Warning - Newness!

Unusually for 27 Leggies we are making a change from the usual diet of Tsonga Disco, Thai funk, Hungarian garage bands and assorted old codgers to bring you some new music by new acts. Don't panic - this will just be a temporary aberration. Not only that, I am trying out some new technology as well - I suspect this will also prove to be temporary.

Apart from getting to know you, our wonderful readers around the world, the main benefit of running a music blog is that nice people send you free music. I have read posts by some bloggers complaining about being inundated with e-mails sending them stuff, which strikes me as churlish in the extreme. It's free music. How can that possibly be a bad thing?

27 Leggies is only a modest endeavour (although I prefer to think of it as "niche"), but despite that I receive a steady stream of links and downloads. Now most of them aren't my cup of tea, to be honest, but every so often something turns up that I really like and that I would probably never have got to hear otherwise. Last week that happened twice.

First we have the "Death" E.P. by Afterlife Parade, which was released last week and is available on iTunes and Bandcamp. Afterlife Parade is known to his Mum as Quinn Erwin, and this is his response to a series of losses in his life and the lives of those around him. He describes "Death" as "deep, dark and atmospheric", which sums it up better than I can. There is a second EP due out in April called "Rebirth" which, by contrast, will apparently be "upbeat, percussive and a bit electronic".

I have listened to the EP three times now and I like it more each time. To "deep, dark and atmospheric" I would add "emotional without ever tipping over into melodramatic". My two favourite tracks are "Simple" and this one, "Arrows Fly". The guitar, cello, drums and prairie winds work really well together and the lyrics draw you in as well - clearly a metaphor for something I can't quite put my finger on.

"Arrows Fly"



Speaking of metaphors I don't quite get but I'm happy to keep listening to until I do, next up is "Alarms Ring Out" by The Daydream Club. They are a vaguely folkie English duo - Paula Walker and Adam Pickering - whose debut album "Overgrown" was released late last year on Poco Poco Records. On first listen this is probably my favourite track. The harmonies are good throughout the album but work particularly well here. It reminds me a lot of Hem, which can't be bad.

"Alarms Ring Out"



After giving them both that build-up, let's hope I haven't buggered the technology up completely and you can actually hear them. As a back-up, here is another folkie tune built around a mystical metaphor.



They were never really the same after Adge Cutler passed on.