Robert Cooke

When the first Tramlines festival was held in 2009, I didn’t go. I was on holiday in Europe, desperately trying to find ATMs that still had cash in them. You see, this was at the start of the biggest worldwide financial crisis since the Great Depression, and the banks had run out of money. Now when I think about that, and think about the fact that back home, Sheffield’s music community had decided to organise a giant free music festival on the eve of the biggest age of austerity any of us have ever experienced, it’s tempting to ask whether they might have timed it better.

Isn’t it nice to get away once in a while? You know, ditch the daily routine, dust off the cobwebs and disappear to the other side of the world. It’s certainly worked wonders for Young Galaxy, who jetted off to scenic Sweden to make an album away from their Montreal base for the first time – nice work if you can get it.

It’s hard to imagine there’s many bands around who don’t envy the position Selkirk’s Frightened Rabbit find themselves in. Though their fourth album, Pedestrian Verse is their first to come with the backing of a major label (Atlantic), no one seems too worried about what this might mean for the music contained therein. There have been no cries of creative compromises, no slurs about ‘selling out’ – simply the recognition that a band who’ve long deserved a taste of success might finally be getting it.

When it comes to writing this column, we spend an awful lot of time goofing around researching on the internet. Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud and Bandcamp – that’s how we find all the bands we feature here. It’s also where we learned the sad news recently that several of those bands – Standard Fare, Likes Lions and Les Oeuf Pourri – have called it a day. It’s where we found this surprising video of Lewis from Best Friends being dead good at skateboarding. It’s where we saw whoever runs the Tye Die Tapes Twitter account be a bit rude about another band, and a member of said band not take it that well. It’s where Tye Die Tapes have, hilariously, turned the accusation that they’re hipsters into a very funny bit of DIY branding. And it’s where Offbeat was resurrected.

Marple’s Dutch Uncles have a quality to them that’s rarer than you’d think – for a guitar band at least. Like Wild Beasts, Menomena, and only a few others doing the rounds at the moment, you can take one of their songs and listen to it ten, fifty, a hundred times, and unless you’re a musician yourself (and a pretty highly-trained one at that) you still won’t be able to fathom how it works.

“That’s almost horrible,” says Harrison Koisser. “I don’t even know how I feel about that. WHAT HAVE I DONE?!”

Don’t be mad, but we might have just split up one of Britain’s most exciting bands. It’s not our fault: we thought Peace would be pleased when they heard how high they rank in Google; higher than both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Wikipedia entry on the very concept of world harmony.

“It’s kind of psychobilly,” is not something you’d ever have expected to hear Yannis Philippakis say about a Foals song. It’s now been more than five years since the music press (we’re pre-blogosphere at this point) went nuts for ‘Hummer’ – the song which, along with ‘Mathletics’, turned Foals into cult heroes overnight. Within months they were posing for magazine covers, and it wasn’t long until they were massive enough to become a byword for hipster guitar music.

On July 6th, 1972, David Bowie performed ‘Starman’ on Top Of The Pops. It was a moment which, two years after The Beatles split up, turned the next generation of children and teenagers on to pop music, and it’s obvious why. No one watching that broadcast had seen anything like it before, and it filled millions of young minds with questions: Is David Bowie a man or a woman? Is he gay or is he straight? Why is he dressed like that? Is he from Earth or from Mars? Who the hell is Ziggy Stardust? And who the hell is David Bowie?

Japandroids aside, it’s hard to think of a more unanimously praised rock record from this year than DIIV’s. Formed in 2011 by Brooklyn songwriter Zachary Cole Smith, the band released their debut albumOshin, in June to slew of eights-and nines-out-of-ten from right across the music press – not to mention a more than favourable 8.5/10 from us here at The 405. As a record, it sits somewhere between last year’s efforts by The War On Drugs and Real Estate: it’s a rock and roll album, but it’s a subtle, sophisticated one. Its washed out feel doesn’t make it any less memorable, and while it takes occasional left turns towards Krautrock tribalism (see recent single, ‘Doused’) it’s never overindulgent and maintains a vibrant, punk rock directness.

Aged 19, Nathan Hewitt left his tiny Canadian hometown of Morinville to go back-packing around Europe. Determined to find himself a new home on this side of the Atlantic, he eventually settled in London with his future wife and his band, Little Death.