NEW NORSE

MP3: Waskerley Way - Energy Legs

Apparently the snow has cleared back over in Newcastle and these new Waskerly Way songs are suitably clear and I would say his best yet; not that Mikey Waskerley is totally persuaded by the weather or anything but his atmospherics are definitely in on some British-style barometric deal as well as saturated in city outskirt forest imagery. A real cloudbusting/travel vibe here and yeah owing a lot to 80s romantic pop in an emotive but not wack-sounding way that kind of reminds me of Wild Nothing's moods.

myspace / bandcamp

RAIN SUBSIDES

MP3: Waskerley Way - Holly
MP3: Waskerley Way - Nocturne #1

Was obviously stoked to have Newcastle upon Tyne's own bedroom sensation Waskerley Way as a last minute addition to the Grass Widow + Trash Kit show a couple of weeks back; he played a certainly successful debut live show (no nerves!) but mostly it was interesting chatting about how low key and off the cuff/explorative those Cat Music songs were and how weird it then was to know tonnes of peope had heard them via Gorilla Vs Bear then Altered Zones and then Hipster Runoff (LOL). Great to get some increasingly good new ones that really mope through the dreamy electronic pop in a real British way that sounds a lot like the suburban parks near where his (and my old) house is in Heaton, tapping into a muffled kinda nocturnal vibe that fits in real nice with the Autumn coming in.

myspace

HI TIDE

Waskerley Way - Cat Alert

It takes a brave dude to make an EP of cat-themed, chillwave-informed tunes; that shit verges on being too Internet 2010, and that's obviously one of the worst things you can be on the internet in 2010. So it's pretty lucky for Newcastle's Waskerley Way that this EP is good enough to make it more than just a checklist of tired internet tropes; actually, the tropes don't come into it in the slightest, because this EP is better than good. As with the best of the practitioners stuck with the "chillwave" tag, it instantly evokes the kind of magic and mystery you felt as a child overhearing fragments of soul and disco. It's not easy to strip away literally decades of exposure to popular music and take you back to the first handful of times you heard music that wasn't a nursery rhyme, but that's what this EP achieves.

[Waskerley Way MySpace]

[Download Cat Music EP]