William Ravenscroft

Shoegaze eh? I thought that was a sneering media term that bands like Slowdive and Ride disliked even before the music press decided to give them a kicking... and ITBOTR are better than the current ‘nu-gaze’ lot. They sound a lot more like the post-rock bands that they mention as influences anyway – Mogwai, Explosions In The Sky, Mono and the like. Excellent bands all, and ‘Life At 4MPH’ has the same atmospheric, swelling storm of guitar and economy with words. Their ‘Track 3’ and ‘Contours’ are impressive too. By the way, even more so than with most things on Unpredictable Porridge, you really need to listen to this and ITBOTR’s other two through some proper speakers or headphones to do them justice.

It’s the squelchy dubstep-ey bass sound that drew me to the, otherwise pretty cheery, ‘Any King’ I think. Flore’s been rousing French people from their léthargie for years by all accounts, DJing, promoting and producing breakbeat music from Lyon. She has a popular radio show called DeLaBreak on www.ibreaks.co.uk too, and an LP due early this year. Can’t tell you very much more than that, except that it’s some of the best electronic music we’ve had on Unpredictable Porridge so far. We could do with quite a bit more of that, mind.

There’s only this one track from Secret Rivals unfortunately, I think it’s supposed to be called ‘Break Song’, and it’s a winner. It’s not impossible that they’re one of the bands who’ve had trouble uploading their work to Unpredictable Porridge, our apologies if they did. There’s not much information on their biography (which is quite refreshing), and what’s there is out of date – they’re a four piece from Oxford as of last week. They’ve got more jaunty indie-pop tunes on their MySpace page, though for my money ‘Break Song’ is their energetic, danceable best. It says there that they’ve got a band member called ‘Clouds’ too, can that be right?

Well what d’ya know, Muarena Helena call themselves ‘shoegaze’ too. The one thing we’ve got of theirs is very fine, simple, called ‘Long Flat’, and is the first track on their LP ‘Fierce Pale Hen’ on Rock Pigeon Records. It’s a bit mournful - a gentle tune on a piano, perhaps sneaking towards being slightly pop-ballady at times, but kept in check by an increasingly abrasive guitar backing. Whichever of them sings on here makes a very lovely noise too, kind of reminded me of that Lætitia Sadier out of Stereolab. You can download some more bits of Muarena Helena from four LPs of theirs at http://www.muarenahelena.com.

Some nice straightforward quiet-loud-quiet-loud garage stuff for you from The Bacchae. Their lo-fi bluesy sound, scuzzy guitars and Harriet Hyde’s vocals might give the impression that they’re from Detroit or New York rather than Leeds. ‘Man’ by The Bacchae is easily worth 2 minutes 58 seconds of your time too, may be the better track in fact. You’ll also like ‘Beautiful Bastards’ on their MySpace page, I shouldn’t wonder.