The Singleman Affair V Pearls and Brass

Duel it out March 4th ....

We gotta fess up ... two of our favourite artists at the moment are
The Singleman Affair and Pearls and Brass and we also gotta fess up ...
both are playing together on the March 3rd.  Both make weirdly iconic
music that is rooted in the past yet instead of playing tribute to
those scratchy records of the past, they revive the past back to a
different world, where bands on independant labels don’t want to
re-enact the past like some shoddy ‘crime scene re-enactment’ on FBI’s
Most Wanted Shows on Channel Five but instead something that is alive
and happening.

And Pearls and Brass ‘The Indian Tower’ and The Singleman Affair ‘Lets
Kill The Summer’ have been on Poptones.co.uk’s record player pretty
much non-stop.  The Singleman Affair play a lush sort of
folk-psychedelia, from the sitar drenched ragas of Madra Mornings Is
and Good To Be With You Again right through to the drugged-up
on-the-nod odes to Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon, right through to one
of the most harmonious-sunshine-drenched beautiful pop numbers of Oh To
Say that would easily put the best Magic Numbers song to shame.

Compred to the hard rockin’ power trio of Pearls and Brass that make
it ok to like rock’n’roll again.  This power-trio
goes straight-to-the-vein power rock of yore ... their fetish for all
things Groundhogs and BLOOZE.  Yes, BLOOZE.  Not blues.  Their new
album ‘The Indian Tower’ is not one of the White Blues Boys from the
Stereophonic Union of Proper Music.  This rips the mother fucking shit,
sounding bizarrely fresh, considering that their inspiration is of the
70s.  Yet, this is no retro-trip.  This is as urgent as a gun to the
head.  Annexing the psychedelic blues from the best of Zep, they manage
to be simultaneously soothing and abrasive, with the heaviest of the
heavy stoner rock harmonies over heavyweight guitar grooves with the
southern boogie skin graft alongside daily shots of electro-therapy
that if played loud would cause brain damage in even the least
non-committed scenester, making them stagger out of the record shop
thinking ‘Could rock ever be this good again?’

Has rock’n’roll come out of the underground again?  Pearls and Brass
and the Singleman Affair are certainly the beginning of some mighty
territorial pissings as they play in sweaty underground freak-out clubs
throughout the USA, claiming freaked noise as their own.

The question now being—who out there in Poptones.co.uk land can
video tape this for us?  Send your answers to

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