slightly off-centre guitar rock, harking back to new wave.
Too shiny to be in the grotty indie bracket, but too hard-edged to be purely pop, the group stands out from their indie peers, and frontman Marcus Ratcliff has the looks to appeal to fans not normally found in scuzzy pub venues. A new single is due in March and a debut album in the summer, so expect PTT to be one of the sounds of this year's festival season.
Leonie Cooper
Hear them: www.myspace.com/pulltigertail
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
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