Alessi's Ark "Time Travel"
Folk singer’s second LP features strong songs delivered with an elegant naivety.
Alessi Laurent-Marke is, you suspect, a girl who has little time for the modern world. Unlike the vast majority of her southwest London collegiate pop peers – but a little like one of them, Anna Calvi – she has little interest in defining the zeitgeist by attempting to fuse hip dance styles with chart pop. She makes folky songs, has worked with Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes, tours with Laura Marling and Mumford & Sons, name-checks Graham Nash in the press-release, covers 60s pop queen Lesley Gore and dressed her latest EP in a photo taken in the How We Lived Then museum in Eastbourne. The EP in question, last year’s Soul Proprietor, was conspicuously free of dubstep remixes.
Yet her second album, Time Travel – and yep, that would be another clue – doesn’t feel self-consciously retro. Touting a small band sound dominated by drums, bass and acoustic and electric guitars, and singing like a cross between Hope Sandoval and Björk, Laurent-Marke has made a record of deceptive simplicity, some charm and a liberal measure of timelessness. It’s all about songs with strong melodies, some sad, some jaunty, sung with an elegant naivety, and produced – by David Wrench in Wales and Marcus Hamblett in Brighton – with an unfashionable lack of pointless digital space-filling.
The cover of Gore’s girl-group classic Maybe I Know is gorgeous, but it’s three of Laurent-Marke’s own songs that neatly define the breadth of Time Travel’s interests. On the Plain has that jangly, woodwind-flecked mix of innocence and experience familiar to fans of Belle & Sebastian; closer The Bird Song bears an ancient ambience created by harp, ukulele, whistles and a trad-jazz brass section; and Must’ve Grown glides into a wall of Richard Thompson folk-grunge guitars yet ends before the two-minute mark, despite being the kind of grand, power-folk thing that lesser talents might build festival sets around. Indeed, Time Travel travels through 12 tunes in less than half-an-hour, yet ambles rather than speeds and feels entirely complete.
Alessi’s Ark carries its ideas two-by-two, sails well above the current flood of increasingly desperate folk wannabes, and weaves a modest magic that is hard to pinpoint, yet even harder to resist. And if Time Travel isn’t quite a classic, it does enough to suggest that this 20-year-old has one in her Davy Jones’ Locker.


Mona "Mona"
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 May 2011 23.20 BST
The Tennessee-reared, preacher's-son-fronted Mona have attracted not-always-flattering comparisons with Kings of Leon. Their debut album finds them entering Bon Jovi and U2 territory, too. These swaggering, would-be huge, one-size-fits-all rock anthems are aimed so much at stadiums it's a wonder they don't arrive with a PA stack and a burger. Listening to them outside that ideal environment, they're decent enough songs, even if Shooting the Moon was formerly U2's Bullet the Blue Sky. But the gravel-voiced Nick Brown's quest to become "bigger than Bono" has left him sounding overwrought and a dreadful ham. "Tell me I'm the wild one," he requests at one point; Say You Will makes the eyebrow-elevating proposition that he has impregnated a local woman who's "known for giving" into carrying the "Devil's child". Titters at the back will be a small price to pay if Mona progress to arenas, though it might all sound a bit embarrassing if they end up playing pubs.


Mona (No 836) Boasting huge sounds and epic gestures, this bunch of 50s throwbacks are on a mission to be 'bigger than Bono'
Thursday 29 July 2010 17.00 BST
The lineup: Nick Brown (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Vince Gard (drums), Zach Lindsey (bass), Jordan Young (guitar).
The background: You hear the line "the major labels are going mad for them" a lot these days, but with Mona you can believe it. A band pitched somewhere between Kings of Leon and U2? What record company wouldn't be desperate for that? We also hear that Saul Galpern, who used to look after Suede, is managing Mona. We're not surprised. Like Suede, Mona are a good idea, and all they need is the right approach, the right delivery, and that idea will take shape and spread very fast indeed. And before you know it, they will be on the cover of a music weekly being hailed as the Best New Band In America.
How do you generate buzz in an era when it is hard to create mystique? One way is to hold back music for as long as possible. This is what Mona and their management are doing, to the extent that we had to hear their debut single down the phone. We'll say that again in case you missed it: WE HAD TO HEAR MONA'S SINGLE DOWN THE PHONE.
Actually, it wasn't so bad – because this is big music designed to be played on radios, or at festivals, neither of which require detail and intricacy, but huge sounds and epic gestures. Singer Nick Brown apparently loves the Beatles (who doesn't?), but the Beatles were about studio craft. Mona aren't a studio band, they're a live band whose songs feature pounding drums, ringing guitars, propulsive bass lines and two-part melodies: the teasing verse and the explosive chorus.
Eventually, we did hear their debut single "properly" in the form of an MP3, but it didn't change our minds. Listen to Your Love, their first and presumably their last independently released record, is a conventionally thrilling three-minute affair, sort of U2's I Will Follow meets Rocket from the Crypt's On a Rope. The single is notable for its two guitar tones – the buzzing riff overlaid by the anthemic jangle – and Brown's voice, which is as gutsy and passionate as you'd expect from someone who once declared that he would one day be "bigger than Bono". We've read a few things about Mona, from when they were based in Dayton, Ohio, that suggest Brown is a giant pain in the arse, but that's OK – he's going to have to be if he wants to be more famous than the most famous frontman on earth. Brown says stuff like, "If it lacks passion, it's not real" and "I saw how a song could enrage, heal, speak love, seduce, calm, provoke, challenge and surrender. All in three minutes. That's what we're all about." Fortunately, Mona have their mouthy figurehead, but no second-in-command – no Bernard Butler – to get in his way and spoil the show. Plus, they look like a boy band from the late-50s rock'n'roll era – like the Wild Ones eulogised by Suede. Unnerved by all the changes afoot in the music industry? Try this comforting throwback.
The buzz: "Romantic rock'n'roll for city folk" – Rough Trade Shops.
The truth: They're not so much old-fashioned as espousing classic, eternal verities. OK, they're old-fashioned. But that's probably the point.
Most likely to: Get signed.
Least likely to: Sign on.
What to buy: Listen to Your Love is released by ZION NOIZ on 13 September.
File next to: Kings of Leon, U2, Rocket from the Crypt, QOTSA.
Links: myspace.com/monatheband


Guardian: Mona are very much rock'n'roll's great white hopes.
Frontman Nick Brown: I am going to be 'bigger than Bono'.
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