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| Race Horses NEW SINGLE "MATES" AVAILABLE NOW AS A FREE DOWNLOAD. FACEBOOK.COM/RACEHORSESMUSIC
LIVE 29 June - 01 July Hop Farm Festival Race Horses' debut album "Goodbye Falkenburg" is now available to order on CD from FP SHOP or Digitally from iTunes. Conceived as a collage of a salty old sailor's life memories: “stories of good times and bad, of girls and champagne, of loneliness and longing.” Bursting with ideas, zig-zagging between musical reference points from The Beatles to Suicide, this is an ambitious –and brilliant – debut, the place where Barbershop meets post-rock via folk, oompah, psychedelia and pop. The album was recorded in a series of adventurous sessions over the space of nine months with producer Dave Wrench (a member of Julian Cope's Black Sheep, producer for Euros Childs and engineer for Bat for Lashes, James Yorkston, British Sea Power and Hot Chip) on board to reign in the chaos. Some tracks were recorded at parties, others in a deserted eco village named Cae Mabon ( “a Smurf-esque fantasy-land Eco-paradise commune type thing,”), others in a chapel and many in Bethesda,Wales. Interspersing tracks are interludes taken from field recordings of nature or zoo animals or party guests, and a choir of trainee dentists cap off the madness. There's more than music influencing this melee – the band cite directors Michel Gondry and Tim Burton, children's classic Where The Wild Things Are and cheeky wartime comic George Formby as inspirations. The album's nautical theme begins with its title: Falkenburg was a ship bombed in WWII, and also the name of a German sailor who died at sea. As the story goes, he returns to the shore every 100 years to search for a virgin to marry. Other themes, we are reliably informed, include mental illness, food, misfit couples and love. Links www.racehorsesmusic.com
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"Emergent rock bands are bound to be measured against their influences, their environment, or, in the case of Race Horses, a combination of both. The quartet is based in Cardiff, Wales, and their bilingual music puts a whimsical spin on UK traditions ranging from music hall and psychedelia to glam rock and post-punk. So any discussion of Race Horses will inevitably lead back to equally warped Welsh forbears like Gorky's Zygotic Mynci and Super Furry Animals. But with Gorky's having disbanded in 2006, and the Super Furries continuing to mutate far beyond their psych-pop origins, it's more constructive to view Race Horses not as imitators but as rightful heirs to the Welsh Class-of-1996 legacy. Their wonderful debut album, Goodbye Falkenburg, certainly proves they're up to the task. What's most striking about the record is that Race Horses never let their grandiose ambitions get in the way of energy and urgency. With spiritual kin like Wild Beasts and Los Campesinos! already bending ears on both sides of the Atlantic toward flamboyant and erudite UK art-pop. With any luck, Race Horses will score the victory lap for this absurdity-is-the-new-sincerity movement" PITCHFORK “Goodbye Falkenburg is an utterly entertaining trip” “cut from the same gonzoid pop cloth as Super Furry Animals, full of psych rock & Beatles soaked harmonies” “colliery band parps, early Of-Montreal jangle, pastoral melancholy and what sounds like Beirut captaining a pirate ship maintain their standing as purveyors of mighty fine singles” NME “a wilfully zany debut with mischievous spirit that's hard to dislike” UNCUT “Goodbye Falkenberg is an off-kilter masterpiece, irrerverant, unadulterated and well worth a listen”. "A 13 track joyride, it hurts psychedelia, White Album Beatles, glam-rock, electro, barbershop, tropicalia, chamber pop and post-rock into the mix. The result is a beserk and brilliant record" SUNDAY TIMES
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Race Horses Catalogue
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