Aural Geography: Brighton

Our second stop on the Aural tour of the world brings us to the hometown of Blood Red Shoes, Brighton. A lovely town on the south coast of England, Brighton has a great recent history in music. Socially and politically, the town is quite liberal; promoting art, individuality and performance at every turn. Not only does the town have a lively music scene (venues, record shops, labels as well as bands), the music it produces is pretty damn good.

Bat For Lashes produced one of the albums of the year in 2006, with Fur and Gold, heading to Mercury and Brit nominations. Brighton features heavily throughout my collection, British Sea Power’s Open Season is a particular great, The Go! Team’s debut Thunder Lightning Strike is great fun, as is Brighton don Norman Cook’s Halfway Between the Gutter and the Stars. Cook is one of Brighton’s favoured sons, with nearly a quarter of a million folk turning up to see his last beach set in 2002. Electrelane, too, make superb electronic music, 2004’s The Power Out is my choice of their back-cat. Not featured in today’s audio selection are other fine bands such as Electric Soft Parade, Brakes, Clearlake, The Levellers, Maccabees and retropop funstrumpets The Pipettes.

So today’s audio choices are all quite modern, and all pretty enjoyable, and demonstrate the variety of the Brighton scene…

Fatboy Slim – Weapon of Choice
British Sea Power – True Adventures (Live in Columbus, Ohio): Thanks to ThaBombShelter for this!
Bat For Lashes – Prescilla
The Go! Team – Fake ID
Electrelane – To The East

 

British Sea Power – Waving Flags

 

Breathe in that refreshing air: British Sea Power are back! Their third LP, the irritatingly titled Do You Like Rock Music? is released next week and has been preceded by this single. Comparisons to Arcade Fire abound, but the sound is certainly a small extension to the kind of music on show towards the end of Open Season, retaining the open air, almost polar mood present on tracks like ‘True Adventures‘ and ‘Oh Larsen B‘, and for that they are truly unique. A full review of Do You Like Rock Music will follow next week, but suffice to say that so far betwixt this and Sons & Daughters’ This Gift 2008 can claim at least 2 superb LPs before January is out. A great start to the year.

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