DOWNLOADS OF THE WEEK: Interview w/ Citizens!, OnCue, Kid Cudi

Citizens! Review / Interview

I always admire a band that know what they are and wear that badge loud and proud. This UK group is pop. So eat it. They are happy to write catchy tunes that drag you into a good time. It is not quite that simple though. With vocals that do a switcheroo between fun and lively to a rip-roaring screech combined with some sweet synth lines you are partying to something you have not partied to before.

Zane Lowe has been playing them on Radio 1 over in the UK, they have toured with The Rapture and are making bigger and bigger moves daily. I caught up with them to find out just how many red wines in takes to win them over, how they plan to reclaim pop and why they chose to follow in the same footsteps as Kanye/Jay Z and Odd Future.

Your official debut single is coming out under the label Kitsune. Can you let us know a bit about the label and what it was about them that attracted you to sign a deal?
Gildas Loeac (the owner of Kitsune) heard a couple of demos and got straight on the Eurostar to come and see us. Kitsune were the first label to make an offer and we loved their vision and passion, and the fact they were willing to put everything on the line over a couple of demos. We went for dinner with a bunch of other labels, but then Kitsune invited us to Paris and got us wasted on red wine... we signed the next day.

How is the debut album recording going? Give us some behind the scenes info on what to expect.
We’ve been recording in a house out in the Scottish countryside. There are birds nesting in the eves of the studio room and you can hear them singing on a few tracks. We won’t be editing that out. There will be a prize for anyone who correctly identifies the species you can hear in the breakdown of track 5.

Will the album be a collection of songs with a consistent sound or will there be various styles?
All the music will be our particular style. But part of our style is to experiment, and bring sounds together that we haven’t heard in the same place before. There will be ups and downs. There will be drama.

What is more important to you – performing well live or producing a killer album?
They’re both important. The gap isn’t so great in our case. We weren’t interested in making a super slick studio album full of tricks that make the final product sound like the work of machines rather than humans. Our job is to try and communicate honestly. So we played most of it live, and we didn’t edit out the mistakes. The live show will follow the same principle, including the mistakes.
 
You have said in a past interview that you want to ‘reclaim pop’. What are the problems that you guys see with the pop world today? Why does it need reclaiming?
This is what I was hinting. Pop has become an ugly, cynical thing. It is as if pop is invalid; that the only reason to make pop music is to make money, not because it is a beautiful thing. So everyone who does it leaves their soul in the changing room and dives headfirst into Guetta’s pool party. And everyone else (the ones who do have souls) are too embarrassed to even try, so they go off on revivalist sub-cultural trips that are more about style than song. So we are here, armed with a sense of humour, a soul and an exclamation mark, to fill the gap.

So, Citizens!...Why the exclamation mark!?
BECAUSE!

How did the tour with the Rapture come about? How did it go?
We like what they do. It turned out the feeling was mutual. It was a lot of fun. Rapture/Citizens! nearly beat Yeasayer on the ‘erotic spot the difference’ arcade machine in the dressing room at Koko. Nearly, but not quite. Yeasayer must have had a lot of practice.

What are three things that make you a better pop band than any other group out there?      
Mike’s moustache. Mike’s eyebrows. Mike.
 
In the modern world where everyone is a critic your video for ‘True Romance’ has received 13,500 plays and 100% likes on youtube (as at 9th Nov). What is it about the video that you think means it connects with so many different types of people?
We’re not quite sure. It just seems to fit. I can’t speak for anyone else but for me I like it because it makes me smile. The song has a sense of being stuck out of space and time. The video suggests a context that on one hand is ridiculous, but on the other is strangely appropriate.

There’s actually another video coming out soon. One of the exciting things about starting this band has been getting to work with other people whose work we respect. We were already messing around with our own video for True Romance when we heard from the guys from Hi-5 who said they were really enjoying the track. We loved the stuff they'd done for Odd Future and Jay-Z/Kanye, so we gave them a free reign to go off and do whatever they wanted. They came back with this mad little horror movie.
 
How has your upbringing and experiences in London affected the sound that is Citizens!?
We love London, but it’s an easy place to go wrong. There are a few cautionary tales on the album.

The single ‘girlfriend’ is a free teaser track from the album. What made you decide to give this particular track away for free?
People have enjoyed hearing that song live. We thought if they had a chance to learn the words (there aren’t many) they’d enjoy it even more.
 
Hair, tuned instrument, shoes, clothes, fresh breath - put these in order of how important they are to Citizens! and let us know why.
Well, we spend a lot of time in a very small tour bus so I guess fresh breath would come at the top of that list. Apart from that we tune our instruments with our shoes and our clothes are made out of hair. We like to be resourceful.

Grab the free teaser track below and get ready to do a bit of Xmas shopping on the 19th December when their first single ‘True Romance’ will wine and dine you.

DOWNLOAD HERE
 

OnCue - Can’t Wait Mixtape

We live in an underground blogosphere where ‘commercial’ is almost a dirty word. Everyone is trying to ‘make it’ without selling out and being ‘commercial’. It’s pretty messed up. Well, Oncue is not trying to be anything. He just started singing and rapping and this is what came out. There are plenty of rappers who try to sing their own hooks, but this guy actually can. As he says, he is ‘ok with Katy Perry hooks and cannabis verses’. That is a pretty sweet summary right there.

Its clever, the flow is there, he can stick a rap in your ears without you looking for flaws. He has a polished delivery. He knows what works. He fits in easily enough with the ‘cash, girls, weed’ world of hip hop but there are stories embedded in there that present it all in quite a fresh way.

The production gets awesome at times. Heaps of nice washy gritty synth sounds and beats. Almost every sound has a little edge added to it. I prefer when he breaks into a more held back delivery over the more spacious slow beats of tracks like ‘Alive’ and ‘Cigarettes and Perfume’. It’s kind of like when your parents are so pissed at you that they don’t actually shout and get angry, they are just disappointed. It hits home just that little harder.

The more and more I got through this mixtape the more and more I was paying attention. The final product is well crafted. It really is a grower – the more you hear the more he finds a little place to live in your brain. Good luck trying to not hum a hook later on in the day. Stop pretending you are too cool to listen to hip hop that is catchy and get clicking.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Kid Cudi - Rap Hard

In history class today we will be looking back at the life and times of Kid Cudi. Out of nowhere he stuck an old old old school demo tape up on the ‘net. Just like looking at all your bad haircuts of the past there is a heap of excitement in the nostalgia of this. It would have been made in about 2000-2001 when the Kid was in fact a kid – just 16 years old.

It shows that his style today of sort of rapping and singing at the same time was not a new thing, that’s what he has always done. You can hear he has improved a lot but there was promise even back then. His flow is way past what you expect from a 16 year old. If this was released today by some new young gun you would consider it fresh. 10 years on and this tape actually fits in with today’s rappers.

Take a peep back into his past and find out where it all started. Would you have signed him off this? Would you have predicted such a massive success?

DOWNLOAD HERE

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By Oli Holmes