New Music Initiative 075: Whyte Horses
Apr. 16th, 2020 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedsitter23Whyte Horses is a "band" and Hard Times is their third album.
But Whyte Horses is really a project by Dom Thomas, who produces Whyte Horses, and is most well known for being the guy behind the Finders Keepers record label.
Allmusic and others name some of the influences in Thomas's work as French pop. folk, psychedelia, tropicalia, lounge and space rock.
It reminds me a bit of what Mark Ronson has done by bringing in vocalists and making mix tapes of a certain sound.
Hard Times is a mix of well known, more obscure and barely known. Ca Plane Pour Moi and Bang Bang (My Baby Shot me down) are here, as well as covers of Todd Rundgren's "I Saw The Light", the Bee Gees "Mr Natural", and songs by Baby Huey, British 60's Psych pop multi-instrumentalist Phil Cordell, Welsh glam band Bran and 70s soft rockers The Alessi Brothers).
Thomas has assembled a top notch group of vocalists- Damon Gough (Badly Drawn Boy), Elly Jackson (La Roux) Tracyanne Campbell (Camera Obscura), Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), Melanie Pain (Nouvelle Vague), John Grant (the Czars) and Chrysta Bell (frequent David Lynch collaborator)- as well as a couple of his own in-house vocalists Lucy Styles and Natalie McCool.
It's the kind of album that gets bad reviews, but I don't care. I can put this on over and over again. best track? I'm partial to Traceyanne of course. La Roux may be unrecognizable as a soul singer, but is powerful. "Seabird" lacks the big name star on vocals, but is beautiful.
I will put in a good word for Badly Drawn Boy's "Satellite of Love". It's a song that doesn't really need to be covered (Sorry U2, Morrissey, Perry Farrell and the Eurythmics). He takes it back to its Loaded-era Velvet Underground roots, and I dig it.
Heck, I didn't even know it was a VU song (BDB does the original lyrics too) but it works as a Velvets-style rocker. Lou would of course re-invent it as a live concert mainstay. It is an epic almost gospel powerhouse on one of its best versions on Take No Prisoners. On Live in Italy- it's a guitar heavy affair with Quine and Reed.
As Thomas sees his Whyte Horses as a modern day version of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, it feels just right.
But Whyte Horses is really a project by Dom Thomas, who produces Whyte Horses, and is most well known for being the guy behind the Finders Keepers record label.
Allmusic and others name some of the influences in Thomas's work as French pop. folk, psychedelia, tropicalia, lounge and space rock.
It reminds me a bit of what Mark Ronson has done by bringing in vocalists and making mix tapes of a certain sound.
Hard Times is a mix of well known, more obscure and barely known. Ca Plane Pour Moi and Bang Bang (My Baby Shot me down) are here, as well as covers of Todd Rundgren's "I Saw The Light", the Bee Gees "Mr Natural", and songs by Baby Huey, British 60's Psych pop multi-instrumentalist Phil Cordell, Welsh glam band Bran and 70s soft rockers The Alessi Brothers).
Thomas has assembled a top notch group of vocalists- Damon Gough (Badly Drawn Boy), Elly Jackson (La Roux) Tracyanne Campbell (Camera Obscura), Gruff Rhys (Super Furry Animals), Melanie Pain (Nouvelle Vague), John Grant (the Czars) and Chrysta Bell (frequent David Lynch collaborator)- as well as a couple of his own in-house vocalists Lucy Styles and Natalie McCool.
It's the kind of album that gets bad reviews, but I don't care. I can put this on over and over again. best track? I'm partial to Traceyanne of course. La Roux may be unrecognizable as a soul singer, but is powerful. "Seabird" lacks the big name star on vocals, but is beautiful.
I will put in a good word for Badly Drawn Boy's "Satellite of Love". It's a song that doesn't really need to be covered (Sorry U2, Morrissey, Perry Farrell and the Eurythmics). He takes it back to its Loaded-era Velvet Underground roots, and I dig it.
Heck, I didn't even know it was a VU song (BDB does the original lyrics too) but it works as a Velvets-style rocker. Lou would of course re-invent it as a live concert mainstay. It is an epic almost gospel powerhouse on one of its best versions on Take No Prisoners. On Live in Italy- it's a guitar heavy affair with Quine and Reed.
As Thomas sees his Whyte Horses as a modern day version of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, it feels just right.
