There’s a fine line between bandmates and soulmates for the LA-based indie rock band Grouplove. This affable band is responsible for the beachy single “Colours” off their 2010 self-titled EP that caught enough global attention to snag the band a supporting spot next to musical forces like Florence and the Machine and The Joy Formidable.

The group formed on a whim when painter Hannah Hooper “fell in love at first sight” with musician Christian Zucconi after his solo show in New York City; she texted the guitarist just days later with an invite to an artist’s residency in Crete for almost two months. The duo was both at a contingent position in their lives where they “had to decide if we wanted to give up being full-time artists and work permanently on a nine to five—so instead of figuring it out, we just went to Greece” where “there wasn’t much else to do other than create” vocalist Hooper laughs. “We both needed to get out of New York at that time and thank god we did,” Zucconi reflects.

The quintet rounded out in the remote, mountainous town of Avdou the where Hooper and Zucconi met LA guitarist Andrew Wessen and his childhood friend, drummer and producer Ryan Rabin along with English guitarist Sean Gadd for their adult “summer camp” experience. All five members moved to Los Angeles to continue generating music once the program ended. “It was instinctual,” Zucconi says. The band has consummated their relationship with quirky bonding rituals like matching tattoos, a five-person tee-shirt with the phrase “Never trust a happy song” scrawled across the chest, and an online family photo album-style blog with everything from Hooper’s drawings to photos of the group’s collectively-owned dog and photos of Hooper giving her bandmates haircuts.

Songwriting proved to be just as effortless as the band’s cohesion, with the band’s buzz-worthy first single, “Colours” Zucconi states: “I just kept singing that song and let my unconscious kind of flow out. The first or second time I played that for the guys they really liked the hook and they just built the song around the original riff that I had.” The band is largely inspired by their personal lives along with influences from the  “big, kind of cliché bands” like Nirvana, The Pixies, Fugazi and Neil Young—“they inspire you to think it’s okay to scream and get these emotions out,” Zucconi says.

The band is currently recording their full-length debut album scheduled to be released mid-2011, renovating the band’s innate “rawness, power and harmony to a new level—when we first recorded that EP we weren’t even a real band—I mean, we recorded it in Ryan’s parents’ house. We’ve really grown as a unit and the music’s gonna reflect that.”

Leonard Cohen
Bird on a Wire, The Machat Company

“We’re too broken up to go on,” announces self-proclaimed Montreal chansonnier, European folk singer and synagogue canter hybrid, Leonard Cohen, with sticky tears clinging to his swollen eyes in Jerusalem, the final destination of his 1972 European tour. At the reflective age of 37, Cohen is usually the unwavering eye of the storm—either lulling hits like “Suzanne”, writing poetry while taking a bath or doodling hearts on a fan’s t-shirt amidst the backstage bedlam of flirty French groupies and combative German fans demanding a refund. This 106-minute documentary, directed and edited by Tony Palmer, is a snapshot of Cohen’s career and gripping, voyeuristic reality television before it existed.

Yusuf (Cat Stevens)
Roadsinger: Live in Australia, Ya Music

Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, takes the Australian stage for the first time in 36 years for 25,000 swaying Aussies at the Sydney Entertainment Centre.

Performing 26 songs scoping from his 1967 debut album Matthew & Son to his 2009 Roadsinger, this 77-minute performance oscillates between the bare-boned, airy folk that defined the Sixties and Seventies and the over-produced orchestration of his borderline bizarre 45-years-in-the-making musical Moonshadow. The highlight performances integrate both characters to create timeless music with a twist, like the chill-inducing blues ballad 1970’s “Miles from Nowhere” fluctuating between acoustic guitar accompanied solely by fluttering piano and a rousing barroom show tune with crashing drums and plunking electric guitars.

Yusuf’s subconsciously oozes his peaceful disposition, making anecdotes about his journey to the Nashville (“the birth land of rock‘n’roll”) to collaborate with Dolly Parton being usurped by bombarding by Homeland Security agents baffled by the spelling of his name comical saying, “Of course, if my name was Cat they would’ve known how to spell it.”

Artist: Nic Dalton and his Gloomchasers

Album: Play All Night, Half A Cow Records

Former bassist for The Lemonheads and Half A Cow Records owner, Nic Dalton returns with his gang of folk-rocking Gloomchasers on their new album Play All Night. This album reflects Dalton’s own progression from a hyperactive, prolific rockstar to a faded musician with a wife and child. The swampy, homespun bluegrass with a melodic backbone and breezy, ambling lyrics—minus that annoying southern twang—is the follow-up to 2005’s Home of Big Regret about Dalton’s move to the country with now ex-girlfriend Lucy Lehmann, who plays the gutstring guitar and sings backing vocals on the album.

Dalton’s maturation doesn’t squash all of the fun out of the new album, the plucky banjo and sporadic bursts of trumpet and trombone uplift the melancholy themes while lyrics like “I smoked pot with Harry Nilsson six months before he died” on “Harry’s Demos” or “I feel so cheap just to be a f-cking circus freak” on “The Circus Clown” also provide the album with a quirky boost of kitsch.

Key Tracks: “Okay Sydney, You Beat Me”, “Take Me As I Am”, “The Last Fan”

Artist: Summer Camp
Album: Young, Popfrenzy Records

A couple bonds of their love of 1980s sophomoric cinema

If iconic Eighties director John Hughes were to rise from the grave and direct an indie love story set in an American high school—starring Zooey Deschanel as the popular, hair-flipping cheerleader and Jason Schwartzman as the pocket protector-toting computer geek—he would certainly ask London duo Summer Camp to provide the soundtrack.

Indie singer/songwriter Jeremy Warmsley and Platform magazine editor Elizabeth Sankey’s collaboration Young is an imitation Eighties mix tape paying homage to Eighties anti-heroines like “Veronica Sawyer” from the 1989 cult classic Heathers and the untouchable heart-throb “Jake Ryan” from 1984’s Sixteen Candles.

A few of the washy, seashore tracks like “Why Don’t You Stay” fade next to Warmsley’s Joy Division vocals and brilliantly cliché pop lyrics on the twitchy opener “Round the Moon”. Sankey’s angsty half-spoken, twee-pop vocals against Warmsley galloping guitar and pinging synths result in the best unpolished, 21st century, indie rom-com soundtrack—and perhaps the only one.

Key Tracks: “Round the Moon”, “Ghost Train”, “Jake Ryan”

Artist: The Temper Trap
Album: Conditions – Remixed, Liberation Music

In an attempt to satisfy the insatiable cravings for Melbourne alt-rockers the Temper Trap while they’re recording in London, ten DJs have sliced and diced their 2009 knockout debut album Conditions to serve up the remixed album.

Sister Bliss and Rollo, two-thirds of the London electro band Faithless, whips the overplayed album opener “Love Lost” into an infectious, seven-minute whirlwind of club-thumping, techno beats, transforming vocalist Dougy Mandagi into wailing soul singer while Penguin Prison reinterprets the bare-boned “Resurrection” into wonky synth-drenched, dancefloor-filler that sounds more like a Scissor Sisters tune than Temper Trap’s. The Count (aka Hervé) injects the thrashing “Science of Fear” with stabbing synths, burying the original skeleton into a grimy, dub step ruckus.

Inevitably, a few of the remixes feel forced with throbbing R&B synths and squawking seagulls (for real) on RUSKO’s “Soldier On” and the pounding percussions laced with sci-fi synths and stuttering vocals on PVT’s “Fader” remix. The remixed version of Conditions is a respectable afterglow, but it simply cannot stand up to the sinewy original.

Key Tracks: “Love Lost” (Sister Bliss and Rollo Mix), “Resurrection” (Penguin Prison Remix), “Science of Fear” (The Count (aka Hervé) ‘Medusa’ Remix)