For heaven’s sake. Two lowercase letters and then some uppercase? Did ks Rhoads not go to school?

And once again we find ourselves in the States, Nashville, Tennessee to be precise where Mr Rhoads is well-known. And by crickey you don’t have to wonder why for very long. He’s blooming brilliant. Looks great, sounds great. Again, veering severely to the left of the field where all the music we know we like lives, but heck can he write a song. He can.

The track above – from his new album ‘The Wilderness’, which has been out since early March – has a real Pink Floyd-y vibe for a bit, then there’s some late night whistling, a huge string section breakdown, a choir, massive drums… oh, you know, it’s all a bit lacking in ambition. It’s a huge sound. And it’s not confined to just this track, the whole flipping album sounds that big, huge, vast. It’s like they’ve chucked everything they can get their hands on at it. Opener ‘Orphaned’ is ‘Be My Baby’ writ x-large, ‘Invincible Fortress’ has a haunting Beach Boys undertow to it and it pumps itself up before bursting with delight and if any advertising types are listening, the intro to the ridiculously jaunty ‘This Is Where I Come From’ really should be snapped up for some ad or other. Get in first eh and send me my finder’s fee? He even goes totally off piste with a bit of hip hop. Both ‘Chains’ and ‘Hiyayayayayaya’ have an Eminem vibe, but mostly, neither lose sight of the tunemongery on show.

Here is a man who crafts songs so hooky they catch fish while you’re not looking. He not only looks like a proper star, but like the sort you’d enjoy a beer or two with. Best of all though, he makes seriously clever pop music. The funny thing is, it’s so mainstream you have to stop and wonder why we’ve not gobbled ks up on this side of the pond. Talk about missing out. Funny old world.

Oh, and we really love the album cover. Made us smile.

More hear…
- Do yourself a favour and invest in a copy of the album. $10. Bargain.
- a website … twitter … youtube … soundcloud … facebook.

You might have noticed, but of late we’ve been craving different. It’s not that we don’t like guitars or tight as chuff three-pieces belting it out, we’ve certainly not gone off stuff intent on making a racket and we most certainly still like noisy, but we’re really enjoying having more of a poke around for a bit of different.

Sea Stacks’ head honcho, Davy Berryman, is clearly someone who likes different and he’s evidently a man who likes a good old think and a plan, a plan that involves putting together a band with no guitars or pianos, and here, some 40 musicians and quite a lot of time later, is the result.

The self-titled debut EP, which crept out last year, is well worth a listen (find it on Soundcloud… when the excellent tip toey ‘Is This Normal’ staggers to its feet and makes a dash for it you’ll want to stand up and honk like a seal), but the new single, featuring the upbeat ‘High Tide’ and downbeat ‘Low Tide’, is already a hop and a jump on from the debut.

Davy calls it orchestra indie, and yes, there’s an indie songwriting sensibility about it, but the level of arrangement and the standard of musicianship is above and beyond. You’re tempted to think My Life Story when this kind of thing tips up, but Sea Stacks are much more subtle, think much more Efterlklang with tunes than Mr Shillingford’s exuberant string soaked pop blasts.

What impresses though is that the whole thing is just so well thought through. With the music front and centre, they make space for everything from a quirky video to Davy’s charming blog on seastacks.co.uk blog. We love it when a plan comes together, and this really feels like a plan coming together.

Looking forward to hearing more as it rolls out this year in among a raft of summery live dates. There’s a smaller live ensemble, just eight of them, and in the spirit we seem to be tucking in our pocket of late, that all adds up to a very welcome slice of different.

More hear…
- Buy the new single for just two of your earth pounds from bandcamp…
- Websiting … Twittering … Soundclouding … Facebooking … YouTube.

The thing about music, see, is you can’t know about all of it. No matter how much you got, no matter how much you cram between your ears, no matter how long you’ve been cramming it, there’s always more.

Round our house, me and Mrs My New Favourite Band are working our way through HBO’s much brilliant Tremé. Set in post Katrina New Orleans, it follows a fantastic hotch potch of characters as they rebuild their lives following the devastating hurricane. As you’d hope for a show set in Orleans, music is front and centre.

We twigged that there were rafts of special musical guests when Elvis Costello popped up early doors acting badly. No idea who they were, but we could spot them due to bad acting. We deferred to Google to find out, but had to stop when Mrs MNFB discovered ‘The Bad Thing’ that happens in Season One while on one such expedition. Keeping it from me almost tipped her over the edge let me tell you.

So thanks to Tremé our ears are open to street folk, school marching bands, jazz of all shapes and sizes, soul bands, brass bands, spectacular Mardi Gras Indians and, thanks to Davis, mash ups of most of the above, with some hip hop for good measure.

Yes, yes, rambling, I know.

What really gets me is the brass. Which brings us to Youngblood Brass Band. See, got there in the end.

Tremé has served up some instruments we’ve never even seen before let alone heard, including the sousaphone. The big daddy of the tuba family, it wraps around the player like a snake and makes the greatest noise – a huge, deep, bassy rumble – and in the right hands it is pure funk. And the right hands, it turns out, belong to one Nat McIntosh of Youngblood Brass Band.

With just three albums under their belt since 1998 and a fourth on the way this summer, not exactly prolific, but feel the quality will you? The nine-piece hail from Madison, New Orleans, New York, Nashville, Minneapolis and Chicago, and right there you have quite a musical heritage roll call… Madison you’re saying? Home to James Brown’s drummer Clyde Stubblefield and uber producer Butch Vig, although sadly not living in the same house as far as we know.

Picking just the one track for your listening pleasure was almost impossible, so after much thought you get ‘March’ from their 2007 album ‘Is That a Riot?’ and from the new album ‘Pax Volumi’ (due this summer on Tru Thoughts), the single ’20 Questions’, which is out on 3 June. Watch it below…

As you can see, what you get here is a bunch of lads cooking up a total storm, shuffling indie kids and their guitars this isn’t. Chuck in a decent MC and the whole thing is pure joy. They’re really worth investigating, because aside from cooking up said storm they’re no strangers to spreading the word. Start at the Wiki entry and The Layered Arts Collective site layered.org and you discover they run a schools programme that covers everything from Orleans musical history to punk and they not only run their own label, but publish their own sheet music so school bands can get in on the fun. And that, in this age of identikit X Factor hopelessness, can only be a good thing.

More hear…
- The Soundcloud is a must-listen from start to finish.
- Website …
- And if you’re in London on 22 May you’re in luck. Get tickets for their show at Cargo here.

Heck. Stand by for a quick post… Canadian Stockholm dweller Richard Reagh has just caused us a right headache. Couldn’t think of a pun for the headline could we. Reagh? Is it, we wondered, pronounced Ree-ag? Or is it Rea, like Chris? One thing’s for sure, he’s not like Chris Rea is his music. Cripes.

Beautifully put together, deceptively simple and ever so slightly off-kilter, that’s Richard Reagh. Perhaps we’d get away with attaching a folk pop label… or perhaps alt folk? But… but… there’s remixes, lots of, which are rather floor pleasing so perhaps not. You can hear a twinge of Beach Boys, a sliver of They Might Be Giants perhaps in that voice. And there’s a very healthy lashing of gospel, real sing-along-a-stuff in a Blur ‘Tender’ kind of way. Have a quick tug on the new single ‘Someone Needs Me More’, just needs a gospel choir really. See what we mean? As hat fans, we’re loving the headwear too.

The plan, says Richard, is to release his ‘The Ed Harris Masters’ album in 10 bite-sized chunks with the latest chunk, ‘Someone Needs Me More’, being the third such offering. The first two chunks, and we will get bored of typing the word chunk in a minute, are corkers. There’s ‘Snowman’ (see above), the single edit of which swirls – quite literally in places – like huge flakes of snow tumbling from the sky, while ‘Whatcha Gonna’ is a proper whistle-along charmer with a bit of Spanish guitar to boot and the delightful line “if we lift of right now/we’ll be back in our beds/before we fall off the couch”. Marvellous stuff.

We’re looking forward to hearing the whole lot as an album, you know, 10 tracks in a row by the same person, like how we listened to music in the olden days. Call us old fashioned.

More hear…
- Website … Facebook … YouTube … Soundcloud …
- BTW… Mr Reagh has kindly helped us out with his name. “Everybody has trouble with Reagh,” he tells us. “Think of a ‘Ray’ of sunshine.” Will do sir, will do.

We’ve just had a brilliant idea. See, we get sent quite a bit of music in the hope we’ll write about it. The excellent Song, By Toad Records did just that… and their music comes with beer. So what if we set up mynewfavouritebeer.com would breweries send us quite a bit of free beer to write about in a music journalism style? No, thought not.

Anyway, to the point. Edinburgh’s Song, By Toads Records have teamed up with the city’s Barney’s Beer Brewery for a Record Store Day experiment that isn’t likely to be repeated in a big hurry. In our previous life record labels and breweries were often been mentioned in the same breath, normally to do with the former organising something in the later and not doing a very good job. Believe us, we were invited much of the time.

Yeah, well forget all that because on Record Store Day 2013, which is 20 April, record label meets brewery in a well organised, limited edition release of music and beer shocker. The plan it seems is for Song, By Toad to stick out a 250-edition clear red vinyl 12-inch featuring eight tracks from, it says here, “emerging bands from the Scottish underground DIY scene”, while Barney’s stick out a limited edition, lovingly presented four-pack of beer with each bottle featuring two tracks in the shape of download codes.

The winner is the first to sell all their wares. Beer vs Records, see.

When we thought about it for a bit, quite a while if truth be told, we thought is was a done deal. Beer wins easy because you get a decent pint AND eight tunes, MP3 admittedly… but then we thought about the clear red vinyl 12-inch and how nice that sounds and then we unrolled our promo of the featured tracks and… well, now we’re not so sure beer does win. And when Beer goes head to head with Records, the 12-inch will be for sale in more places than the beer, but then we imagine that record shops aren’t licensed to sell beer, nor would you expect to pick up a 12-inch in an offie, not matter how nice the colour of the vinyl.

Oh, yes, right. Music. You get two tracks by, in alphabetical order, starting with our faves, the shoegazey Le Thug, twinkly dream popsters Magic Eye, the ‘atmospheric punk sludge rock’ of Plastic Animals and ragged indie rockers
Zed Penguin.

So… back to the beer, which is making our mouths water just reading about it… you get a bottle each of Le Thug Lager (4.8%, Light straw coloured, smooth and a light fruity zing. A clean, dry, finish), Zed Penguin Pale Ale (3.8%, gold coloured, a good honest full-bodied pale ale with a subtle citrus & spicy hop finish), Magic Eye Red Rye (4.5%, made with two types of rye malt & German melanoidinmalz. Copper/dark amber colour, with a crisp, toffee apple & fruity taste) and Plastic Animals IPA (5%, light straw coloured, assertive bitterness, erupting with US style hop character).

We’ll let you know who wins.

More hear…
- beervsrecords.com, Song, By Toad Records, Barney’s Beer and Record Store Day should keep you busy while we’re at the bar.
- We’ve just looked and there’s hundreds of beer blogs, really like Boak and Bailey’s Beer Blog and the grandmaster Pete Brown. Don’t think we’ll be writing about beer any time soon.