coupla new songs

Two new solo demos for your amusement here; a full version of my most recent track, penned in pieces over the last month or so and named, appropriately, 'August Song' (yes, I've fallen into the Damon Albarn-esque trap of not giving songs decent titles and just appending the word 'song' to the first word of the chorus). It's quite a sweet song, I think - composed on my computer (you can hear the exclusively electronic version in instrumental form here) but with live guitar and vocals added, it's about the idea of contacting your first - idealised - love and being disappointed with what you find. I like the lyric, 'and suddenly I find that I've exaggerated you'. It's a bit simple, maybe, but reminds me of a run of songs I wrote a year or two ago; from John Wyndham through to Sleepwalk.

The second song I really did write a couple of years ago, and promptly binned because it sounded like Muse. I can't remember if I ever even distributed the demo to the rest of the band, but if I did they never mentioned it and wisely so. But it's been rattling around in my head for ages, not so much for it's tune but because I always rather liked the (admittedly silly) lyrics, which were originally conceived as a yarn about witchery and starvation, but which boiled down to a couple of short verses in the end. "And then came the drought. All the crops dried up then all the horses disappeared', it goes, rather inexplicably.

This version was borne more out of a desire to test myself than resurrect a bad song; I've been listening to lots of garage, dub reggae and stuff of that excellent Junior Boys LP, and have been wondering if there's a way to make guitar music with gaps and spaces; not the same relentless, endless strum. So this is an attempt to use a more creative sound; although in truth it boils down to a big bassline and a drum beat. Well, anyway - 'Fishes In The Water'.