Thursday 16 February 2012

Kowalskiy's Free Monthly 5-track Scottish EP #20

I'm sure you know the drill by now. It's the 16th of the month, so time for another EP! As always, I've pestered five of my favourite up-and-coming Scottish artists for one of their cracking tracks.  This time 'round we have...

1.  Little Fire - Feel It All ('Tis a great pleasure to have Ayrshire's award-winning Jamie McGeechan on this EP. One of the finest songwriters in this fair land... and a man that knows how to plug!)

"I'm gigging at the Brew at The Bog Festival on the 5th May with Three Blind Wolves, Mike Nisbet, Beerjacket and loads more great artists, then I've a gig with the Queen on May 20th at the Diamond Jubilee Celebrations thing at Glamis Castle, my album will be out this year and I've got a gig with
Joan Armatrading that I'm really looking forward to also. Oh and I'm really looking forward to an event called Third Degree Burns I'm putting on at the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum on Saturday 2nd June with Ayrshire musicians Rose Parade and Alan Frew, that will be a good un. thanks!!!" - Jamie McGeechan a.k.a. Little Fire

2.  Brown Bear & The Bandits - War Of Loves (The best thing to come out of Largs since Sam Torrance and Nardini's! Although not on it, this is a great taster of what to expect from their upcoming debut EP.)

"This track War of Loves is one of the first songs we played live and is now a staple in our set, it won't be featuring in our soon to be released E.P. that will be out at the end of March so now is the time to get it before it disappears. Be Excellent To Each Other." - Stuart McArthur (Brown Bear & The Bandits)

3.  New Town Triptych - Never Again (This is the A+ side to their recent, third, and my-favourite-so-far single. You can download the rest here!)

"This is a song about the friends I've lost that I never really had in the first place, sounds depressing but it's surprisingly upbeat... Hope you like it!" - Scott Thomson (New Town Triptych)

4.  The Last September - Tears and Broken Glass (acoustic) (Here's a banjofied version of a track from last years album. It'll be the B-side to their upcoming single This City.)

"The B-side to the single This City is a sort of hillbilly version of the song Tears and Broken Glass from the album As The Crow Flies. I was testing out some mics and stuff in the house and just recorded this acoustic version of the track. I kind of liked its humble charm and then had the idea to ask Stuart Cartwright from Unkle Bob to play some Banjo on it. I think he's really added something magical in an old timery kind of way! It's a nice example of the fun you can have making something when there's no pressure on." - Pete Deane (The Last September)

5.  Ajimal - Your God Is Not In Burgos (demo) (Absolutely stunning! When he's not studying Medicine at Edinburgh University, Fran O'Hanlon makes some of the most exquisite music you're likely to hear all year. Thanks to Fran, you can singalong too! Lyrics are up on the track page.)

"Your God Is Not In Burgos is a song about two very different places, which I came across whilst walking the Camino de Santiago through Spain. I stopped in Burgos, a very pious and historical site, and have never left a place feeling so unwelcome, rejected and angry. I felt that there was very little for me that felt spiritual or 'religious' in Burgos. Then walking on I came to a tiny little church-cum-hostel called San Nicolas, it was an ancient, humble little place and had welcomed pilgrims since the 12th century. I had planned to keep walking that day but stayed to rest a little and get some water. The welcome there was so wonderful and the people so kind and generous that I stayed. They were Italian hospitaleros of the Dominican order, and in Dominican tradition, they washed the feet of the walkers staying there, and cooked us genuine Italian pizza and shared some cakes which they had bought from a nearby monastery. I wrote this song that night on the altar, on an old acoustic guitar and then set off again the next morning. I didn't play it for a long time after that, but I found myself at the same little place the following year and stopped there and played the song again, on that same guitar I'd written it on, a year or so before." - Fran O'Hanlon a.k.a. Ajimal

Not bad eh?!  Well, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do... and the 19 others over on my bandcamp page.  Time to put my feet up for a few days before I start sending pestering emails again.  If you fancy saving me the hassle though and want to appear on a future EP, fire me over a wee email (kowalskiy2@gmail.com) and we'll go from there.

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