The bleak light of the Editors' maudlin pop dresses up with a lick of colour for their third outing.
Snatching a few moments during their rehearsal schedule at their North London studios, Editors' guitarist Chris Urbanowicz and drummer Ed Lay are in a relaxed, jovial mood as they give me the low down on new album, In This Light And On This Evening.
Will the pop prince's second album blow away some of the mysteries of Mika?
In today's musical climate Mika is a rare artist; his unabashed pop anthems are gloriously over the top, his stage persona and flamboyant style unapologetic and beneath it all is a serious young man with a single pointed determination and intelligence. His songs have been at once personal (his first album detailed childhood experiences while new album The Boy Who Knew Too Much looks at his adolescence) yet unrevealing.
With the sad passing of James Stinson of Drexciya some years ago, the dark aquatic electro sound of Detroit looked to be in decline, though in reality that has hardly been the case. Gerald Donald, the other member of the group has kept busy with Dopplereffekt, Der Zyklus, and recording most recently under the name Heinrich Mueller.
The purveyors of big room mirror ball house are back with Temporary Pleasure.
First came the anthemic remix by Justice, then from the ashes of Simian stepped James Ford and Jas Shaw under the new guise of a mobile DJ unit. Their debut album was heralded as one of the best in modern dance culture, garnering critical praise and spawning a handful of recognizable hits, rare for an album of its genre. After intense touring and both members lending their production skills to other projects they are back with Temporary Pleasure, the instrumental album chock full of vocals.
For over fifteen years Moritz von Oswald has been rewriting the book on modern dub music, feeding stripped back German techno and house through vintage valve compressions and creating a legion of fans with his Basic Channel, Chain Reaction, Maurizio and Rhythm & Sound projects with Mark Ernestus. Save for a couple of remixes we haven't heard from von Oswald since the last Rhythm & Sound release though his Recomposed album with Carl Craig last year was a dramatic shift away from his affiliation with dub techno and saw the veteran producer delving in to modern classical fused with electronics. Following on from that project we here witness the formation of the Moritz von Oswald Trio, a supergroup of sorts featuring Vladislav Delay and Max Loderbauer from Sun Electric.
The Welsh rockers tap into the spirit of gone but not forgotten lyricist Richey James Edwards for their ninth album as Real Groove gets up close and personal with Nick Wire and James-Dean Bradfield.
Their songs have long been a call to arms for alienated, disaffected youth and assorted castoff freaks. Faced with the sudden, shock disappearance of guitarist and chief songwriter Richey Edwards in 1995 on the cusp of real success, they decided to continue as a three piece and have since gone on to become even bigger and more successful than they ever hoped. Their latest album Journal For Plague Loverssees a return of Edwards to the group by way of lyrics long ago left to the other members shortly before he fell off the face of the earth.
Elly Jackson shakes her famously coiffed red shock of hair, loosening fragments of white detritus which float down to the table of the Sheperd's Bush pub we are sat at.
“I had a show last night and I sprayed my hair with that really hard spray but I didn't get all of it out so if you see little bits coming off, it's not dandruff,” she explains.
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