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Pivot
I always imagine that hanging out in the Warp Records offices would be really unbearable. Loads of men with trimmed chin accoutrement listing to the screams of an Apple Mac having bamboo thrust through its keyboard by some Nazi type machine. Apparently this vicious little day dream of mine couldn't be further from the thruth, first the go and sign Polly Scattergood (who admittedly I haven't listened to in months but for a while there I thought was total genius), and now they've got Pivot. These dudes are representing the Australian wing of the krautrock rebirth as trailblazed by the twin obscenities of Holy Fuck and Fuck Buttons (for my money the Buttons are the best of those two f***ers). Anyway Pivot have just signed for Warp and soon everyone's going to be calling them the sexy kraut Foals or some s*** and they're playing tomorrow night at The Luminaire in Kilburn. I'm there.

Hype Will Eat Itself
Last year there was Cold War Kids and Foals. Before that there was Tapes n Tapes and before them Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. But this year? It seems that 2008 is sincerely lacking a new buzz band. People were chattering about Dodos, but you could still have swung a cat at some of their shows. There had been a lot of heat on Chief, but their shows decimated that anticipation. Telepathe were the hipster triumph, but it was too avant garde for labels to throw money at. But then that's a good thing right? Who wants a hype band that everyone on earth will have to talk about for the next four months until they inevitably collapse into their sea of mediocraty? Yes, theoretically, but in the case of SXSW 2008, the lack of new buzz bands does not seem down to any increased reserve, or patience on the part of the industry, rather its the fact that now days hype moves so quickly that an annual convention cannot keep up. In actuality their were loads of buzz bands of SXSW 2008. There were shows with queues around the block and kids climbing through windows to get a glimpse, but all those gigs were by bands who the indie community might assume, fairly, had already 'made it'. MGMT, Santogold and Crystal Castles can hardly be described as discoveries of the convention as they have been written about and drooled over for months. A few years ago though and this would have been their moment to prove to the world they were the big new thing. As it is though they are already chalked up as established acts. A magazine over here proclaimed Vampire Weekend the event band of the convention, but once the band have already been to play in the UK three times in the last couple of months and been deemed famous enough to sit on the cover of an English TV listings paper surely they cannot be seen as underground, or a discovery in any way? Now it seems 12 months just is just too long to wait f you truly wish to be an agenda setting industry showcase. Bands can rise from first gig to magazine cover in three months, so headlines predicting the 'Buzz Bands of 2008' will surely be replaced by: 'Buzz Band of Spring 2008', or 'The Band Set To Own August - October 2009!'. It does mean that festivals like SXSW will struggle to define the musical calendar, rather I guess it'll be shared out by many global regular events. So Camden Crawl - here's your chance to stop sucking. Anyway, not a revolutionary thought, but about as much as I can handle on this little sleep.