The Violet Hour
The Clientele

Put on a Clientele record and all sorts of out-of-focus images start drifting through your head: car headlights in the rain, the hazy twilight sun hanging low in the sky, long shadows, fogged-up café windows, coming home at dawn, willow trees hanging over ponds, church bells, dust particles dancing in shafts of sunlight streaming through net curtains, reflections in puddles, empty bus shelters at night, the lights on Battersea Bridge. If you've heard any of their singles (collected on the "Suburban Light" album) then you'll know what I mean, fleeting moments of everyday beauty that give you a warm, wistful glow for reasons you can't quite put your finger on. Like Nick Drake, The Cocteau Twins and Galaxie 500 before them they inhabit a highly personal world of ethereal dreaminess full of softly chiming guitars, brushed drums and whispery vocals buried under a soft woolly blanket of echo, and "The Violet Hour" makes it clear that they're perfectly happy to stay there too, though they've figured out how to give their songs more room to breathe so they don't quite feel like damp and poky little bedsitter rooms anymore. It's quite beautiful at times, "House On Fire" is so ripe with longing you think it's going to break down and cry before it finishes, and the superb "The House Always Wins" sounds like it's made of lace until it's set on fire by some flaming fuzzy guitar at the end which makes you think for one shocking moment that they're actually going to rock out ­ they don't of course, they keep it all bottled up like the nice, polite English boys they are. On the downside though, their songs are so impressionistic the paint is barely touching the canvas and they can drift by in a hook-free haze and be as hard to remember as the face of that pretty girl you saw for a fleeting second on the Number 30 bus all those years ago. Now excuse me while I go and stare out of the window for a while, I love the way the light hits the buildings at this time of day. [Official Site]

Haha Sound
Broadcast

A certain mystique tends to build up around bands like Broadcast who play moody electronic-tinged music, don't smile much in photographs, and take three years to make an album. You imagine them as very serious artistes hunkered down in a dark studio obsessively twiddling the knobs of their gizmos in a search of the perfect bleep, reading Nietzsche during black coffee and cigarette breaks and only venturing into the outside world to watch obscure German Expressionist movies at the local arthouse cinema. While the monochrome claustrophobia of their previous album "The Noise Made By People" made all that sound believable, "Haha Sound" displays enough of a lighter touch to suggest that they might actually enjoy a pint and a good knock-knock joke like the rest of us. Not that this is some huge stylistic change of direction, singer Trish Keenan's airily detached voice still floats through a cinematic landscape of eerie keyboard and guitar noises, but the songs feel looser and the mood is more varied, occasionally sounding like they're skipping through fields rather than just moodily trudging up grim rainy streets on their way to the methadone clinic. The opening track "Colour Me In" has a sing-songy nursery rhyme melody and a fairground ride musical accompaniment ­ albeit a David Lynch type of fairground with scary midgets lurking behind the candy floss stand – and "Before We Begin" is so lovely and beguiling you'll want to buy it some sweeties. The single "Pendulum" is on the darker side with its industrial beat and chainsaw synths and the band show the influence of all those nights spent watching obscure German Expressionist movies with some oddball instrumental snippets that pop up throughout the album like little explosions of weirdness. It's this mix of retro pop classicism and arthouse oddity that makes Broadcast such a groovy and moody thrill, as if Francois Hardy had been kidnapped by aliens and was lost in the cold, outer reaches of the universe in a huge, throbbing and humming spaceship. [Official Site]

A Cellarful of Motown!
Various Artists

Motown's back catalogue has been packaged and re-packaged more times than Michael Jackson has had noses so the release of yet another compilation would usually be a big snooze-a-rama rather than a cause for celebration, but what we have here are two CDs worth of Motown tunes from their 1960s Golden Age that have never seen the light of day before because they were given the thumbs down by the Emperor Berry Gordy at his quality control sessions. Now while "previously unreleased" does usually mean "old crap we're putting out now to make a few quid off the trainspotter completists" this is MOTOWN we're talking about here, the undisputed greatest record label ever (if you want to dispute it I'll see you outside, mate) and only a label as awash in talent as they were could discard gems like Barbara McNair's swinging "Baby A Go-Go" and Gladys Knight's passionate stormer "Here Are The Pieces of My Broken Heart" which most other labels would give up their first-born male child to put out. I nearly fell out of my chair when I heard Tammi Terrell's sublime original 1966 version of "All I Do" ­ the same song that it's writer Stevie Wonder recorded (and had a big hit with) in the 1980s. How he could have sat on a song that great for so long is beyond me, but I'm not a hyper-talented genius so what do I know? That these cracking tunes have sat unheard in dusty shoeboxes under Berry Gordy's bed for over three decades is quite mind-boggling, and you'll be spending a lot of time picking your jaw up off the floor when you listen to this. Not being as good as a "My Girl" or "Tracks of My Tears" is hardly a crime worthy of such neglect as few songs are. For vintage soul fans this like finding a lost Rembrandt in the attic, but even better because you can't dance to a painting.