Doubtless if you're donning knee pads and crawling over Camden's stickiest floors and filthiest toilets, you'll be aware of essential shows from Dots & Dashes faves Crystal Fighters, Best Coast, Gold Panda and Surfer Blood. Yet with an at times overbearing line up that seems to erupt from the NME ad pages, flicking bewilderment into your eyes like Eyjafjallajokull, Dots & Dashes is here to help digest the lesser-known chunks of this year's Camden Crawl run-down, taking in rampant Japanese glitch-disco, feminine Mancunian post-punk and Seasick Mutiny.
Veronica Falls trade in trendy-as-fuck ramshackle guitars, twinned with sterile 60s vocals not too dissimilar from that peddled by those inhabiting The Horrors' Strange House in 2007. Expect intimidatingly haute couture types nodding in despondent appreciation. Maybe a spot of toe-tapping if you're lucky, perhaps to the haunting reverberating retro of Found Love In A Graveyard. Veronica Falls play both Saturday & Sunday of this year's Camden Crawl. Veronica Falls - Found Love In A Graveyard by musicmule
If you've ever come across the euphoric Gameboy glitches of Shige's DJ Scotch Egg, you'd be forgiven for feeling as though you'd fallen through an alluring sense of misapprehension, a drum-fueled vortex of unerring synth key concoctions and banishment of time signatures. And that, effectively, is Drum Eyes. Japan-via-Brighton-via the fringes of sanity. Drum Eyes play both Saturday & Sunday of this year's Camden Crawl.
Cue premature La Roux comparisons. Then get swept away on a refreshing post-punk wave sloshing about like The Fall, Gang of Four and Brian Eno stumbling about beneath deck necking sandy-infested bottles of rum. Early the Haste Comes reeks of an imminent urgency, as guitars ripped from funk, Prince and PiL flicker about like the fringes that'll dangle in NW1 next weekend, as Lonelady prepares to play both days of this year's bash. LONELADY - Early The Haste Comes by tomrobinson
With boy/girl duos coming thick and fast this year particularly from over the pond, not many come as savagely and rapidly racing up in your face as Comanechi. Close Enough To Kiss is the bastard offspring of The 5.6.7.8's, Death From Above 1979 and Lightning Bolt tottering about with Courtney Love's lipstick smeared all over its luscious lips. Viscerally enthralling. The pair play Camden's Underworld on Saturday before playing the Camden Rock the following day. Comanechi - Close Enough to Kiss (Genuine Guy remix) by GENUINE GUY
London trio Is Tropical have been whipping up something of a frenzy, alongside fellow off-kilter popsters Wild Palms. They're currently touring with Good Shoes in quite a bizarre booking marriage, given that electo gems like What? owe far more to the barking instrumental glory of Ratatat than wiry Morden guitars lingering about like the stale stench of smokey morning cushions. Is Tropical play Sunday 2nd May of this year's Camden Crawl.
Great Danes Oh No Ono represent everything that's enticing about Scandinavia with their brand of expansive utopic psychedelia. Not so much a "new band" as such, the Copenhagen quintet's third LP proper, Eggs, released on the forever-superlative The Leaf Label earlier this year, is a hazy whirlwind tour through ages, era and part MGMT, part Nuggets-infused streams of self-enlightenment. Oh No Ono play Camden's Proud Galleries on Saturday, as well as Sunday of this year's event. Oh No Ono - Helplessly Young by theleaflabel
What would any festival promoting the wonders of music be without an icy lo-fi electro outfit from Brooklyn?! Fulfilling such a role are The Hundred In The Hands, the most stylistically enviable pair since Telepathe's Dance Mother swarmed iPods last year. Dressed In Dresden rattles like the Northern Line, with Eleanore Everdell's kitsch American lilt permeating jolting new wave guitar stabs and howling backing vox, all courtesy of partner in stereotype-defying minimalist beauty Jason Friedmann. On the precipice of unleashing their debut EP on the ominously omnipotent Warp Records. The pair play Camden's Dingwalls on Saturday as part of the festival's Warp Night. The Hundred in The Hands - Dressed in Dresden by blogenbois
