Ten For 2010: Your Starters!

THE AVETT BROTHERS
Sibling folk-rockers from North Carolina, Seth and Scott Avett (plus Bob Crawford on upright bass and trumpet) plug straight into the emotional mains with songs of heartbreaking directness. Until last year, the trio had won and maintained a loyal but smallish audience with a succession of country-pop, chamber-folk and bluegrass-influenced albums. Then Rick Rubin — co-head of Columbia Records and a producer with a background in rap-rock (Beastie Boys, Run DMC) and late-career trans¬formations (Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond) — came calling. I and Love and You, the album he oversaw, took the band into the Billboard Top 20, yet retained everything about them that was special and endearingly unpolished. In America, fans were on high alert for signs of dilution or candy-coating; for the most part, they greeted the Avetts’ major-label debut with plaudits (and relief). In Britain, alt-country enthusiasts are likely to prove receptive to the album’s more ramshackle moments, and radio will warm to tracks such as Kick Drum Heart (which recalls the Beatles, Tom Petty and the Strokes in less than three minutes). The Avetts’ appeal is summed up by the moment, on the title track, when the music hushes and Scott sings: “Three words that became hard to say, ‘I’ and ‘love’ and ‘you’.” There is something of the very early Eagles about the band, which is no doubt an aspect of their music that Rubin picked up on. What I and Love and You suggests is that he signed them in order to capture this, rather than with any Hotel California-style multiplatinum madness in mind.

I and Love and You will be released on Columbia on April 5; myspace.com/theavettbrothers

THE DRUMS
Proving indie need not always have the word “landfill” attached to it, this Florida/New York quartet have the songs (and well-worn classic record collections) to breathe new credibility into the notion that guitar pop still has something thrilling to say. Founded by the Sunshine State pair of Jonathan Pierce and Jacob Graham, the Drums write songs — as first introduced on last year’s Summertime! EP and I Felt Stupid single — that take their inspiration from sources as varied as the Beach Boys’ surf-pop, early-1980s New York new wave, 1960s girl-group froth and the scratchy minimalism of Joy Division and the Cure. To which a cynic might respond by mentioning, with an ostentatious yawn, MGMT, Black Kids, Animal Collective, Passion Pit, Interpol and the Strokes, among others, before saying: “Haven’t we heard all this before?” Well, yes: we’ve heard everything before, in the sense that one record begets another or jogs your memory about its most identifiable ancestor. Where the Drums soar is in the impression they convey of needing to make the music they make, rather than doing it for the free clothes or because someone has told them they like their hairstyle. The Drums’ music just gets the old “happy song/heartbroken lyric” thing brilliantly right, epitomised by I Felt Stupid, on which Pierce sings forlornly, over ascending chords that conjure up sunny-day optimism: “Your arms around me seemed to be the only good thing that ever happened to me.” We all know that feeling.

The Drums’ debut album will be released in the spring; myspace.com/thedrumsforever

ELLIE GOULDING
Winner of the 2010 Critics’ Choice Brit award, Goulding follows in the footsteps of the previous victors, Adele and Florence + the Machine, and looks set to be just as successful, with her spooky update of Kate Bush, Björk, Everything but the Girl and Portishead. She is the second of three sisters, raised in Herefordshire, and her first attempts at songwriting were folky, acoustic-based and not creations she felt she was going anywhere significant with. It was only when she contacted the electro-wunderkind Frankmusik on MySpace and he suggested a collaboration that the 22-year-old took flight. Starsmith (real name Fin Dow-Smith, the next producer Goulding hooked up with) effected the key transformation. Famed for his re¬invention of Katy Perry’s I Kissed a Girl, Starsmith heard “beyond” the folkish upholstery of Goulding’s music and “into” the songs, liberating tracks such as her next single, Starry Eyed, and relocating them in arrangements that, while poppier, make them much stranger and somehow more melancholic, too. Thus, the single, while alive with drum’n’bass propulsion, stalking strings, lush Busby Berkeley-blowsy vocal harmonies and deep, rumbling bass notes, never loses touch with its core components, which are Goulding’s part-innocent, part-ecstatic singing and lyrics that both giddily celebrate romantic rapture and anti¬cipate the almighty love hangover to come. It is a powerfully potent mix.

Starry Eyed will be released on Polydor on February 22; myspace.com/elliegoulding

EVERYTHING EVERYTHING
Based in Manchester, but hailing from Kent and Northumberland, this art-pop four-piece have spent the past 12-plus months releasing a succession of singles of such quicksilver brilliance and idiosyncrasy that they are regarded by many as the British band most likely to deliver the first truly great debut album of 2010. What Suffragette Suffragette, Photo¬shop Handsome and MY KZ UR BF demonstrated was a willingness to venture out to the furthest and wildest musical shores; for the listener, joining Everything Every¬thing on that journey was an act of faith, so utterly (but thrillingly) unpredictable is their navigation. Their first single owed debts to the Mamas and the Papas and Steely Dan (among many others); their second, to XTC and early Police; while MY KZ UR BF called to mind Futureheads, Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson, the Asso¬ciates and, er, Kajagoogoo. Other tracks are just as mercurial: Tin (The Manhole) sounds like Radiohead covering Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, with backing vocals from the Beach Boys; and on Nasa Is on Your Side, Jonathan Everything’s falsetto wraps itself around a multi-episodic song that could be a lost 10cc outtake. Like Wild Beasts, Everything Everything never give the impression of waywardness for waywardness’s sake; rather, they come across as committed wholly to their own peculiar and fiercely original vision. And it’s a spellbinding one.

Everything Everything’s debut album willbe released on Geffen in the spring; myspace.com/everythingeverythinguk