A Week in Drownload: Youthmovies, No Age, John Maus, the Sticks, Soiled Mattress and the Springs

More of what's good, including the magnificent new Youthmovies video and an Upset! The Rhythm special. Next week: Feist, Ronson x Radiohead, Holy Fuck x Riton, Chairlift, Islands and more, perhaps.

Youthmovies
Video exclusive: ‘The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor’
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The first single from their long-awaited debut album, ‘The Naughtiest Girl Is A Monitor’ (released early March) showcases Oxford five-piece Youthmovies at their excellently eccentric best – a wholly natural-sounding concoction of a dozen movements made single, a progressive piece of ambitious modern rock that shrugs the shackles of typical genre restraints.

Watch: Youthmovies – ‘The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor’

John Maus
‘My Whole World is Coming Apart’
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John Maus is alive and off on one again.

‘My Whole World is Coming Apart’ is his call to arms, a track that revels in the glee of a life spent rebounding time and again off the barriers of polite society; each rejection sending Maus’s attempts at pop flying off on strange tangents, ploughing furrows head-down ‘til he finds himself alone in a field at the edge of town and, as if that wasn't alarming enough, a full-blown idiosyncratic. Synths flutter like edge of town leaves, but they’re brave and decent like Bowie’s ‘Big Brother’.

Download: John Maus – ‘My Whole World is Coming Apart’

The Sticks
‘On the Sea’
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Brighton's The Sticks are something of a worrying fall from grace, their lurching like runts at odds with Maus’s shoulder-pads-in-a-nuclear-bunker strut.

Still, the sense of struggle remains, even if it is more weary and lagged out and bitter, stalking at a distance and out of time, like if the speccy one from Stand By Me fell asleep after a heavy night’s drinking, woke up in 2008 and proceeded to scream in its face until it was finally, finally over. Hear what that might sound like below.

Download: The Sticks – ‘On the Sea’

Soiled Mattress and the Springs
‘Tidal Wave’
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More pastoral climes now, as we lay down with Soiled Mattress and the Springs (ho ho) and get burned to death in a sunflower field (oh no).

Yeah, their sunny pop may sound charming and bright and breezy at first, but there’s more than meets the eye imminent in ‘Tidal Wave’, as the small-time gangsters wringing necks in out-of-season Skegness turn horrified faces towards the killer surf a mile or so offshore. Vengeance, scum. This is the popnotpop revenge of Silent Type and the Spods.

Download: Soiled Mattress and the Springs – ‘Tidal Wave’

No Age
‘Neck Escaper’
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You’ll have heard this already, no doubt, but Randy Randall and Dean Spunt’s skewed pop transcends tragedy, with lyrics that hint at finding a body that’s spent days hanging behind a locked door, shit piling up, “smells like someone died ”.

Onward, totally.

Download: No Age – ‘Neck Escaper’