New Music - Blouse 'Into Black' (Captured Tracks, 2011)

Lovely rolling, moody tune with a prominent guitar riff carrying it along. I picked this up as a 7" on Captured Tracks, the label that brought us Wild Nothing.

Breathy female vocals give it an ethereal quality but a keen sense of dynamics are at play with some lovely subtle embellishments. It's deeply catchy and enticing, a stomp of drums and linear bass, overlaid by a guitar riff that sounds like the work of the Rockabilly Robin Guthrie as the chorus gushes into life.

The b-side, 'Firestarter', is a little more obvious in its early Cocteaus, Bauhaus, chorus-pedal-bass, early-80s indie-goth stylings but 'Into Black' is a lovely track.

Don't know much about the band apart from the fact that Blouse was the Pulp parody band in the Brasseye Paedophile special, not sure if that reached Portland, Oregon...

There's a few mp3s at the Blouse's Bandcamp page.