The Time Out mixtape
Your weekly guide to the best new tracks
Listen to the Time Out mixtape: our music team's round up of their favourite new tracks, mixes and music videos. Check out the hottest new music here, and check back for regular updates.
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Unknown Mortal Orchestra – 'Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay'
It's Friday, and the sun has returned after a week of damp grey misery, so to celebrate here's wonky soul band Unknown Mortal Orchestra (whose record 'II' this week made our list of the best albums so far this year) with a divine take on an Otis Redding classic. Forget whatever Simon Cowell has told you about 'making the song your own': UMO know very well that you can't take 'Sittin'…' away from Otis, so for their take on Marc Riley's BBC Radio 6 show they've done nothing radical with it. Their warm and trippy (and ever so slightly spooky) take just cranks up the reverb and adds some crunchy, vaguely psychedelic guitar slides, to make an ideal soundtrack for wastin' time in the sun.
Museum Of Love – 'Down South'
Suicide, Soft Cell, the Pet Shop Boys, Yazoo… It's an acknowledged Pop Fact that synth-and-vocal duos have made some great records. The latest twosome to try the format out are Museum Of Love, with vocals by Pat Mahoney – formerly drummer in LCD Soundsystem – and machinery by Dennis McNany of The Juan MacLean. Of course, another acknowledged Pop Fact is that drummers should never sing, but if Phil Collins can do it then Pat Mahoney definitely can. He's pretty good, too – a little David Byrne, a lot Bryan Ferry – and it all sounds very sleek and groovy over McNany's retro synths. Actually, the only thing about 'Down South' that we're not too keen on is the album art, which looks like it's been lazily Photoshopped together in five minutes by Marilyn Manson. But who cares? It's the music that matters, and we predict great things – including, inevitably, a sweet James Murphy remix.
Snakadaktal – 'Ghost'
What is a Snakadaktal? It's a cross between a snake and a pterodactyl (obviously), as drawn by the members of this Australian dream pop band during a boring maths class. They don't have to do maths any more, because they've finished school and formed a five-piece dream-pop band, so they're free to channel all that creative energy into lovely tracks like 'Ghost', which is included on their forthcoming debut album 'Sleep in the Water' (August 2). Whereas Snakadaktal once fused legless reptiles with extinct flying ones, nowadays they combine the all-consuming chillout electronica of 'Moon Safari'-era Air with plaintive, minimal balladry in the style of The XX, plus a dash of chillwave. It's great stuff, but here's a word of warning: if you're ordering the album, make sure you don't confuse Snakadaktal with Shakatak.
Fun Adults – 'For Water'
If you were a child in the ‘80s or ‘90s, there'll probably be something hauntingly familiar about the stunning new video for Fun Adults' track 'For Water'. It's a jumpy, flickery animation, full of dancing figures which look like something Henri Matisse might have created if he'd lived 40 years longer and worked for Disney. The song is great, too: clanking and shuffling, rising and falling, packed with vocal harmonies and discordant keyboards, it's a Wild Beasts-meet-Four Tet wet dream.
Nadine Shah – 'To Be a Young Man'
Nadine Shah is starting to scare us. We first wrote about her back in November, and tipped her as one of our 2013 ones to watch, so naturally we were excited to see her new video – but what is seen cannot be unseen. The song is masterful, a stalking, Bad Seed-y alt rock beast that sounds a lot more ambitious than the Newcastle singer-songwriter's early solo piano material. The video, while just as impressive, is probably the creepiest (literally – entomophobes, beware) we've seen all year, even including that Nick Cave video with Ray Winstone and the prostitute. We love Nadine, but now we're worried we're meddling with some deeply, dangerously dark stuff. We've washed our hands, but we still feel dirty. Where will it end? Nads only knows.
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