Listening Club - 19th August 2012

Yo ho ho, everyone.

Summertime's finally here in London kiddies, which means people have stopped moaning about the lack of decent weather and started moaning about the heat and humidity overload instead. So it's par for the course, really.

This time last week, as u know, I was stood in Hyde Park, drinking weak overpriced lager and enjoying New Order (typically shambolic), The Specials (typically energizing) and Blur (surprisingly slick). All well and good, and from the looks of things, vastly superior to the B and C-list smorgasbord that was the Olympic Closing Ceremony. As Chris TT pointed out in his blog post, whatever cultural and creative doors were driven open by the imagination of the Opening Ceremony, were well and truly slammed shut by the narrow-mindedness of the Closing. So, and slow, it goes.

Meanwhile, back in Listening Club land, @cakehugga hit a pre-wedding home run with her choice of Ugly Duckling's "Moving At Breakneck Speed", which not only went down a treat, but seems to have garnered more post-LC-replays than any album so far (well, judging by the tweets, anyway). Hooray! and thanks to her for the pick, and also for nominating @JimMcCauley for this week's selection. Over to him...

"Unlike the last time I was in charge, for this go in the big Listening Club chair I knew exactly what I was going to choose from the get-go. There’s not much of a story to this one. I find new music these days pretty much exclusively from what people mention online. For a while I found quite a bit through 6Music, while I was working in an office that had 6Music on all day (except for that weird few days when we switched to NME Radio. Imagine Steve Sutherland stamping on a human face, forever. That’s what NME Radio is like), which I can thank for things like Sleigh Bells and Public Service Broadcasting and also for kicking off my ongoing thing for discovering stuff I idiotically overlooked in my 20s (Hooray for Lush and The Sundays and Dubstar! Not so much for Curve, I’m afraid), but now it’s mostly about the social media. Luckily I follow enough people with decent taste for this to be a fairly reliable process.

So then. This lot cropped up in my Facebooks a few weeks ago and looked interesting, and so I grabbed their latest album, and I rather like it. Hopefully you missed that bit where I bigged them up on Twitter. With luck they won’t have suddenly become really famous in the few days since I typed this, and you won’t suss their identity inside a couple of bars. With a little more luck you'll rather liket it, too.

See you on the Twitters at 8!"

Download is here (direct dropbox link) or you can listen via Mixcloud here!

Start time, as always, is 8pm BST (GMT+1). Search #listeningclub to see what's going on, and follow@listeningclub for the admin.

Spread the word!