MySpace Trawl – National Forest
Bah. It's autumn, and long gone are our memories of the few hours of sunshine we got in summer on that fateful Sunday afternoon in Stoke. Unfortunately, all the sunshine has buggered off and it’s now time for our traditional eight months of sub-zero temperatures.
How we look forward to standing in the bus stop whilst freezing our arses off and listening to old people complaining about the cold and why the number 97 bus is three minutes late. As the days get colder, darker and generally shittier, we thought that we’d best try and find some music for you that’s a little bit happier and will get you through this year’s arctic freeze. While we’d love to physically be there to warm you up with a piping mug of hot chocolate, wrap you up in the finest cashmere scarf and cover your hands from winter’s horrible cold with a pair of mittens, we can’t. It’s not really possible, and anyways we’re all probably going to hibernate through the winter.
Instead of helping you stay warm ourselves, we’ve picked an artist whose sound has a pleasant warm vibe to it anyway. This week, we turn the focus of our semi-famous MySpace Trawl feature to Manchester, where we’ve stumbled across the sounds of National Forest, aka Daniel Cowley.
Yes, we’re sure that all the hecklers out there will be already thinking to themselves. “Oooh, as if a record can make you feel any different, hecklerspray's just being stupid again.” Well, to some extent you’d be right in thinking that. National Forest’s records aren’t gonna make you develop a major case of heat stroke, but we feel that they will at least be a deterrent from the cold. Until the bus arrives. Better than nothing.
Signed to the brilliant but tiny record label Faith and Hope, National Forest fuses a mixture of electronics and indie with touches of pop that creates a sound that doesn’t really seem to fit in to one kind of genre. If this music was a kid at school, it would be the loner of the class – always searching for a friend but not quite being able to find one. As the man himself has said in the past through various interviews, his earlier work was made on a PC, crap guitar and a crap microphone. Crap equipment or not, it still sounded good to us. Unfortunately none of the early stuff from his self-titled first album is up for you to listen to. But fear not, we’ll give you a link later so you can listen to some. All is not lost!
A lot of electronic music gets slated, usually from closed-minded journalists who think anything lacking a guitar or two can’t be good, but other reasons include a lack of vocals. Whilst not every track from the second National Forest album One Million feature vocals, some of them do, be it from unknown artists and the more established. Coincidentally, two of the four tracks on his MySpace page are just like that!
The first track available for listening – and for you to legally download without feeling guilty about – is National Forest's stab at remixing one of The Flaming Lips' tracks – Free Radicals. The Flaming Lips rock enough already, as you will have read with our various live reviews but National Forest takes one of the best tracks off their latest album and gives it a good makeover. Wayne Coyne’s straight-edged vocals have disappeared and replaced with fuzzed-out and trippy-sounding reworks. Same goes with the song’s easily-identifiable melody. If you are familiar with the original, then the remix is just building on its foundations. Adding a few more layers of drums and melody, it works a treat. This remix has not been released anywhere – it’s a MySpace exclusive, so go download it before it disappears!
Smile Says Go is one of the other tracks that features vocals. We could have picked A.M Lights but we favour the other track a tiny bit more. Manda Rin from Bis and Data Panik sings on this one. The music itself is a floaty electronic lullaby, oozing with happiness. Add to that a light and catchy vocal, it’s a hit in the making that deserves to be whored out on every kind of car commercial going. But sadly not. Because of the feelgood factor of the track, it quickly ends, which is always annoying.
For anyone who lives in the Manchester area, Mr Forest co-runs a night there called Kiss My Hac. All we can do is urge you to visit, for music of the same kind of style and feel.
Once again, here we have a brilliant example of an artist who is making some gorgeous sounds but is sadly unable to poke his way through to a mainstream audience. In a sad world where dance music seems to be full of crap repetitive trance full of women who can’t sing underneath horribly sampled theme-tunes to 80s cop shows, there is a slight glimmer of hope with National Forest. But he isn’t getting the exposure he deserves. Chances are you won’t be hearing brilliant tracks like A.M Lights at 11am in the morning on your local tinpot radio station. Oh no, that’s usually reserved for repetitive plays of old George Michael songs.
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[story by Matthew Laidlow]
