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albums - current and forthcoming releases... [page 21] |
early May 2003 |
Earlier Reviews | see previous reviews page (#20) |
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Musically it is dark throughout, often intimidating and somewhat claustrophobic whilst the lyrics veer from the lairy to the lustful and frequently to the loving. Karen O’s off stage relationship with a member of fellow New Yorkers, The Liars, is presumably the source of some of the sentiments expressed particularly in the mellow Maps (“They don’t love you like I love you”) but Karen’s a grrrl with attitude so there’s plenty of put-downs for others – “Boy you’re a stupid bitch, girl you’re just a no good a dick” in the superbly menacing garage of Black Tongue. And Cold Night could almost merit a parental warning for sex content whilst at the same time poking a tongue at the White Stripes (“we could do it to each other, we’re like a sister and a brother”). There’s more than a hint of early Siouxsie and the Banshees with Karen O’s frantic yelpings frequently reminiscent of the Queen of Kent, particularly in Maps and the catchy angled Pin. But this is not just a one woman show as she’s more than ably accompanied throughout by the chopped and scuzzy strings of Nick Zinner and the pounding sticks of Brian Chase. So Yeah Yeah Yeah? Well two and a half Yeahs at least. Review by Paul M |
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VARIOUS ARTISTS Pow! To The People (Track & Field, 2xCD) |
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Of Montreal’s Everything About Her Is Wrong has the most cleverly barbed lyrics since Wire’s Mannequin set to a pristine Californian pop tune. Hey Lover by The Aislers Set is a pristine girl group song, sounding as if it had been recorded in New York in 1965 and discovered on a rare acetate only yesterday. Comet Gain’s Look At You Now You’re Crying is the saddest tale of kitchen sink desperation, guitars loudly leaking buckets of tears alongside Rachel’s very English, very soulful voice. The Clientele offer up the purest Love-song. Galveston proves that The Ladybug Transistor’s Gary Olson has the perfect, most resonant voice for singing Jimmy Webb songs. Add to this Woodchuck, The Amazing Pilots, Kicker, Saloon, Tompaulin, Herman Düne, the Loves’ Velvet Underground stylings - the list of great songs and bands is 36 long. Cane 141’s The Grand Lunar is mournful and elegant, while Mid State Orange’s Association-influenced crystalline pop is light streaming through curtains on a summer Sunday morning. The Tyde’s How Am I Supposed 2 is a stunning stoner-pop love song, with a piano riff so addictive that the song should be prescription only. By the end of disk two I’m a glassy-eyed melody junkie looking for his next fix of sweet, soulful, slightly downbeat pop music. As a labour of love it’s outstanding. I’ve personally been turned on to so many great bands through these gigs and hopefully this album will open them up to a bigger audience. If I wanted to produce a classic mixtape, I wouldn’t bother: it’s already all here. The album proves there’s more to music than what the radio and the NME choose to tell you. It typifies and defines independence: as soon as you realise that there must be an alternative, you’ll start noticing the signs; there’s a signpost (36 of them actually) before us right now. Brothers and sisters, the real rock revolution starts here. Reviewed by Ged M
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| FOUR TET Rounds (Domino) |
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This time round, the tracks seem more accomplished, more complete - the rhythm is more consistent, and some of the tracks threaten to break out into - gasp - a tune. This isn't Four Tet selling out, by a long stretch, simply a more confident, more mature Kieran Hebden, reaching out to an audience slightly wider than the Boards of Canada junkies whose attention he so skilfully caught with "Pause". Hebden is one of the most intriguingly contradictory artists on the electronic scene. A dyed-in-the wool laptop musician, his early jazz and folk influences have steered him away from the more extreme synthetic sounds of the genre. While a good deal of "Rounds" is sampled, almost every sound is recognisably organic: Balinese gamelan, central European folk instruments, glockenspiels, harps, and good old-fashioned electric guitars and drums. "Rounds", like the albums that precede it, shows that there's far more to electronic music than its detractors would care to admit. Contradictory, beguiling, beautiful - the perfect early-summer album. Review by Simon K
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VARIOUS ARTISTS Everything Is Ending Here: A Tribute to Pavement (Homesleep Records) |
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What’s the point of a tribute album? On this evidence, it’s to underline the massive influence that Pavement were and continue to be on the independent music scene. They built the template and, on the evidence of this double CD, few bands have added anything to it. Many of the bands seem to bask in Pavement’s reflected glory and are happy to tug their forelocks to their musical masters. A cover version ought to be inspired by the original to take it further, to make it the band’s own. If not, they might as well be down the karaoke bar on Pavement night. In three versions of Here, only the Tindersticks manage to re-conceptualise the song. Stuart’s mournful undertaker vocals highlight the surreal quality of Malkmus’ lyrics while the strings and almost calypso beat set off the elegant despair. Hats off to Spearmint for their “tribute” which is the only original on here and completely misses the mark. It’s a reflection on the songs that had an influence on the singer – a few Pavement tunes plus The Fall, The Teardrop Explodes, some soul tunes. It’s just attention seeking and we should all ignore them until they’ve finished their tantrum. The stars of this compilation are the ones who add their own sound to the Pavement frame. C-Kid get it right with their Schneider-TM/New Order-ish reworking of In The Mouth A Desert. Appendix Out add a honeyed Scottish accent and folky twist to Frontwards. Saloon and Lenola feminise and hop up the pop quotient of their versions. Kicker produce a soulful take on Father to a Sister About Thought that has a fabulous Lloyd Cole vocal. Truman’s Water remind us that Pavement could be a bunch of noiseniks too and Oranger rock out on Winner of the. The Tyde offer a raga-ed up reassembly of Perfect Depth with spongy keyboards and Pink Floyd stoned guitar effects to finish. Pavement are a great band but you knew that already. Pavement wrote great songs but you don’t need 36 other bands to tell you that. You’ll want to return to a selection of tracks off this record (thank Christ for CD program buttons!) but if the album does anything, it’ll send you back to those Pavement originals, which seem to acquire a finer indie-pop lustre the older they get.
Reviewed by Ged M
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| YO LA TENGO Summer Sun (Matador) |
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As Beach Party Tonight drifts woozily into view with only a fragment of a vocal, it’s apparent that any overtly rock elements of yore have been foregone here. Instead in their place comes the jazzy piano of Nothing But You and Me, jazzy flute on How to Make A Baby Elephant Float and jazzy trumpet on the ten-minute opus Let’s Be Still. In places though it goes a tad pear-shaped. Georgia vs Yo La Tengo features the devil’s own instruments of torture, bongos, and combined with Moonrock Mambo only proves that one thing they’ll never be is funky. Before any longstanding fans start to get worried though, underneath all of this you can still hear the same avant-garde alt-rock heart beating as one. Yes, the guitars are turned down lower than usual but the Georgia and Ira’s vocals are still as beautiful as ever, particularly Georgia’s on Today Is The Day, and Winter A-Go-Go belies its title to conjure up a seaside feel with its Wurlitzer organ framework. Not for the first time, they save the best till last, with the album’s one true Nashville sounding song, as Georgia guides us through a sublime reading of Big Star’s Take Care replete with pedal steel, upright bass and acoustic strumming. Some might dismiss Summer Sun as too languid and almost funereal in places but it’s the perfect album for lying on your bed with the windows open watching a lazy summer day turn slowly into night. And that really is nice.
Review
by James S
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GLASS CANDY Love, Love, Love (Troubleman Unlimited, US) |
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Glass Candy are Ida No (vocals), Ginger Peach (drums) and Johnny Jewel (guitars). You might have heard the theatrical Johnny, Are You Queer on Rough Trade’s superb round up of 2002. If that whetted your appetite, here’s another eight tracks on the New Jersey label that brought us the Rogers Sisters, Erase Errata and much other new wave flavoured music. The music is electro-glam rock, while Ida’s voice is a cross between Siouxsie Sue and Patti Smith with the odd Karen O yelp thrown in. There’s a faint resemblance to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, though the Glass Candy influence is more Metal Guru than Motley Crüe. Imagery plays a big part in the band, from the sex-pop collage of the fold-out sleeve to the art-deco stylings of its reverse side. Crystal Migraine is 70s-era Bowie decadence: “we all died at the tragic party”, though you need the lyric sheet to decipher the hyperventilated delivery. The electro rhythm of Brittle Women sounds very like Suicide, as Ida No declaims, with all the gothic angst of Siouxsie Sue, “love me not for my beauty/one day it will surely fade/ashes, ashes!” There are two covers: Hurt was a song by the Screamers, apparently major players on the late 70s LA punk/underground scene but not a band I’d come across; their fondness for aliases seems to have rubbed off on Glass Candy. And then there’s the glam-metal deconstruction of The Last Time, sounding nothing like the Stones’ original but original enough in its own right as a result of the glam-punk guitars and unique Banshee wail that gives the song total reconstructive surgery. For an album named for love, there’s a gothic fascination with death and decay that’s paradoxically very attractive. It’s familiar enough to fit with what’s currently coming out of the US but at the same time it’s got a sound of its own. You smitten?
Reviewed by Ged M
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VARIOUS ARTISTS The American Song Poem Anthology: Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush (Bar/None Records) |
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The resultant music was middle of the road, produced in a variety of styles: country, funk, pop, sacred music. And, of course, it was largely awful, or it would have been but we live in an ironic age when kitsch is cool and MOR pop has a new credibility. So magician Penn Teller is now the owner of the biggest collection of American song poems and a band as credible as Yo La Tengo have recorded How Can A Man Overcome His Heartbroken Pain (it’s like the Byrds playing garage-rock if Gene Clark had worked all his life in a garage). I Love Yellow Things is a list of yellow things that the writer likes, played in a country style. Human Breakdown of Absurdity is a psychedelic space rock masterpiece, backed with the most unsettling female wailing. Jimmy Carter Says “Yes”, written by the excellently named Waskey Elwood Walls Jr, is a funky Bobby Womack-styled tribute to the 39th President of the USA while Richard Nixon is an unhinged half-sung, half-intoned hymn to the man who put the “crass” in democracy and who, according to the writer was sent from God. There are songs about hospitals, Burma and your girl being stolen by an Argentinean cowboy (“I could not bill and coo/ like that gaucho buckaroo”!) The greatest track was actually a piss take, intended by the writer John Trubee to test how far these song-poem companies would go. As he was paying for it, they went all the way! Blind Man’s Penis is worth the price of admission on its own. It’s repulsive but irresistible, as singer Ramsey Kearney intones, in his best Johnny Cash voice, a song of LSD, lady Martians and, of course, that visually challenged man’s member. The album is a document of social history, a work of an insane cataloguer, a collection of suddenly credible again easy listening and, of course, fantastic fun. You may not play it as much as the latest Radiohead album but you’ll have more laughs. Reviewed by Ged M
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BLUR Think Tank (Food) |
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It seems however that, despite the omnipresent conflict that underpins Think Tank (the bitter departure of guitarist Graham Coxon and the Gulf War Version 2.0), Damon Albarn’s mutant projects, The Gorillaz and the downright odd Mali Music, have matured the erstwhile fop and his ever-decreasing band of post Brit-pop upstarts in many many ways. As a result of finally growing up, Blur have captured their musical stride here, at last, and produced a fluent, ambient, scratchy and wholly listenable album, with the much-needed help of producer-of-the moment Ben Hillier, William Orbit and a certain Norman “Fatboy Slim” Cook. Pretty rhymes, poppy Bronx-beats and sonic washes of tin pot electronica fill the album, along with a gentle smattering of Gorillaz-style guitar strummery, best seen in action on the almost-joyous rocker Crazy Beat. The album’s highlight is clearly the shimmering, undeniably pretty Sweet Song, a simply arranged and orchestrated love song sung, it pains me to say, beautifully by the mournful Albarn. With tracks like this, and the Happy Mondays sound-alike Brothers and Sisters, it’s hard to see how Coxon’s acrimonious split is in any way detrimental to the band. Indeed, on the one track he’s actually present, the unpleasant Battery In Your Leg, it’s almost a tangible relief that his penchant for twiddling one too many guitar knobs and tweaking awkward beats and odd sounds, has been taken elsewhere, to have been replaced by the undeniable mastery of ex-Verve meister Simon Tong. It still wouldn’t be fair to say I was a Blur fan however, but Think Tank has clearly changed my opinion of them greatly, and it will yours too. Where once I loathed and switched off, I now rather enjoy and keenly await the next beat or blip. It is however, hard to see where the band go from here without returning to cockney-quip laden times long gone, there’s not much room to maneuver without going all Gorillaz on us. Which for Albarn maybe be more tempting next time now his creative fuel, the dislike of Coxon, has diminished. For the rest of us be assured, that’s a good thing if the next Blur album is anything like a continuation of this one. Review by Dave B |
To a
fanfare of scuzzed guitars and pounding drums, one of the most hotly awaited debut albums
of recent years hits the shops. The initial reaction is mild disappointment with
nothing from the chop slappingly great first two singles present and one or two of the
eleven tracks little more than vehicles for Karen O’s impressive range of grunts and
sighs. Still, judged as it should be as just another album it’s still a bloody
good one. 
Track & Field started as a
club, then added gigs to their roster of happenings in October 1999 as they built a
reputation for ultra melodic, sixties-flavoured soulful pop which impacts on brain and
feet simultaneously. For the last few years they’ve opened London ears to some
of the best independent music from across the world through hundreds of gigs and a fair
few records. The double album is a beautifully balanced collection of bands that
have played live for Track & Field, spanning the range of independent music from
jangle pop to indie-electronica to low-fi folk. 
Released on May 5th, Four
Tet's third full album, Rounds, is a wondrous treat from start to finish. Bejewelled with
achingly beautiful moments, right from the first two tracks, "Hands" and
"She Moves She", "Rounds" is perhaps a little more accessible than
2001's album "Pause". The same delicious morsels of innocent, organic,
folksy, sound are served up, like a delicious picnic in a warm, early summer meadow,
leaving the listener shiny, happy and blissed out.
The
album illustrates two of the things that make America great: vanity and capitalist
exploitation. In the late 60s and 70s, adverts in cheap magazines encouraged
would-be writers to submit poems that would be set to music for between $75 and
$400. It was pure vanity publishing (only a few copies of the record were ever
pressed) and production line music (the band were on piece rates so made a point of
spending the minimum time on each song to maximise their wages) and at the time the only
people who made a real profit it from it were the shadowy überlords who controlled the
business. 
It would be more than fair
to say I’m not a Blur fan by the stretch of anyone’s imagination. In the
past their whimsical indie utterances (think the awful Girls and Boys here people) have
jarred with my melodic and lyrically biased sensibilities. It would be also fair to say
then that when the promo for their latest offering “Think Tank” dropped onto my
doormat like a dead fish onto the shore, I didn’t exactly rush to listen to it.