hi! I was gonna wait to message but then I saw you play violin! I do too! How many years have you been playing? I've been playing 3.

hello! And yea I did play violin! I played for about 8 years worth of violin. Had a blast but that interest kinda died out when it came to collage. Though doing it all through late elementary all of middle and Highschool helped a lot with my growth and social skills, beautiful instrument too! fun little fact is that I love to use the violin to help my singing in some songs/hymns. Thank you for the ask and have a wonderful day/night!

BEST TRACKS OF 2017-ARTISTS LIST #100

PETER CAT

After a brief hiatus Glasgow’s Peter Cat composed of singer songwriter Graham Neil Gillespie returns with some brand new tunes and we could not be more excited! Here are the 12 tracks that made his year! 

1. LCD Soundsystem – ‘black screen’ (from album american dream, on Columbia Records) Yeah, it sucked when David Bowie died. We all remember where we were, what we were doing at the time. Most of us, however, didn’t have extensive email chains from the man himself sitting in our Gmail inboxes, like LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy did. ‘black screen’, from LCD’s comeback record american dream, is essentially Murphy grappling with the guilt of not having done more, not having tried harder after befriending the Spaceman in his twilight years. Murphy was even supposed to have produced Blackstar; something he alludes to in the lyrics to ‘black screen’ with ‘I had fear in the room/so I stopped turning up/my hands kept pushing down/in my pockets’. The same lyrical tropes that Murphy has revisited so often throughout his career – perceived inadequacy, a relative lack of influence – here take on a much more serious, resonant aspect. And while musically, this track is comparatively simple – a slow bass pulse punctuated by shimmering, Low-style synths – it frames Murphy’s heartfelt lyrics faultlessly. By the time a heartbreaking reverberated piano is ushered in for the outro, the listener is launched into orbit, ‘watching images/from the station’. An incredibly powerful song, I felt, which articulates our universal inability to ever really let Ziggy go.

2. Father John Misty – ‘The Memo’ (from album Pure Comedy, on Bella Union) Full disclosure: I didn’t massively dig this album on first listen. I thought Josh Tillman had disappeared a little bit too far up his own arse for his own good. It took me a couple of spins to completely get on board with Pure Comedy, but once I did: well boy, was I firmly in the saddle! While Tillman serves up less straight bitterness and sarcasm on Pure Comedy compared to his previous releases, ‘The Memo’ is the most caustic cut on the record; right down to Father John’s hilarious dialogue with an imagined Twittersphere in the song’s middle eight (‘this guy just gets me’; ‘this is totally the song of my summer’, a robotic voice emotes, as Tillman’s fictional folkie wrestles with his waning cultural influence). Lyrically, this is the kind of thing I just wish I could do: the line “As the world is getting smaller, small things take up all your time” especially resonated with me, as it should do with anyone who suddenly realises they’ve lost a week of their life to their smartphone/email inbox/inexplicable Twitter spats/being ‘crazy busy’.

3. Oxbow – ‘The Finished Line’ (from album Thin Black Duke, on Diorite Music/BMI/CFY Music) Hearing Thin Black Duke reminded me of hearing Slint’s Spiderland, or Codeine’s The White Birch, again, for the first time. While Oxbow have pushed the envelope of experimental music, noise rock and even avant-garde jazz throughout the course of their thirty-year career, never have they sounded so magisterial, so elemental, so utterly accomplished as they do on this LP. It’s measured, it’s cacophonous; it’s pretty much perfect. It feels disingenuous to single out any one track for acclaim, but if I had to choose, album closer ‘The Finished Line’ would be it: a spookily melodic doom-waltz which begins from a conventional enough place, but by the end descends into a barely controlled atonal nightmare, with vocalist Eugene Robinson alternating between breaths, groans, moans, shouts and guttural screams. I’m struggling to find words for how good this is. If I think about this too much longer, I’m going to make it number one, so I best move on quickly…

4. Perfume Genius – ‘Alan’ (from album No Shape, on Matador Records) Perfume Genius has truly gone from strength to strength over the past few years, following up 2014’s slickly sensual Too Bright with the almost overwhelmingly intimate No Shape. And no single song stopped me as firmly in my tracks with its opening bars in 2017 as closer ‘Alan’ did. After a few seconds of strings emanating from the speakers as if from the bottom of the Grand Canyon, Perfume Genius – aka Mike Hadreas – intones ‘Did you notice/we sleep through the night/did you notice, babe/everything is alright’. Not only does his paper-thin warble sound magnificent, but given Hadreas’ personal experience of homophobia, chronic illness and abuse throughout his life, the benign, almost mundane happiness he expresses in his relationship with his partner of eight years is so cathartic as to be deeply affecting indeed. There may have been a tear or two shed on my part.

5. Jane Weaver – ‘H>A>K’ (from album Modern Kosmology, on Fire Records) Another mesmerising record for which it was quite an onerous task to select a standout track. In the end, I’ve settled with ‘H>A>K’, the opening cut on Liverpudlian singer Jane Weaver’s 2017 LP. On an album which consistently channels the measured motorik of Can and Neu!, ‘H>A>K’ does so with the most vivid aplomb. The way in which Weaver’s icy vocal gets caught in a robotic stutter just before the drum beat kicks in is so, so very satisfying, and it’s all uphill from there: an arpeggiated bass line swims a steady breaststroke through a pool of washy keyboard chords, reaching out into the cosmos before reducing down into a single drip, drip, drip of synthesiser. The best part of this krautrock homage is that, unlike so many other artists who nod to the genre, it doesn’t outstay its welcome: ‘H>A>K’ is over in three-and-a-half minutes, although it feels at least twice as long (in a good way).

6. Jlin – ‘Hatshepsut’ (from album Black Origami, on Planet Mu) This track – and every track from the album it appears on, really – was some mindfuck when I first heard it. It’s almost entirely rhythmic, there being little in the way of melody or notation here; but Jlin’s vision of rhythm is as this constantly evolving, mutating entity, which never sinks into a groove for long enough for the listener to get complacent. It’s rhythm as warfare, as evinced by the sonics – military snare rolls, sharp trill whistles; everything conformed to the MIDI grid – which evokes the battle elements of the Chicago footwork scene from which Jlin’s work stems. And in a musical culture which increasingly fetishises prohibitively expensive analog synthesizers, drum machines, etc., it’s oddly refreshing to hear an artist just running with unapologetically digital, über-quantised drum hits, and calling them good. ‘Hatshepsut’ moves the feet, the brain, and everything in-between: essential stuff.

7. bell lungs – ‘Mosul Dam’ (from Pefkin/bell lungs 7” split, on Sonido Polifonico) When I first came across this song, I must’ve listened to it on a loop ten times, if not more. Its hazy layering of plucked strings and cut-glass vocal harmonies is disarmingly gorgeous; but that gorgeousness is tempered, given an ominous shading via samples of radio dispatches which hint at the creeping sociopolitical unrest with which we are all, sadly, becoming more familiar by the day. The Mosul Dam of the title is a real dam in Iraq, built on a water-soluble foundation, which bell lungs astutely employs as a metaphor for the instability of UK political life in the post-Brexit era. Full disclosure: bell lungs (aka Ceylan Hay) is now also a member of Peter Cat! But that has nothing to do with her inclusion on this list, as ‘Mosul Dam’ is quite simply one of the best songs I’ve heard all year. Avast ye to her Bandcamp page post haste.

8. Dominic Waxing Lyrical – ‘Laika’ (from album Rural Tonic, on Tenement Records) I was fortunate enough to both hear and meet the Edinburgh-based Dominic of said Waxing Lyrical this year, and in addition to him being a very pleasant gentleman, his record Rural Tonic is quite brilliant: a madcap meander through a surreal and pastoral England, equal parts chamber pop, folk and punk. The closest comparison I can grasp for is XTC’s seminal Skylarking; one of my favourite albums, which warmed me to Dominic’s work instantly. ‘Laika’ is the lushest track on this LP; a gorgeous harpsichord progression grasped tight to the bosom of a honey-sweet chamber orchestra while Dominic intones the tragic fate of Laika, the first dog in space. And it has a theremin outro – of course.

9. Sarah Davachi – ‘For Voice’ (from album All My Circles Run, on Students of Decay) We’re inundated with so much ambient music these days that it’s reached something of a saturation point: although they’ve officially denied it, there’s compelling evidence to suggest that Spotify actually populate their numerous ambient playlists with the ‘work’ of fake artists. With this in mind, it takes a truly arresting piece of music to cut through all that aural mist, and Sarah Davachi does precisely that on ‘For Voice’. Previously reliant upon an array of synthesisers to produce her music, Davachi strips each track on her latest LP down to just one instrument. On this track, she manually loops her own vocal into a dizzying, otherworldly choir which will, if you let it, transport you to a place you’ve never visited before over the course of its nine-minute runtime. Sublime.

10. Princess Nokia – ‘Green Line’ (from album 1992 Deluxe, on Rough Trade) Princess Nokia is superbly skilled at widening the scope and scale of her lyrics on any one track, detailing her personal experiences in opening bars before connecting them with astute political observations in later ones. It’s something that impressed me on a lot of the tracks on this record, but particularly on ‘Green Line’, which begins with Nokia hopping a ride on the 6 and ends with her championing the ethnic diversity and multiculturalism of the NYC of which she is a proud native. It feels honest, brash, humid, celebratory; real. Plus, the beat couldn’t sound more Big Apple if it was smothered in gherkins and mustard – check that Taxi-esque Fender Rhodes line!

11. Catholic Action – ‘Doing Well’ (from album In Memory Of, on Modern Sky Records) As a Glaswegian, I can authoritatively confirm that Catholic Action are the best guitar band in Glasgow right now. Their debut album is packed with surgically precise glam-rock stompers: such uniform quality makes it difficult to choose a stand-out cut, but the vocal hook and guitar lead on ‘Doing Well’ complement one another so effortlessly that I’ve plumped with that. Chris from the band is currently mixing the next round of Peter Cat singles to perfection, too – those are due out early 2018 onwards, so keep an eye out!

12. Protomartyr – ‘Male Plague’ (from album Relatives in Descent, on Domino Records) Of the plethora of bands who try and fail to recapture the spirit of The Fall in their acerbic heyday, most fail. Protomartyr, on the other hand, do not. They’ve managed to distil the finest elements of late 1970s Transatlantic post-punk into something with an enviable drive and snarl. For me, ‘Male Plague’ is the catchiest song on their latest LP, with some great lyrics from Joe Casey, in which he welcomes the cultural disrobing of white men (characterised as ‘sad-sacks pickled in jars’) while humorously acknowledging his own irrevocable place within that very demographic.