Helium Raven

Hessle Audio crest their wave at the Bussey Building, December 2011

2012-01-21T00:24:00.001Z

At the tail end of 2011 I had a superior night out in Peckham and wrote about it for a website, but it got lost in the post somewhere. Here we are anyway, complete with past tense formatting (which I am not a fan of at all).

Warm presents Hessle Audio with Pearson Sound, Ben UFO, Pangaea and Joe
Bussey Building, Peckham, London
10 December 2011

2011 was a year of consolidation, rather than exposition, for the always-on-point Hessle Audio. Founded just as dubstep burst its banks in 2007, the label found itself at the vanguard as UK dance music splintered into countless sub-genres, putting out singles that touched on house, bass, dub, R&B and whatever else its stellar roster could shoehorn into six minutes. Yet this year, aside from the excellent compilation-slash-retrospective 116 And Rising and two vinyls from Pangaea and Peverelist, Hessle's three founders seem to have focused on the more lucrative gruntwork of playing records to sweaty dancefloors.

The Bussey Building in Peckham has quietly established itself as an alternative clubbing hub in this dog-eared corner of London, where comparatively cheap rent and the local art and music colleges have fertilised a close-knit hipster outpost. Okay, so it's a decrepit old warehouse, the lights are too bright and there's barely more than a trestle table for a DJ booth, but the sound quality is surprisingly meaty – and one-room-parties always have the edge when it comes to atmosphere.

The Hessle colleagues and label favourite Joe all chipped in to a monster back-to-back session, rarely playing more than three tracks before tagging out. In different hands it would've been a car crash of mismatched records and stilted mixing, but the collaborative effort worked precisely because the Hessle attitude is so deeply embedded in these friends and former housemates, who flit freely between genres and BPMs. Tapping the tempo up and down constantly, they touched on influences across eras, from anonymous new white labels to severe techno, classic house, pristine UKG and, for the final half hour, some high watermark dubstep courtesy of Pearson Sound, a murky and unforgiving finale for the last clubbers standing.

One noticeable trend among the night's selections was footwork, its defiant anti-rhythms and broken robotics having quietly infested the UK dance underground since Planet Mu's first Bangs & Works compilation last year. While dubstep is still a tangible influence, it's the lure of the offbeat – machine-made yet unpredictable – that really feels like the freshest direction.It would be easy to suggest that UK bass music has failed to match dubstep's break-out success, or even that the scene is off the boil entirely after a flurry of innovative releases in '09 and '10. But if 2011 seemed like a quiet year for Hessle, maybe that's only because the attitudes the label helped generate have come into their own. Dance music is in a divergent mood and selectors like Ben UFO gleefully reject genre purism in favour of a fragmented, freeform party attitude. If the satisfied faces at closing time were anything to go by, us listeners are in the mood for mixing it up too.

Big movements from below: An interview with Shabazz Palaces

2012-01-20T23:48:00.001Z

Back in November I met Shabazz Palaces, but the interview has only just appeared in print, in the first Loud And Quiet of 2012. Their album also appeared very near the top of the Village Voice Pazz & Jop end-of-year list, although didn't feature in quite as many Top 10s as I'd expecting. But hey, lists are stupid.

Last year's Shabazz Palaces record was remarkable for many reasons. The record turned heads not only for its provocative title and unorthodox sonic template of African percussion, spooky jazz, murky industrial beats and distorted vocals, but also for its appearance on Sub Pop, that Seattle grunge label usually home to bands like Beach House and Washed Out. As the first hip hop release from the imprint, Black Up stood apart from the rest of 2011's so-called 'avant rap' bubble of blog-friendly notoriety-seekers like Lil B and the Odd Future kids. The album was the product of the mysterious Palaceer Lazaro, soon identified as Seattle dweller Ishmael 'Butterfly' Butler of early '90s hip hop trio Digable Planets, along with percussionist Tendai Maraire and guest vocals from newly-signed labelmates THEESatisfaction. The DIY weirdoism on show on Lil B's I'm Gay or Tyler the Creator's Goblin couldn't be further from Black Up's complex rhythms, opaque lyrics, freeform structures and cryptically spiritual aesthetic.

Meeting Butler and Maraire on a miserable day in Shepherds Bush near the blank face of Westfield shopping mall, London seems embarrassingly unglamorous compared to these rarefied mystery guests. Then again, Butler is from a city with 944mm of rain a year, so the gloom seems to suit them. Outdoor photos over, they offer their thoughts on being placed in the underground hip hop bracket alongside someone like Tyler, who was only just out of nappies when Butler won his first Grammy award.“I think at the core, the comparison is exact,” says Butler. “I think that we all have a similar approach to music, culture and life. But that being said, you could probably say that about most of the people making music around the world. I think a direct comparison is somewhat lazy, y'know, just because the acts are a little different [to mainstream hip hop]. Because in that difference is a chasm that's huge from one artist to the next. I like Lil B a lot – Lil B doesn't write any lyrics, he just puts the beat on and starts rapping, leaves all the mistakes in – to me that's a brave and courageous and kinda visionary way of doing it, it's kinda old school to the core, and I respect that, but to compare that with the guys in Odd Future... But cats are coming from the same heart feeling, I think.”

Take the lyrics, for example. Where Lil B is silly and provocative, and Odd Future just plain offensive, Shabazz Palaces are clearly reaching for something more oblique. Where the lyrics are clearly decipherable they often remain just out of reach: “There's about to be big movements from below, the golden age lies ahead”; “The lies are getting truer and the truth is getting brighter, things are looking blacker, but black is looking whiter.”

“Well, the lyrics, they happen to me, I don't necessarily make 'em up,” explains Butler. “I feel 'em, they come through and then I do as little modification to it as possible.” So it's question of waiting for inspiration to hit? “It makes the process slower but it's kinda what I do. Tendai's better at just having a subject and getting a middle and an end to it. We exist in a separate musical thing, but encompassed in the same thing. He's doing something and I'm doing something, and I learn something and then apply it to what I'm doing – it's a pretty different and rich relationship of collaboration.”

The other notable appearance on the record is from THEESatisfaction, a Seattle duo equal measures Salt'n'Pepa and Erykah Badu (for once a lazy comparison that's near the money – these girls are sexy but weird, gutsy but soulful) who contribute singing and rapping and also appear as occasional live guests. The spirit of collaboration runs through the album even though it's not credited as an ensemble piece.

“It's like coming from the same father,” explains Tendai. “Everybody knows what the rules are, you grow up together, and when everybody leaves they go their way but when it's time to do their thing they know the rules.” Tendai himself comes from a family of musicians and is preparing to release his own hip hop record as well as an album of mbira music, or thumb piano, the percussion instrument he wields to mesmerising effect on tracks like 'Free Press and Curl'.

The Shabazz Palaces live performance also diverges from your standard hip hop show, with Butler and Maraire playing instruments and triggering samples while sharing tightly rehearsed vocals and even choreographed dance moves. “We were raised with the understanding that if you were lucky enough to have the gift of music then you saw that as being a gift, you didn't necessarily claim it as your own,” says Butler. “So when you use it in performance you treat it like a gift, give a lot, be dedicated, spend your time on stage involved.” THEESatisfaction also make guest appearances during the show, adding vocals and sassy moves of their own. “Without really talking about it, it kinda evolved to where it is now, and even now we're looking at it like, we don't do enough! We try to add new shit almost every show, but also leave a lot of room for things to happen naturally that are different every night. So it's like a reverence for being able to perform,” says Butler.

That reverential element to the group's aesthetic comes through in both the lyrics and the visual elements, with religious signals and symbols used ambiguously, for example in the Arabic lettering in the album artwork or in song titles like 'An Echo From the Hosts that Profess Infinitum'. They both feel a connection between music and spirituality? “Yeah,” says Butler. “'Cos I'm not really a religious or a church-going person, although I have beliefs and stuff like that, but one thing that I do go to every day is music.” Both were brought up in musical environments, and with a master mbira player for a father there was no doubt that Maraire would start performing just as soon as he could hold an instrument. “My whole family is into music, my father and my mother, brothers, sisters. I wasn't forced but it was like, there's nothing I could do! At 18 months, my parents said I just hopped up and started playing, and the rest is history.”

“For my mom it was Motown,” adds Butler. “My dad was more like avant garde jazz.” That jazzy sense of untethered exploration, a looseness in form, certainly comes through in Black Up’s disregard for convention and easy hooks, but the range of influences on Shabazz Palaces is infinitely broad, according to Butler. “Looking back on it, I just liked any kind of music that was good, whether it was on a commercial or a sitcom, a theme song or anything like that. I was just keen to rhythm, to melodies, from the start. But I really like Prince and Parliament/Funkadelic, that was stuff I used to listen to over and over and over and over.”

After a couple of self-released EPs, Shabazz Palaces started to capitalise on the internet chatter they had generated, but remained reluctant to give interviews or put a face to the music. While the hype mill works faster than ever, publicity-shy musicians can also use the web to stay out of view and keep their distance from the PR machines. But was the aim to remain anonymous and go for slow-burn success, or are they still gunning for sales and acclaim? “There's no aim. We don't approach it and say, 'We want the outcome to be this',” says Maraire. Some of their mid-‘90s peers continue to enjoy success yet remain relatively underground, I suggest – take Ghostface Killah and MF Doom’s recent show at the Roundhouse. “Slow is cool because there's not many dudes from Ghost's and Doom's era that's just gonna come out and have a massive show,” says Butler. “They just let their music represent them. If they went and got an interview or had a TV show, anything happening was because somebody liked their music, not because a solicitor got it for them or their publicist. So I respect that and I see that as adding some longevity to what you're doing, if you allow whatever it is you do to get you wherever it is you're gonna go, instead of manipulating things.”

Still, it must have been gratifying to see Black Up regularly appearing in critics’ end of year polls last month. “If you make something for commerce, any kind of success is pretty amazing,” says Butler. ‘It's unexpected, but there's a duality to it. I mean, we know that we have skills, but sometimes your idea may not resonate, so you just don't know.” Maraire agrees: “No one likes every song on our album.”
“The philosophy is like, because you gotta rely on your instinct, you might do something and not necessarily think that much of it, but you gotta keep things there,” continues Butler. “Sometimes there's stuff going on that you don't necessarily like, but you have to accept it 'cos it happened.”

So how does the rise of Shabazz Palaces relate to the success of Digable Planets way back when? “If you ever start feeling like you're entitled to success then you start being one of those asshole superstar people unable to accept when things don't go their way, y'know,” says Butler. Did that happen to him? “No.” But presumably it happened to people he knew? “Yeah,” he laughs.So given the huge chasm between the sonic palettes of Digable and Shabazz, what kind of future hip hop can we expect the group to be working on next? “I don't even know yet,” says Butler. “You can hear things going on in your mind, when you write a piece or something – there's whisperings of the idea, but you can't necessarily grab onto it or catch a line off of it yet. But I feel it, y'know. And little things, silently, ideas and stuff... but it hasn't quite been pasted together in our mind yet.”

Finally I ask what other artists we should be looking out for in the coming year. “There's certain websites I go to that specialise in hearing new music, but I'll just put it in my iPod and have it on rotation,” Butler says. So, despite forging such a unique identity for Shabazz Palaces, the notion of authorship isn't all that important him? “Not really.” It's a strange admission from someone who's worked hard to create such a cohesive and distinctive album, but also appropriate to the way he seems to place the music ahead of the personalities behind it. They both give props to THEESatisfaction, who plan to release a record later this year, and Maraire recommends Zimbabwean singer and mbira player Hope Masike.

With plans for more live shows and another record to be released through Sub Pop, Shabazz Palaces definitely aren't on the standard hip hop trajectory. “Yeah,” says Butler, offering an off-the-cuff summation of the band's ruling principle: “I mean, how you are is gonna dictate where you go.”

Dan Sartain and the only sensible part of my review

2012-01-20T23:20:00.001Z

Oh dear, I made a stupid mistake while reviewing Dan Sartain's new album for L&Q which was entirely due to an iTunes cataloguing error. In summary though, this is what I thought of it:

That clatter-clanging blues-punk is here distilled into 13 sub-two-minute songs, of which ‘Nam Vet’ is pure British grot’n’roll circa ’05 and half of the rest sounds like the Ramones. Which, on balance, is fine by me.

This is roughly what Mr Sartain sounds like, and if you were unlucky enough to read the full 145 words then my sincere apologies for filling your head with indie un-facts. Massively embarrassing.

Androids behind a velvet rope: The Phenomenal Handclap Band, Form And Control

2012-01-20T23:04:00.000Z

First published in Loud And Quiet

The Phenomenal Handclap Band
Form & Control
Tummy Touch
Out 30th January 2012

The Phenomenal Handclap Band have dialled down the funk and turned up the proggy art-rock for a follow-up album which splices those ‘70s genres with a wearying dose of adult contemporary, castrating its dancefloor potential in the process.

The New York collective once toured with Bryan Ferry, which says it all, really. Ostentatious velvet-rope slickness suggests Roxy Music at their glossiest, yet at heart it’s all deeply repressed, even conservative. Oddly blank vocal efforts are duplicated in a creepy android choir (echoes of Ladytron, continuing the riff on Roxy) that’s totally sexless (and not in the good Ladytron way).

There’s no doubt that TPHB is the project of two DJ minds tuned to the other side of the mixer – this is all about structure and sheen, knob-twiddling and record-referencing. Beautifully constructed but with little of the joie de vivre that fires up its retro source material.

Slackin' too hard: Cymbals Eat Guitars live at the Garage

2012-01-20T22:58:00.000Z

First published in Loud And Quiet

Cymbals Eat Guitars
Relentless Garage
5 January 2012

One strain of American rock that’s never quite made a successful translation into British music is the sub genre known, in typically contradictory fashion, as ‘slacker rock’: superficially loose yet nerdily exacting, hyper-literate yet loving to play dumb, boisterously poppy yet with guitars always a smidge out of tune.

Staten Island band Cymbals Eat Guitars, who put out their second album Lenses Alien last August, have added their own generation’s angsty inflections to a marginal update on the suburban slacker sound, so instead of slouchy Gen-X ennui, their live performance ripples with the muscular professionalism of a small town band with its eye on the prize.

Singer Joe D’Agostino switches from a sing to a scream, with not so much the geek-goes-postal attitude of Stephen Malkmus as with the gelled finesse of Dave Grohl, while keys, bass and drums provide a heavyweight backdrop like a houseful of Modest Mice.

Clever, unpredictable songs with clever, cryptic lyrics don’t always register in a noisy low-ceilinged room, but the dedicated air-punchers at the front suggest that CEG’s killer tour schedule and word-of-blog buzz is paying off, little by little. Recession era music, eh? Even the slackers are working too hard.

Searching for the perfect pop moment: An interview with GIRLS

2011-12-07T23:51:00.001Z

First published in Loud And Quiet

Last month I met Girls before the band's Electric Ballroom show.

Christopher Owens is the nucleus of Girls, subject to his own chaotic quantum laws on the quest to write the perfect bittersweet pop song. Two albums and one EP into his late-blooming music career, he’s getting close to nailing it as well, but not without the assistance of various capable electrons, orbiting at a distance yet integral to Girls’ atomic substance. Chet 'JR' White is credited by Owens as someone who “helps record” the songs, but listening to their facetiously titled debut, Album, as well as this year’s acclaimed follow-up Father, Son, Holy Ghost, it’s obvious that his input has alchemical results on the deceptive simplicity of songs like ‘Hellhole Ratrace’ and ‘Vomit’. After recording the first album themselves, the gaps have been filled for a full touring band, right up to that second album pop cliché, a shimmy of backing singers.

I meet Owens on a dark evening when the clocks have gone back, just as the band finish sound-checking for their sold-out show at Camden’s Electric Ballroom. He slopes into the dressing room holding a vile-looking cup of greyish milky tea, his bleached hair hanging half up, half down and flopping round two very pale blue eyes. He adopts that slightly sniffy, louche air that Californian bands carry with ease, but now and then he’ll become more engaged and set those blue eyes right on you. Wearing the indie uniform, unchanged since Cobain, of blue jeans and flannel shirt, he’s curated his grubbiness right down to the fingernails, baby blue varnished and chipped, though not dirty. His teeth are surprisingly un-American, like an old picket fence out of joint, but somehow this gives him a real edge that orthodontically conventional indie bands miss out on. I think about whether he was maybe banned from having a dentist as a kid.

Because Chris Owens, as everybody knows by now, grew up in a Christian cult. His baby brother died because of the cult's anti-medicine beliefs, and aged 16 he ran away for good. But now his relationship with his mother is on the mend, as you can hear in the handful of songs he's written about her – ‘Forgiveness’ and 'My Ma', an especially lovely track on the new record that’s somewhere between the Flaming Lips, George Harrison, Cat Power and the finest AM radio fare of ‘70s interstate journeys.

That morning, Chris had met with one of his musical heroes, Lawrence (of Felt, Denim and Go Kart Mozart), a star who never was but is now enjoying a little resurgence with the release of the documentary Lawrence of Belgravia. Turns out Owens had written him a letter and Lawrence decided to wander down to the venue and hand-deliver a reply. This strikes me as something life-affirmingly awesome – receiving a letter from your idol – but Owens plays it down a little (“He just came to say hi”), maybe because he's tired of soundchecks and press engagements, or maybe because he sees himself more as an equal to Lawrence these days. After all, Owens is the proud owner of a 9.1 and a 9.3 from Pitchfork, no doubt more than Lawrence can boast. Not to mention that Girls have actually sold a few records, steamrollering indie expectations with the sheer universalising force of catchy pop songs.

Now, songs by Girls are generally about girls. Sometimes girls Owens loves, or maybe girls he has a crush on, or girls he left behind. Sometimes the girl is his mother, of course. The backdrop to this is a hazy atmosphere of drop-out delinquency, the feeling of being lost in a vagrant’s eternal summer. The cosy California bubble that Girls emerged from and that so often informs their writing must seem a million miles away from the noodle-stained and piss-soaked Camden streets outside, so I start by asking him about touring. It’s horrible, right?

“I don’t know,” he begins, a stock answer that he tends to use as a habitual gap-filler before offering something meatier. “There’s good points, but on the whole there’s a lot of long drawn-out...” He pauses. “In the van, with the same people all the time... it’s nothing too horrible but it’s not the best time ever. I’m not somebody that’s just, like, living the dream or something.” Echoes of that itinerant childhood with the Children of God perhaps, who travelled constantly to spread their mission. Maybe when you’ve seen the world already it’s more fun to just stay home. “I think London’s good,” he adds, “but everywhere else can be a little bit hit or miss, maybe not so many people. It’s a bit difficult to tour here to be honest. It’s kinda like... very depressing. You can end up a lot of times in places with shows that you feel were really unnecessary. Nobody’s that excited to be there, there's not that many people there, y’know.”

What about writing on the road? “It’s difficult because I like to be alone for that, but I’m always around people now. And there’s not much free time really, besides the travel time, and the worst place in the world to try to write a song would be in the van. But it’s not even really an issue ‘cos there’s a lot of songs written. It would just be cool to find a way of recording more to catch up so that stuff doesn’t get too old before you start working on it.”

A lot of Girls songs are very honest about people very close to him, some mentioned by name – ‘Alex’, ‘Jamie Marie’, ‘Laura’. Do they mind being made the subject of a song? “I don’t think it’s bothered anybody. And they’re usually nice songs, it’d never be a bitchy song or anything.” Maybe there are people who want a song written about them though. “I’m sure there are, but it doesn’t work like that.” What about crazy fans? “There’s been a few. I get the impression there are a lot of crazy fans, not necessarily just ours, but like, music fans.” Does he see himself as famous then? “No, not yet really... a little bit,’ he concedes. “Nothing’s changed, which I think is really good. I would hate it if I started writing while thinking about the fact that people are gonna be listening.”

Lawrence doesn’t have that problem, I would guess. Even after a few decades he’s only really known as a fringe figure, adored by the very few and ignored by the rest. Girls have had quite the opposite experience, hailed and hyped from the get-go with support from former Holy Shit bandmates Ariel Pink and Matt Fishbeck and most of the music press.

So what’s the price of that success? “It’s working harder, it’s touring. The price though? I don’t know what the price is – it’s too soon to tell. But Lawrence could have done exactly what we've done. We went on tour, we worked really hard. Lawrence has never toured, he refuses to tour. You know, if you go out on tour all the time like we've been doing, you’re gonna get more attention than people that don’t. And also in his case it’s different because he was doing most of his stuff way before people were using the internet.” A truism of 21st century indie success, for sure.

Owens has previously said that he sometimes writes songs for other voices, imagining Beyonce or Justin Bieber delivering lines like, “My love is like a river, she just keeps on rolling along.” I can see what he means – a universal pop song would obviously sound great booming out of the ‘Yonce. But Owens’ cracked and fragile voice is an elemental part of the Girls sound, something that fans seem to be drawn to just as much as the songs themselves. “Yeah, I think that’s true, I think people do think that...” Doesn’t he agree? “I think that for what we’ve done so far, for the most part, it is. But not as a rule.”

As well as imagining alternative performances of Girls songs, Owens has spoken of using other artists as prompts for his own songwriting, like ‘Jamie Marie’, his attempt at a Randy Newman song. With all this fluidity and striving for some transcendental pop quality, what is the remaining essence of a Girls song? “Well....” A very long pause. “I think the essence is for me to talk about myself, and it’s usually like, uh... some admitting to being unhappy and then, like, talking about some type of alternative to that, like being happy, or wanting to be, or hoping to be.” So it’s actually about the words rather than the music? “Yeah, yeah,” he says firmly, “the music’s just a backdrop. On every record there’s so many different types of songs, so many different genres, but all that stuff is very interchangeable.”

I ask if he really is on a quest to write the perfect pop song. “Yeah, I am. But I don’t know, it could be any kind of song structure, I don’t really care about that. I think it would have to be pretty simple, those songs are usually pretty simple.”

For someone who’s had such a complicated life, the songs are strikingly simple, with lyrics of the “mad/bad/sad” variety that he somehow breathes much more life into than you’d reasonably expect. Perhaps Owens finds it useful to channel the disorder and spontaneity of his life into easily digestible pop mantras. “The simple thing is really just the only thing I know right now, it really is. Everything that has ever been on a Girls song is just the first idea.” I try to drag out something more combative, more declamatory, more preachy, but he doesn’t take the bait when asked why pop music is so important to people. “I don’t know. I just think it would be cool to write a song that everybody knows, that’s all.”

We wrap up the conversation and he unfurls himself from the tiny upholstered chair, dishwater cuppa still sloshing in his grip. The band’s new single (“’Cos people didn’t let me put it on the album and I didn’t want it to be a B-side”) is dedicated to and named after Felt frontman Lawrence, and is available on 28 November, digitally and on limited edition heart-shaped red vinyl.

Horn splatter, glass shatter: Hudson Mohawke live at XOYO

2011-12-07T23:29:00.001Z

First published in Loud And Quiet

Hudson Mohawke at XOYO
19th October

The best shows are most often those where artist and audience fall into a frenzied feedback loop of mutual appreciation, ecstatic vibes and perverse egging-on to go louder, harder, funner. Of the many qualities attributable to Glasgow producer and prodigy-turned-scene-stalwart Hudson Mohawke, that ability to tap into exactly what the crowd wants – or needs – is perhaps his most natural talent.

Faced with a sold out venue of pumped up Londoners defying the too-cool-to-dance stereotype, he plays it wide, filling the stage with giant letters spelling H-U-D-M-O and wisely breaking up the cascading technicolour onslaught of his own material with snippets of anything from Pusha T and dirty South hip hop to Bjork's crystalline yelps and a final coda of Tweet's 'Oops (Oh My)'. Tracks from this summer's Satin Panthers EP more than hold their own against Kanye and Jeezy though, with all hands raised for the horn splatter and glass shatter of 'Thunder Bay' and the sizzurped wobble of 'Cbat'. Happy hardcore rubs up against low-slung crunk and the ratatat percussion loved by HudMo's peers, but the effect is always one of all-consuming PARTY rather than unfocused eclecticism. Bottle this and flog it as a legal high for school nights.

A weird winter sparkler: Kate Bush returns with 50 Words For Snow

2011-12-07T23:19:00.001Z

First published in Loud And Quiet. And my first non-disclosure agreement, legal eagles!

Kate Bush
50 Words For Snow
8/10

We wait forever for a Kate Bush album, so of course two come along at once. After the odd rehashing of old material on Director’s Cut, a surprise Christmas gift of seven new tracks has appeared in our stocking. Given that Bush appears to be one of the most genuine and least cynical pop stars around, the idea that this shock-and-awe approach to album release schedules could be a contrivance to muster maximum media impact isn't a pleasant one, but it all seems very cleverly played. Still, any cynicism is shot to pieces after hearing 50 Words For Snow, an album dealing in suitably cold and wintry themes: icy precipitation in its various forms; humankind's relationship with wild, irrational nature; and attempts at love in the face of chaos and loss.

'Snowflake' casts Bush's young son as the title 'character' drifting down from the sky, partly sung and partly spoken in the cloying voice of a just-pubescent English boy. His mother interjects in a sweet but slightly icky expression of their maternal bond (“The world is so round, keep falling, I'll find you”). 'Lake Tahoe' and 'Misty' use a similar palette of skeletal piano phrases, brushed drums, and strangely synthetic-sounding string flurries in structures more narrative than musical – all three top 10 minutes. 'Misty' is the one about shagging a snowman, by the way. Bonkers on the page, brilliant in your ears, even when she sings, “I can feel him melting in my hands.”

The single 'Wild Man' is the most immediate, despite its spoken verses and creepy dual-voice chorus. Lyrical loopiness continues, with the abominable snowman as the subject: “Lying in my tent, I can hear your cry echoing round the mountainside, you sound lonely.” But the strongest song on the album – and I can't quite believe I'm putting this to paper – is 'Snowed in at Wheeler Street', the achingly raw duet with Elton John, playing lovers torn apart across the centuries. “Come with me, I'll find some rope, I'll tie us together/ I've been waiting for you so long, I don't want to lose you again,” she sings over a twisting horn pattern like a Steve Reich offcut. It’s painfully heartfelt and quite chilling.

Then there's the really batty one, the title track, with Bush cracking the whip on the lazily erudite voice of Stephen Fry. “C'mon man, you got 44 to go!” she urges, while Fry nonchalantly proffers his words for snow, from the sublime ('stellar tundra') to the ridiculous ('phlegm de neige'). 'Among Angels' provides a sense of enclosure after an unpredictable second half but, weirdly, begins with a bum chord and a clipped “sorry”. A strange mistake on such a well-crafted album? With pressure to produce a classic after so many years away, perhaps admitting a tiny error allows Bush to shirk the weight of expectation by making the first move. 50 Words For Snow delicately negotiates its status, never shying from the artistic convictions of its creator, but still careful to put us at ease with her singular talent. Sometimes the genius has to play dumb so as not to scare off the simpletons. A winter sparkler.

Into the Night: Resurrecting the Garage with Azari & III, LIVE

2011-12-07T22:57:00.001Z

First published in Loud And Quiet

Azari & III at White Heat, Madame Jojo's
November 1st 2011

Some tech-savvy good samaritan recently ripped and uploaded a BBC radio documentary about house music grandaddy Larry Levan, which included a four-hour live set recorded at the Paradise Garage in 1979. Rescued from obscurity, that tape is a vivid snapshot of the emerging scene, featuring soaring live vocals from underground legends Sylvester and Loleatta Jackson. And just when you think “they don't make 'em like that anymore,” Azari & III are in town to squeeze the sweat from your pores through the ol' fashion magic of analogue.

Yin meets yang in the voices of Cédric Gasaida (silkily purring in a fur hat and teeny-tiny white jeans) and Fritz Helder (streaming sweat and rasping dirty talk in a skin-tight suit), while the eponymous Azari and III lurk just behind, pushing an ‘80s template through a prism of contemporary ballroom house, trash-fash electro and luscious space disco. It's a wholly un-ironic resurrection of the extroverted, ecstatic, near-spiritual magic of prototype house, and along with that rip-roaring podcast it's the closest any born-in-the-Eighties kids are ever gonna get to the Paradise Garage. Whooping and perspiring, the congregation confers something genuine and majestic onto the glossy perfection of ‘Reckless (With Your Love)’ and ‘Into The Night’.

It's Doom. And Ghostface. But not quite Doom&Ghostface. LIVE!!!

2011-12-07T22:35:00.001Z

One of a few reviews and features taken from the end-of-year issue of Loud And Quiet, available throughout December.

Doom and Ghostface at the Roundhouse
5th November 2011

The man formerly known as MF Doom returns to the Roundhouse for a sold-out show, barely ayear after his debut European performance in the same venue. Carting round the UK for a fewweeks, the masked and multi-monikered rapper’s schedule happens to coincide with that of hison-off collaborator, the man formerly known as Ghostface Killah. And lo! A co-headline dateis squeezed in, to the delight of the uniform legions of polite-looking dudes in New Era capsand flannel shirts, all of whom seem happy to give up their fireworks in the hope of hearingmaterial from the long-awaited DoomStarks collaboration.

Unlucky. The intended running times fall victim to hip hop standards of punctuality as theytake their sweet time on the solo sets, leaving us with just a few closing minutes of sharedstage antics, back-slapping and big-ups.

But we make do. Both provide blistering run-throughs of their best bits, Doom stuffing hishalf with snippets from across his catalogue, including Dangerdoom and King Geedorahmaterial plus tasty treats from Mm.. Food. He flomps across the stage with relaxed authority,face hidden behind the gold mask and sizeable pot belly poking out from an Army surpluscamouflage net. Big Benn Klingon provides the usual hype man business with gusto to matchhis gut, and backpacks bump heartily with recognition of each rhyme.

Ghostface gives us an equally satisfying selection, throwing in material from Fishscale andRaekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx as well as some classic Wu Tang. “Who copped the first Wualbum?” he barks, provoking whoops that would indicate some of this crowd were seriouslygangsta as six-year-olds.Annoyingly, the corporate gloss of the Roundhouse doesn’t extend to the sound quality,despite there being little more than a backing track and a few gruff voices to amplify. Familiarbeats ricochet around the ovoid tramshed like bullets in a tin submarine, while the muffledbass rumbles underfoot as if emanating from a passing rudeboy’s ride. The rappers’ white-hotaura keeps us perky, but when it takes Ghostface shouting “Dollar dollar bill y’all!” to realiseyou’re listening to ‘C.R.E.A.M.’, you can’t help but feel a little cheated.

The King of Limbs remixed: Radiohead as source material for new gen producers

2011-11-03T08:09:00.001Z

[Wrote this for the Spectator Night & Day arts blog but it hasn't been posted up yet]

Radiohead
TKOL RMX 1234567
XL Recordings

Given the clangorous fanfare and critical parping that usually accompanies a new Radiohead album, the February release of the band’s eighth studio effort caused merely a few ripples in the big splashy sea of new music. Partly this is down to the band’s decision to forego the expected promotional duties, festival headline slots and arena shows, but another explanation is that The King of Limbs could be band’s least successful and least memorable record. While it’s not without its moments, particularly when it hits its stride halfway through with the twin beauties of ‘Lotus Flower’ and ‘Codex’, TKOL is Radiohead in B-side mode, showing off a practiced ease with their own style and the organic interplay between human and machine; acoustic warmth and synthetic glitch.

But it was also obvious that these few tracks (only eight of them!) would undergo multiple incarnations, as producers and DJs from the top of the tree to its bedroom-bound roots got their hands on the fertile raw material. Given Thom Yorke’s recent collaborations with progressive hip-hop producer Flying Lotus and home-grown talents Four Tet and Burial, it’s not hard to imagine Radiohead taking the remixer’s job into account as they tinker in the studio. Why finish a track definitively when someone else will do it for you? Why write 10 great songs when you could do eight and let the remixers go forth and multiply?

And lo, eight months later, I’m clutching a copy of the snappily titled TKOL RMX 1234567 in my (virtual) mitts. At its best, this record shines a spotlight back onto TKOL to pick out the delicacy and maturity that underpin tracks like ‘Bloom’ and ‘Lotus Flower’, not to mention Thom’s ever-lovelier distant falsetto. But at its worst, it’s an over-long, over-stuffed non-album that doesn’t hang together with any coherence, despite brief flashes of brilliance and a handful of moments that easily surpass anything present in the source material.

So for best results, ignore the idea that this is an album. Although sequenced as well as it can be for a disparate bunch of tracks made by a disparate bunch of people, what you essentially get is a compilation of back-to-back singles that would never normally sit together in a mix. Reflecting the bubbling-over of all kinds of electronic music in 2011, highlights include the bucolic beauty of Four Tet and Caribou’s efforts standing shyly against the bubbling, dubbling, low-end splash of Harmonic 313’s take on ‘Bloom’ (see video below) and Blawan’s deliriously wacky version of ‘Bloom’, a tightly locked dancefloor ear-shredder. Then there’s Pearson Sound’s abstract and virtually undanceable rework of ‘Morning Mr Magpie’, which starts off quiet and arboreal before debasing itself with scattershot drums, hard-panned vocals and twisting rhythms.

The ultimate cut-out-and-keep track has to be Montreal newcomer Jacques Greene’s excellent ‘Lotus Flower’ (see video at top), which mimics Nathan Fake’s warped warmth as its builds unfussily towards the big drop at the four-minute mark, a glorious acid pulsing with pockets of melodic tastiness bursting through to configure new harmonic alliances quite different to the original track.

Lowlights are the less interesting, more ambient offerings from Shed and Altrice, and the straightforward dancefloor rework from SBTRKT, which is serviceable but disappointing considering how steeply his star has risen this year. Similarly, man-of-the-moment Jamie XX submits an anaemic ‘Bloom’ with his now-trademark bells and steel pans needlessly smeared all over it.

It’s an exciting collection that anyone with half an ear cocked towards electronic music should not ignore, but whether Radiohead can really continue in this vein is another question. Will they accept a fate as merely a sample generator for more inventive producers to play with? Or will they go back to the drawing board and make a ‘proper’ album of a proper length with a few guitar riffs chucked in for good measure? My prediction – bearing in mind the recent news that they’ve already returned to the studio – is that they won’t be able to stay away from the Pyramid Stage for too long. Glastonbury 2013: I’ll put my money on it.

No-holds-barred maximalism: Rustie takes it to the next level on Glass Swords

2011-10-27T00:32:00.000+01:00

First published on Dummy, here's the first part of a review of Glass Swords, the debut from Rustie that's attracted a not insignificant number of digital column inches this autumn. It's a pretty intense listen, and to a certain extent I found it hard to warm to despite being nothing but impressed and intrigued all the way through. I am certainly interested to see how people will feel about this record in a year's time - does it point the way to an ascendant taste for plasticky, crayon-bright sounds, or is this the high watermark of a trend that's reached saturation?

Rustie
Glass Swords
Warp

Following on the heels of Satin Panthers, the recent EP from fellow Glaswegian producer and LuckyMe collaborator Hudson Mohawke, Rustie’s first album proper is a similarly explosive, immersive, star-spangled knockout of a record that can be filed as a companion piece to HudMo’s 2009 debut Butter. While they both share a taste for no-genres-barred maximalism, cascading ’80s synths, ass-wobbling bass and warped lady-vox, on Glass Swords Rustie sees HudMo’s game and raises him, shrugging off the call of the dancefloor in favour of a personal voyage to the weirdest outer limits of timbre, melody, rhythm, texture and memory. And to think they called him dubstep.  

Glass Swords gleefully tests your mettle from start to finish. It bulges, it strains, it stretches back and slaps you around with a glossary of shameless retro-funk-pop elements – hollowed out drums, G-funk squelch, pulsing house beats, dirty slap bass and even that horrifying vocal “ooh” last heard all over James Horner’s score for Titanic. The biting clarity of each sound builds a world that seems purely, deliberately digital – a bravely un-trendy move in a climate of analogue reverence, yet rather than seeming cold and artificial, this cut-glass digitalism refracts into an infinity of animated virtual worlds, polygon landscapes and platform games in glorious 8-bit colour.

Continue reading on Dummy...

Purist punk and suspicious mindsets on Iceage debut New Brigade

2011-10-10T15:36:00.001+01:00

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed Iceage's debut album, New Brigade, for Dummy. I found myself really enjoying it despite its fairly predictable template of scratchy retro punk and confused stabs at shock value (half-hearted references to runes and the KKK, plus a few Harrington jackets and bovver boots thrown in for good measure). Definitely worth a few spins if you're wondering where all the half-decent guitar bands went.

Iceage
New Brigade
Out on Abeano

Four teenage Danes in Harrington jackets and switchblade smirks have just released their debut album New Brigade in the UK. Back home, Iceage have already attracted an unusual amount of media interest for an underground band of abrasive snotrockers, with local tabloids getting into a familiar fear-mongering froth over bolshy kids making too much racket (“Teenage bullies full of anger and anxiety!” according to one headline, as translated by singer Elias Rønnenfelt).

If alarm bells are ringing, you’re not alone in your suspicions. A supposedly underground band getting mainstream column inches? Who’s bankrolling this stunt? Where’s the guerrilla gig? Are Iceage a corporate Trojan horse for a new strain of piss-weak continental lager? Well, it’s good news: the band’s credentials appear to be clean – or rather, appealingly unclean and genuinely independent. A mood of nihilistic despair and aggression courses through New Brigade as they channel the savage post-punk of Wire and Mission of Burma with the obliterated noise-rock of early '80s no wave or primitive Sonic Youth, although their visual aesthetic is rather less savoury – a dubious tattoo of possibly-quite-fascist neofolk band Death in June has been spotted on guitarist Johan Surrballe, while shallow references to Klansmen the video above and runes are juvenile shock tactics at best. Doubtless these Danes trace their bloodline back to Søren Kierkegaard rather than Hans Christian Andersen, yet there’s little trace of the left-wing (or any-wing) moralising that came as standard in the first wave of punk.

Continue reading here...

"Shit, I'm dressin' like I was at the Ali-Frazier fight, baby": Shabazz Palaces take London

2011-10-01T13:46:00.000+01:00

I planned ahead on this gem and bought my ticket in August. I wasn't wrong: it was rad. Buy the album immediately and play this video LOUD, 'cos that sub bass is unforgiving:

Shabazz Palaces at White Heat, Madame Jojo’s
27 September 2010

Hooded and hidden behind shades, Palaceer Lazaro (or Ishmael ‘Butterfly’ Butler, formerly of 90s hip hop trio Digable Planets) commands his debut London performance as Shabazz Palaces, a show that’s sold out twice over judging by the jostling and jamming in White Heat’s basement. The Black Up LP came out on Sub Pop this summer to immediate acclaim as well as curiosity as the label’s only hip hop release to date, an anomaly partly explained by Butler’s roots in Seattle but perhaps also signalling some continuing degradation of genre boundaries for internet-dependent music fans.

Flanked by percussionist Tendai Maraire, who chips in on vocals and choreographed hand gestures, Butler backs his rhymes with raw, weighty bass, noodling mbira, jazz piano cut-ups and other freeform eclectica. Drenched in wet reverb, the lyrics are too often buried out of earshot, but 'Recollections of the Wraith’ (see video above) finds a sweet spot almost unexpectedly with its simple come-on (“Clear some space out, so we can space out”) and startling melismatic vocal sample, as a slow jam ripples through the crowded bodies. An uncompromising and electrifying taste of a musician at the top of his game, a full 17 years after winning his first Grammy.

The blank face of melodrama: Can I get some back-up on Zola Jesus, please?

2011-10-01T13:25:00.000+01:00

Everyone loves Zola Jesus, huh? I could barely find a bad review of this record, which must mean one of two things: either I am hopelessly out of step with what's hott + relevant + buzzy, like all these witchy house and draggy-gaze and don't-call-it-goth-but-it-is-really non-genres of recent months/years; OR (and I prefer this one), I am simply today's prophetic manifestation of cosmic musical truths, a Pop Nostradamus of the 21st century transmitting flippant critical insights and pointing at the falling sky while common-or-garden bloggers flap around mindlessly, recycling press releases and performing their ablutions.

Hmm.

It seems to me that Zola Jesus has cut corners artistically by releasing an album so soon after her last and failing to offer any noticeable change of mood or direction. Her voice can only bring out an intuitive response in the listener - you really do either love it or hate it, and for me it happens to be the latter, in the strongest possible way. It just seems so false, melodramatic yet blankly superficial, a hyperreal 21st century performance of a performance with emotions boiled down into a string of signs and off-the-shelf vocal tics. But as ever, I'm open to crits. What am I missing?

First published in Loud And Quiet

Zola Jesus
Conatus
Souterrain Transmissions/Sacred Bones Records

How to make a Zola Jesus record in next to no time: Take one facsimile of Marina Diamandis’ voice. Extract the froggish tics and cod-operatic throatiness; discard rest, including consonants. Apply a layer of chest-thumping histrionics and allow to dry until almost transparent. Add a few coarse chunks of piquant instrumentation - prepared piano and re-animated toybox, for instance (or whatever presets you have to hand). Dust with upside-down crosses and a few bumps of unidentifiable low-grade dust; serve on a bed of ripped tights to wide-eyed fashion interns and MP3 bloggers. Any leftovers can be fobbed off on little sisters feeling down about their GCSE results.

Look, I hate to be flippant. But if Zola Jesus can’t be bothered to put any effort into her third studio album (the second only came out last August), then neither can I. A torturously tedious listen.

Never coming full circle: Pinkunoizu at White Heat

2011-10-01T12:42:00.000+01:00

First published in Loud And Quiet

Pinkunoizu at White Heat, Madame Jojos
20 September 2011

Despite the Japanglish name, Pinkunoizu bring their filigree rhythms and hypnotic movements from the slightly less distant climes of Copenhagen, working with what appears to be a standard issue post-rock vocabulary of drums, guitars, violin and more guitars. But with a mission statement to “never come full circle, to move hazily in bended ellipses”, the five-piece deftly sidestep the earnest bombast of similarly equipped bands in favour of a tightly-balanced propulsion that's taut yet fluid, dense yet ephemeral. Like a bullet train speeding past Mt Fuji, you might say.

You can taste Mogwai in the soft vocals and slowly evolving guitar phrases of quieter tracks, while the spectre of shoegaze is invoked at its most inspired and least dirgy as the set builds louder, faster and tighter. Battling guitars are couched delicately inside the mix rather than squealing for attention over the top, much like Yo La Tengo at their most rasping and rugged (there's even the lesser-spotted female drummer to stretch the comparison) or the Velvet Underground on the viola-versus-guitar jam of 'Hey Mr Rain'. The Peep EP, a more delicate and exotic experience than Pinkunoizu's live show, is out in November on Full Time Hobby.

Garage rock: the gift that keeps on giving. Now from The People's Temple

2011-10-01T12:02:00.000+01:00

First published in Loud And Quiet

The People's Temple
Sons of Stone
Out on Hozac

Another month, another Jim Jones-inspired band of psych-pop mop-toppers. Unlike Cults though, The People's Temple have a defiantly macho take on '60s garage rock, more in the vein of The Seeds and the Count Five than The Shangri-Las.

Sons of Stone, the Michigan band's debut, is like opening a dust-covered box of warped 45rpm wax salvaged from Lenny Kaye's garage, a loving recreation of that cherished lo-fi Nuggets sound, complete with simplistic pentatonic riffage, trebly bathroom-echo vocals and drums recorded in a concrete stairwell. Seems like Iggy dropped by to give a production masterclass too, with everything whacked right up into the red for some appallingly distorted guitars that couldn't be more faithful to the era.

While the first third plods along predictably, tunes like 'Starstreamer' and 'Sons of Stone (Revisited)' indulge in some commendably rough-edged proto-punk that any Roky Erickson fan would find easy to love.

Sweet like instant-mix pancakes, Givers release debut LP

2011-10-01T11:46:00.000+01:00

Givers: Happy, and a little bit clappy

First published in Loud And Quiet

Givers

In Light

Out on Island in the UK, Glassnote in the US

Givers achieved highly sought-after buzzband status at this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, TX, and it’s pretty easy to see why on the Louisiana band’s strikingly competent and unabashedly joyous debut. Opener and lead single ‘Up Up Up’ (which they performed on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in June, another rite of passage in the journey to buzzdom these days) is as sugary-sweet and over-egged as instant mix pancakes, spilling over with enough colour and melody to keep most bands going for a whole album.

The songs range from intricate to kaleidoscopic to bewildering, stitching Longstreth guitars, fragmented percussion, properly good vocals and flavours of zydeco (the folk style of their home state) into a skewed pop record that should appeal to fans of Dirty Projectors and Vampire Weekend. When a debut this solid comes along, you can’t fail to be impressed, although whether its sweetness and light will hold up over the long winter remains to be seen.

Ex-presidential San Fran gloom-pop: New songs from Fops

2011-10-01T11:34:00.000+01:00

First published in Loud And Quiet

Fops, For Centuries EP
Available on cassette or MP3 from Monotreme Records

Following last year’s full-length Yeth Yeth Yeth, the Bay Area underground super-group Fops offer up this hefty EP, which at seven tracks and 43 minutes is even more generous than your standard long-player. On the other hand, closing track ‘Ronald Wilson Reagan’ takes up half of that running time with a lo-fi soundscape that evolves like bacterial cultures on a Petri dish, easing from phased guitar chords threaded with birdsong to splintered loops of distortion and vocal drones, all washed up like driftwood on a California shore.

It’s an interesting Side B but the first six tracks will be more familiar to fans of Fops’ alma maters, Thee More Shallows and Ral Partha Vogelbacher, mixing the hollow mechanics of early new wave with fuzzy-edged fingerpicking and some choice creepy lyrics: “I shot a parakeet after it called to me, half in Dutch and half in English.”

For Centuries is a gorgeously far-off and faded collection of gloom-pop made for cloudy day beachcombing, having far more in common with the bleak horizons of Echo and the Bunnymen than the current West Coast wave of affluent teenage tokers.

"More computer in the monitor please": Rainbow Arabia in Dalston

2011-09-19T21:28:00.000+01:00

I was disappointed by Rainbow Arabia a couple of weeks ago in Dalston. The gig was pretty sparsely attended, for a start, and it felt like they were waving from a ship that sailed long ago in terms of the Mixmag-via-Middle-East maximalism. Shame they couldn't have released more material ages ago to capitalise on the 2008 buzz.

First published in Loud and Quiet

Rainbow Arabia at the Shacklewell Arms, Dalston
6th September 2011

The faded tropical glamour of the Shacklewell is a fitting venue for the similarly faded tropical clamour of Rainbow Arabia, the LA husband-wife duo behind two EPs of M.I.A-meets-Sublime Frequencies electro. Now touring to promote the full-length Boys and Diamonds (a slightly out-of-character release for Berlin techno label Kompakt), Danny and Tiffany Preston adopt a 1-1-1 stage formation, with the hired drummer hands providing some dynamics against the banks of programmed synths and snares. Dressed down in navy cardigan and Nike runners, Tiffany eschews the tribal raver aesthetic (very 2008), but if they’re so inspired by ‘world beats’ and the Middle Eastern dance music of Omar Souleyman & co, why are they so afraid to cut loose? Despite the cacophonous carnival stylings, some songs fall flat when man and machine don’t quite synchronise, while the preset rave whistle quickly becomes a chore on the ear. And really, is there a sadder question in popular music than “Can I have some more computer in the monitor?” None of this would really matter if Rainbow Arabia were bringing a few stone-cold party bangers to the table, but a few hours later and the songs have slipped from my mind like Saharan sand.

Dark matter and Cleopatra eyes: Austra live at Cargo

2011-08-18T23:32:00.001+01:00

First published in Loud And Quiet

Don't call it operatic

Austra
Cargo, Shoreditch
7th July 2011

Goth is a question that cannot be answered yet will not die. What is it, exactly? No one can agree. Goth is the dark matter of the musical universe and best sidestepped as a term altogether.

And so: the current spectrum of darkwave banshees stretches from Planningtorock at the sharp end through to Zola Jesus at the rather blunt end, with tenuous foundations laid on the trembling theatrics of Kate Bush, Siouxsie and even that contemporary white witch Bat For Lashes. Austra frontwoman Katie Stelmanis's opera-trained voice is set on a constant quiver, strong but with a Bjork-ish throatiness.

Alright, listing all those left-field female pop voices is rather hackneyed, but in the case of Austra the voice is the reason we're here. Tonight it seems so faultless it could almost be – is she? Of course it's ridiculous, but at points Stelmanis seems to nail the notes so precisely you could swear she's miming.

Cleopatra-eyed and flanked by her two Coachella pin-up singers (tie-dye, suede fringing and glitter), the Torontonian marches from thumping album opener 'Darken Her Horse' to the pagan disco workouts of 'Beat and the Pulse' and 'Hate Crime'. The intensity and idiosyncrasy of that voice gets wearisome after 45 minutes, but a skilfully arranged cover in the shape of Joni Mitchell's 'Woodstock' keeps us hooked until the final bars.

Departures: Why I love Amy Winehouse (Concise Version)

2011-07-28T01:02:00.001+01:00

There are so many things to say about the recently departed Amy Winehouse, many of which were said in her short lifetime and many more of which have been repeated in the few days since her death.

All I can to add to the ever-expanding collective memory of her is my own experience of her music and the effect she has had on me. Her addictions, her fame, her disastrous performances and sporadic no-shows, her tabloid status and her immediately iconic look, from the beehive to the missing tooth to the ever-diminishing twig-like limbs... well, these are the things that the obituaries will have to talk about. But I was already a Winehouse fan by the time her personal life took over her musical endeavours, having chanced on her appearance on Jools Holland in 2003.

As a teenager who loved both the Libertines and Lauryn Hill, I was always – and sometimes still am – trying to reconcile my guitar with my voice. All the usual guitar-wielding women failed to hold my interest, like Courtney Love or Chrissie Hynde (this was just before the download age got going – finding worthy musical heroes was pretty tricky in the darkest West Country, despite growing up a few miles from PJ Harvey). Yet my favourite R&B voices seemed worlds away from music I could play myself, with their slick ProTools beats or jazz piano and vinyl crackle.

But then there's Winehouse, bashing out 'Stronger Than Me' on a Strat which even I had to admit was fucking boss, and I hate Strats. And I can clearly remember turning the TV on, in the corner of my room, standing there in a t-shirt and pants aged 16 at midnight on a Friday, as close to the sound as I could get and completely entranced by this girl combining the most unique, drawling, bluesy, growling, sweet and strange voice I'd ever heard with a guitar and a jutting chin, a macho stance and lascivious look. At the time, Winehouse had just turned 20 years old.

I want to say so much about her – her voice, of course, but also her amazing songwriting and barmy lyrics which couldn't have come from anyone else – but in the end the thing that meant the most to me was that she was so incredibly different from everyone else. Winehouse came from another place, from her own mind, seemingly unblemished by all the crap that was in the charts during her own teenage years of the late Nineties. She wore what she wanted, for a start. Not just a foot-high beehive but, in another Jools Holland clip, a black mini skirt and white bomber jacket. Or, at her most drugged out, a Fred Perry shirt with sleeves pushed up to show off horseshoe and pin-up girl tattoos. She was a lad, a mod, a skinhead, a jazzer, a toker, a snorter, a boozer. She could punch you or kiss you or shag you, she was all spit and humanity and visceral emotion, yet on record she'd managed to boil all that down into these blistering couplets which told you so much, almost too much, about herself:

“The only time I hold your hand is to get the angle right”
“Then you notice lickle carpet burns, my stomach drops and my guts churn”
“He left no time to regret, kept his dick wet with his same old safe bet”
“I don't wanna meet your mother anytime, I just wanna grip your body over mine”
“Yours is a familiar face but that don't make your place safe in my bed”

She was raw and filthy but never dolled up and sexualised for the pop market. It would be crass to make her out as some kind of aimless maelstrom of emotion, destined to crash out through hedonism, because that would suggest she had no determination or appetite for success, and you don't sell six million albums without a little bit of hard-headed ambition inside you.

But what Winehouse absolutely was not, was a pop star. Well, of course she was, eventually. But what were the chances? No one could have predicted her rise and rise, looking at the words to 'Fuck Me Pumps' or her blood-stained ballet shoes. Talent she had, but talent doesn't often lead to mega-fame.

The reason I loved her, and I suppose the reason so many people loved her, people who might not normally listen to jazz, soul, R&B or pop, was that she was a real person who said real things in a way you'd never heard them said before, whether she was singing about chips and pitta or straight-up l-o-v-e. Her idiosyncrasies weren't a mask of family-friendly kookiness like many of her female singer peers. I don't relate to her songs because of their subject matter – our lives and loves could not be more different. I relate to them because anyone with a heartbeat can hear that she's singing for her life and telling you the whole, unvarnished, gruesome, glorious truth.

Winehouse's death was needless and tragic, but rather than mourn the 'waste' of her talent, it seems more sensible to celebrate the recordings that do exist. And contrary to certain writers' proclamations, there's a truckload of stuff out there: album cuts, bonus tracks, thousands of clips from TV shows, festivals, gigs, showcases, unreleased tidbits floating through hyperspace and, inevitably, a bumper collector's edition of every last scrap of material will be released and re-released until all 7 billion of us declare 'Rehab' as 'our' karaoke song.

Finally, 'Love Is A Losing Game' must be the closest thing to a stone-cold classic to have been released in the last decade. It's as if it's been transported from some timeless song library on another plane; concise and effortless, crying out to be covered by hapless X-Factor wannabes but always protected by the fact that no other voice will ever do it as much justice.

And that was just a few of the reasons why I love Amy Winehouse. I'm going to miss her.

Departures

2011-07-23T23:50:00.000+01:00

14 Sep 1983 - 23 July 2011

Not wholly unexpected, but no less devastating for that.

A hugely important musical figure in my life so I'll try to put some more words together later.

A quiet evolution in the undergrowth: An interview with Vondelpark

2011-07-17T23:44:00.001+01:00

My 100th Helium Raven post is an interview with Vondelpark, a band from the wilds of South London and beyond and currently signed to R&S. Their new EP, NYC Bags and NYC Stuff, is very much in line with the bittersweet echo of London beats that the label has taken such a shine to with other recent releases from James Blake, Pariah and others.

Props also to Phil Sharp who took the photos for the interview, which he previewed on his blog. He's met at least two of my favourite artists of all time, by the look of it.

First published in Loud And Quiet

Even a stagnant pond teems with life around its damp and fecund edges. There in the broken reeds and rainwater tributaries you'll find all sorts of chary and reclusive fauna, shrinking from your gaze and retreating deeper into the undergrowth to tend their offspring and forage for sustenance. So I find myself in Peckham on a rare visit to this oasis of cheaper living and isolated artistic indulgence, atmospherically a million miles from London's arid centre but really only a few streets south of the priapic new Shard development, a glassy-eyed visual metaphor for the recession if there ever was one.

Vondelpark, despite being named after a green space in Amsterdam, are a distinctly British proposition and a band that have made London's anonymous southern borders their home. Though apparently influenced by a trip to America's West Coast (as hinted at by California Analog Dream, the opening track of last year's Sauna EP), there's something about the mottled patina of their songs – warm yet cool, fond yet distant – that's exactly the opposite of the Golden State's freewheeling optimism. The vocals are submerged and rarely decipherable, floating above reclaimed garage rhythms on 'Hippodrome' or trip-hop shuffle on 'Jetlag Blue Version', and seem to be calling back to warmer, easier times. The Sauna EP is a document of that longing – for sunshine, a younger youth, a smoother toke.

This is the sound of Britain's new bands. Have you noticed? They're young, as always. They're sad, sort of, but also happy at the same time, in the same moment. They like to look back, to reflect. And perhaps more than ever they've got no clear future, no reason to stay in school and get a job, 'cos there are no jobs to be got and it's starting to seem like there never will be. In the boom years there was a risk, a desperate thrill, in pissing about with guitars for a few years before knuckling down to the inevitable. But now? Bands like Vondelpark are taking it slow. They're productive, prolific even, yet they don't crave overnight success. Perhaps because there's little else out there for them, and the future seems to stretch out indefinitely.

Alright, this portrait may not be exactly how it is for Vondelpark, but it's a common enough attitude among bands of their vintage. We're sitting out back at Peckham's Bar Story with the railway station in our sights. Lewis, the guy commonly mistaken for the only member of Vondelpark, is frontman and ringleader of the porous group which includes regular members Bailey and Matt. A recent Boiler Room set saw them joined on drums by Will Archer, a friend and musician who operates under the moniker Slime and has collaborated with Vondelpark on the tracks '2Player' and 'Gals'.

So is this the birth of a 'scene'? “All of our friends are creative in some way, like our friend Ciaran [Wood] who does the videos. It's good to be inspired by people, you kind of bounce off each other,” says Lewis, explaining that it's a “friendship group” first and foremost. “We don't even go to all these nights in London, we just use the amenities to do our own little world.”

Asked how they put their dense and dreamy songs together, there's little to go on. “Just from hanging out,” Bailey offers amid the ums and ahs. It's part of their defiance against the hype machine, one that they share with some of their contemporaries. They're relaxed and purposely slow-moving. The songs too are languorous but not luxuriant, seeming to wallow in time, not as an opulent fuck-you to the ever-quickening treadmill of globalised commerce but more as a consequence of being left behind by the gobbling Pac-Man of credit, debt and default. If the under-25s have had free time foisted upon them because of the recession, at least the musicians can take the opportunity to go slowly, add more layers, play low-key shows and retain their privacy.

Vondelpark haven't appeared from nowhere though, having had a taste of success with their previous incarnation in a more straight-up art-rock band. Pretty brave to just chuck all that away and start again, anonymously? “It wasn't representing what we actually wanted to play,” says Matt. “We had the greatest intentions with that, but we were very young, we didn't want to go down a path that we weren't completely comfortable with,” explains Lewis. “We had offers from major labels who wanted us to be something that we weren't, so... that's all really. There's not many bands that start with four years of experience of playing live around the country. I think we're just quite comfortable with the experience we got from that, and we're not ashamed of any of it.”

It must have made you more clued up about the pitfalls of the industry as well. “Yeah, I think people care about music and we didn't realise that as much when we were in that band before, 'cos everyone around us in East London... it was just like, a darker place, to be completely honest.” How so? “It was just a weird time,” says Bailey, as they all quietly nod. “Yeah.” “Not very nice.”

Still, internet buzz being what it is, the idea of anonymity quickly overtook their intentions as cut'n'paste culture turned the reborn band into 'mysterious south London producer Vondelpark'. That's what happens when your only web presence is an interview with Vice magazine. How important is anonymity, then? “I think people really get that wrong, to be honest, about forced mystery,” says Lewis. “In our case, we actually did do an interview about a month after we put up our first MP3.”

Lots of artists seem to be quite clearly choosing to hide their identities though. Maybe it's a reaction to all that in-yer-face pop and the risk of sudden 'success' and over-exposure on the blogosphere. “You don't need to be anything more at first, it's just having really good songs so people care enough about the music to want to hear more,” says Lewis. “I just feel with the mysterious thing it just comes from people not wanting to waste away with an image, just wanting people to take the music for what it is.” Bailey offers a harsher assessment. “There's a lot of people that just keep regurgitating the same article over and over again, and I think people need to like... live a little bit more.”

“With Burial, he did it in his own way and it's completely original, so the music is the actual important thing,” says Lewis. “And it wasn't intentional, he just honestly doesn't like doing that [promotional] stuff because it's not that important to him, and it's not actually that important to us, 'cos we enjoy listening to our records.” Wu Lyf tried to go down a similar path at first, too. “Now they're saying they're pissed off they even started doing press, 'cos it's taking away from them being in their bedroom making songs.”

What about the musical mood that pervades London bands at the moment? I'm thinking Ghostpoet, James Blake, Echo Lake – musicians of all genres evoking a similar melancholy feeling through mumbled lyrics and dreamy production right down to blurred press shots. Is there something in the water or what?

"Yeah, you could take that quite pretentious and say it's because of England, but it probably actually is,” says Lewis. “I was talking to someone from San Francisco about this the other day, and he was saying, 'I couldn't live in London 'cos it's so grey.' But on a serious level, it is pretty grim, there's only like two months where it's warm in London and I mean, it's not really a great place to sort of... at the moment everyone's just like... yeah, getting emotive,” he laughs.

It's a sound that the classic Belgian techno label R&S has spotted and embraced, signing up diverse acts of the 'post-dubstep' non-genre like James Blake and Space Dimension Controller, giving the label a new lease of life as it nurtures London's fresh talents. “The label has some amazing musicians at the moment,” they remind me later. “Keeps the momentum up to improve every record.” The band are about to release their second EP through the imprint, titled NYC Stuff and NYC Bags, but still plan to steer clear of the limelight. “We're keeping it pretty low key, hopefully the album will be out around Christmas time,” says Lewis. “We don't want to release an album until we're completely happy with what we've done,” adds Matt.

Our conversation concludes with Lewis setting out what could be the band's manifesto, if only they were the type of band who would put their name to something as declamatory and earnest as a manifesto. “We're just really, really, really into making music, and we want to play to lots of people. I just want people to be able to listen to our music and relate in some way, and make them feel better about being in shit situations. That's the main intention.” And in its own small way, that simple rejection of cliched rock and roll living and industry indulgence sums up the quiet evolution ticking over in the city's undergrowth.

The past is ours for the reaping: The Horrors release third album 'Skying'

2011-07-15T22:52:00.001+01:00

SPF 50 all the way.

Dummy Mag asked me to write about The Horrors' new album, and you can read my words here.

I've been listening to Skying an awful lot this week. At first it almost made me laugh, playing spot-the-influence and hearing the band march ever nearer to the present day in their journey through the decades. But as I listened again and again, the album opened itself up to me in the way all great albums do. Things finally fell into place riding home along Great Eastern Street (left earbud only, you understand), drumming the handlebars and singing along to previously meaningless words that had somehow become the world to me. "La la la la..."

Primary Colours was an album I played too much in the space of four weeks and have rarely returned to, although hearing it now does bring me back to a very particular time and place. Will be interesting to see if Skying carves a permanent niche in my life or just my summer. The Mercury shortlist awaits, I expect.

Tie-dyed in knots for Blondes at CAMP Basement

2011-07-14T01:04:00.000+01:00

Went to see Blondes just over a month ago. For some reason there weren't many people at CAMP (maybe because it's a shithole with very optimistically priced beverages), but they stepped up and gave it their best for a motley crew of weeknight wreckheads and silent head-nodders. A very good band indeed, and their John Talabot remix is on Myspace, which is worth checking out even in this Murdoch-boycotting age.

May I take this moment also to recommend the head-spinning disco-but-not-rubbish deliciousness of John Talabot. His XLR8R podcast has been keeping me toe-tapping during the daily grind.

First published in Loud And Quiet

Blondes
CAMP Basement
26th May 2011

At quarter past eleven, CAMP Basement contains just 40 people, give or take some smoking stragglers outside. Those in attendance seem bemused at the low turnout – seems we all expected a roadblock for this mid-week nugget of sensual synth grooves and retro-future-trance. 'Cos everyone loves retro-future-trance, right?

Anyway, Blondes take their position behind an impossible patchwork of hardware, keys and cables, embarking on a slowly building set that gently coaxes us into its ambiguous emotions, involving and evolving through dischordant horns, fuzzy analogue warmth and big, big beats. On record it seems cerebral, almost cold, but by the set's halfway mark we've got a rag-tag anti-rave going on down here, 40 of us locked into the beat, arms raised and heads nodding like clockwork.

Zach Steinman, one half of the Ohio-via-Brooklyn-via-Berlin duo, says of the semi-improvised show, “I'm not really sure if it would work in a huge club. If someone tried that I'd be scared.” Don't buy it. Despite the low turnout, Blondes could easily wave their hypnotic rave wands over a huge club – or better, an arboreal summer festival – and have a thousand-strong crowd tie-dyed in knots for their elegantly engineered free-flowing trance.

An interview with Husband: Lusty pop-noir from Bologna

2011-07-10T15:49:00.000+01:00

First published in Loud and Quiet

Maybe it's no coincidence that one half of pop-noir duo Husband, the bedroom producer and musical director Gianlorenzo, is called Giallo for short. The Italian horror genre most famously affiliated with Dario Argento is a tidy hook on which to peg the band's lusty voodoo rock, which has more than a touch of the George A. Romero about it too. Their debut single 'Love Song' lurches into view like a Zombie Pride parade, beating fleshy drum skins with half-gnawed thigh bones and tapping dead-eyed rhythms on your skull, sending a short, sharp dose of the heebie-jeebies down your spinal cord.

Picked up by Robot Elephant Records after the No Pain in Pop blog spotted their Myspace page, Husband’s output so far is minimal but striking. After putting out a couple of tracks backed with a handful of remixes and playing their first live shows, they're now back in Italy to work on more material and play a stretch of shows on their home turf over summer, including a support slot with the rejuvenated Battles.

Based in Bologna, Husband came to life when Giallo asked friend-of-a-friend Chiara to lend her voice to a few songs he was creating at home. The Italian-Australian singer was more used to being on the other side of the stage as an organiser of the electronic music festival Dancity, held in a medieval town in Umbria. “It's been quite chaotic because I've been learning how to play the drums and how to use my voice, pretty basic,” Chiara tells me, speaking on the phone from the Venice Biennale, as you do.

So while Giallo is the bedroom-bound producer, spending long hours obsessing over organ dynamics or percussion fills, Chiara seems to be able to step in with fresh ears and call time on the incessant tweaking. “Being an artist and being more into your own music, it's not like you spend a lot of time listening to other people's music, you spending time trying to perfect your own,” she says. “I think sometimes he gets obsessed too much with certain things and I'm able to say, no, that's fine, or I think you should work more on that.”

The songs are dense, weighty, layered. What's the writing process like? “I'll start with a line of drums or voices, then try to add something,” explains Giallo. “But at the end the usual thing I do is to erase things, a lot of things, and that's the way I like it because I record at home in my room, so I have the time to understand what I really want from a song. To focus and redo a song – and sometimes the song changes completely.”

It must be tricky translating that to a live performance though. “Basically we just play very little – we have synthesisers and a sampler, and a floor tom and snare. That's because we are only two people, and also the elements in the songs are sometimes very basic,” says Giallo, while Chiara adds that she is still finding her voice: “I've never had a music experience before, being part of a band.”

Bologna itself sounds like something of a musical hotspot, with its own small indie scene and a variety of venues. But how easy is it for bands to break out of Italy and reach an international audience? “I think that things are changing because we are becoming more conscious of ourselves, of our music,” says Giallo. “Italy used to follow other music and trends that came from outside, but now we are just trying to be more personal, taking from the outside but also giving something to the outside. And I think a lot of bands are now coming out from Italy.”

Chiara agrees that something exciting is happening in Italian music right now, as the scene looks both inwards and outwards, triggered by the turbulence of contemporary Europe. “We are in a strange moment culturally, I think we are breaking some boundaries. There's probably less people trying to emulate things outside, but at the same time that coincides with people being more open to an international experience. Strangely it's a good moment for Italian music, even though there's the economic crisis and Berlusconi and all that. Music is a kind of reaction. A lot of people are doing things artistically because they need to do them, they need to make a statement.”

And what exactly is Husband's statement? “It's certainly not straightforward pop, even if there are pop elements to it,” says Chiara, as though the shamanistic spookiness of their output so far was only a hop and skip away from 'California Gurls'. Another EP and a debut album are said to be in the pipeline after a summer spent playing and writing, but Giallo adds that UK performances are likely in early Autumn: “We are very happy and excited about it because when we went there it was amazing.”

Chiara agrees. “I'm really hoping to meet great bands and have a great experience. The best scenario would be to keep going the way it has been up to now, and get a good album out.” With the undead forces they've roused through those graverobber rhythms, Husband would find it harder to put the black magic back in its box.

An apparition of dub: This Peaking Lights record is ruling my summer

2011-06-22T23:30:00.000+01:00

Peaking Lights are the sound of hot sun blazing against your neck, a drop of sweat meandering down your cupid's bow, sticky hands clutching a cold can. The sound of distant buzzing creepy crawlies and squinting against the late afternoon glow. An apparition of of dub bass pounding from under the earth, disturbing the ladybird hanging shell down from an arching blade of grass.

The dub is like a ghostly echo of heatwaves past, conjured from a ouija board mirage of heat and light; a magnetic memory buried in the foundations of city tower blocks and street furniture. Indra Dunis' words are crumpled memories of cultural commandments, almost-nothings beaten into syntactical forms for a brief moment before disintegrating into the sun-bleached haze. Heart rates slowing, pulses beating thick and hot as the daylight slips away.

Peaking Lights' second album, 936, is out now on Not Not Fun.

Still playing with the past: The Horrors perform new album 'Skying', 17th June 2011

2011-06-19T11:28:00.003+01:00

I'm on the Number 8, heading to Bethnal Green to see the live comeback of a band now defined by their ability to make impressive comebacks. A man standing near me is talking about the gig with his friend, explaining that he doesn't know the band too well but, “I like the whole genre of the Horrors.”

Inwardly I snort as my brain chips in with a facile comeback. “What, 'the past'?”

Haha. But I'm onto something, aren't I?

Just Skyin' around. In the past.

Tonight The Horrors are previewing their third album, Skying, at York Hall in the East End, just down the road from where the band lived while putting together the first album and making waves with their bird's nest hairdos, polka dot waistcoats and hanging-by-a-thread 20-minute live shows. Given that singer Faris has spent most of the past year working on his excellent girl-group-meets-Joe-Meek side project Cat's Eyes, a vehicle that got him a gig inside the Vatican, playing in Bethnal Green must seem like something of a step back. Although perhaps it's a tradition now, given that the preview show for Primary Colours was at Rich Mix, at the other end of Bethnal Green.

And what a horrible venue. At least at Rich Mix, charmless black box though it is, you could actually hear all the instruments. York Hall, a boxing venue turned leisure centre, is a velvet-curtained, polished-wood space in the typical East End fashion; a hall where drums go to die, or in this case to boom out aimlessly while drowning guitar lines and squashing Faris' baritone voice (which has always been a bit of a weak link when he's not squawking, and apparently he doesn't do squawking any more).

Given the drastic step-change in sound, look and atmosphere that accompanied the second album, I suppose I'd expected another reinvention. For a start they look pretty similar, if even more subdued and grungy, with shapeless black sweaters and leather macs hanging limply, while Josh's trademark huge black hair now drips over his face like '90s oil slick. They remain one of the best looking bands around, regardless – a band who you believe are a band, who you couldn't miss if you walked past them waiting for a bus at Liverpool Street or buying milk in Sainsbury's Whitechapel (I can confirm).

So that's what they look like, far away on that raised stage, but what does it sound like? If you've heard the new single 'Still Life' you may have noticed people tentatively throwing the B-word out there. I regret to inform you, they may have a point. The opening bars of the first song 'Changing the Rain' kick in, all booming and chunky. “Fuck,” I say to Sam. “It's not even baggy, it's the fucking Charlatans.”

Wait up!

Let's thrash this out. I've come too far with the Horrors just to abandon them when they have their Be Here Now moment (this was the first reference that sprang to mind when I heard the brass outro to 'Still Life'). We've established that the Horrors' genre is essentially 'The Past'; this is where all their ideas and inspirations come from. I have nothing against this in principle, even if we've been culturally conditioned to demand more! newer! faster! at all times, an attitude that's crying out for political and economic critique, obviously. (I've been meaning to write about this for some time re: the various discussions triggered by Simon Reynolds' latest book, Retromania, but that will have to wait for today.) But, as I mentioned regarding Primary Colours back in 2009, scouring the past for musical ideas is one thing if you select garage rock, let's say, and stick to it. But if you then choose something else – post-punk and kraut, or My Bloody Valentine – then it can seem arbitrary, as if you're shopping for influences. The new material makes me suspicious that this is in fact the case with the Horrors. First they gave us Nuggets of flaming garage primitivism, then it was dazzling man-machine post-punkism, and now apparently they've parked up in the '90s to see what's ripe for the pilfering on the shelves of baggy, shoegaze, grunge and (truly) early Britpop. At this rate their fourth album will sound like LCD Soundsystem and their fifth will be approximately contemporary.

To wit, one of the final new songs they play (which may be titled 'Endless Blue') even sounds like 'My Iron Lung', big and grungy but with an unmistakably wan, British edge. Of course, it may sound nothing like that on the record, but the miserable sound quality contaminates all the new stuff to appear muddy and heavyweight, with none of the pristine amphetamine sharpness of the second album – even 'Sea Within A Sea', easily one of their best and weirdest songs, sounds slightly turgid.

Elsewhere they've kept on plenty of the Kevin Shields guitar flavours but new ingredients include – yes – a bit of Simple Minds, plus a definite '80s 4AD quality in the clever combination of density and dreamy lightness. But again, who knows what subtleties might come through on the album, because you can't actually hear it in here. They play absolutely nothing from the first album, which is no surprise but makes for a pretty static experience visually, with Faris not venturing anywhere near the crowd or embarking on his usual disruptive prowling antics.

I'm still not sure what to make of it. Buoyed by the critical reception to Primary Colours, it would seem the Horrors have moved further towards sleek, smooth, big-venue alt.rock for grown-ups. But if they wanna play with the big boys, they're gonna have to deliver the tunes, and I can't hear a 'Losing My Religion' in this set.

Three from Lefse Records: Algodon Egipcio, A Classic Education, How To Dress Well

2011-06-15T00:53:00.000+01:00

A few bits coming up on Helium Raven:

An interview with Italian noir-pop newcomers Husband

Blondes live at CAMP and Beaty Heart live at White Heat

New albums from Julian Lynch and The People's Temple

My verdict on Nero's Dubstep Symphony for the BBC

But something else for now, looking at an interesting label you may or may not know much about: Lefse Records. I haven't worked out if the name of the imprint is a reference to the old-school Norwegian snack food (check it out), but it's run by a guy called Matt Halvorsen, which is most definitely a Scandi surname. I'm more intrigued by their odd little roster, which includes Neon Indian, Fair Ohs, Ganglians and How To Dress Well among others.

Other less exposed artists include Algodon Egipcio ('Egyptian Cotton'), a Venezuelan bedroom musician making summer-hazed, beer-goggled, echo-chambered pop with shades of Atlas Sound, Surfer Blood, Panda Bear and Girls. Okay, that flavour's been done to death in the past 18 months, but it sounds at least twice as good sung in Spanish and it's all somehow laid on thicker and creamier and denser and kind of speckled and sparkling. I'm going to call it Tapioca Pop, why not. His album La Lucha Constante ('The Constant Struggle') is a pleasingly coherent and warming little thing for sweaty June nights such as this.

My next favourite so far is the Italian band A Classic Education, recommended to me by their kind countryfolk Husband. I get the impression they're quite the elder statesmen of Italy's indie kingdom but like the vast majority of European bands they don't seem to have impacted on the consciousness of our navel-gazing isle, despite being quite radio friendly, I think. Actually I need to stop saying radio-friendly - when you've been listening to Gloss Drop all week your radio-friendly-radar gets pushed well out of whack. But A Classic Education have a lovely '80s indie scratchiness overlaid onto some quite straightforward retro melodies that might appeal to you if you ever liked Modest Mouse or even Okkervil River or something (it seems they've supported both). Personally I never enjoyed either of those bands but I like A.C.E. from a retro-pop perspective, as someone who adores Luna, Galaxie 500, Orange Juice, and now Cat's Eyes... simple stuff but so tastefully produced. If Algodon Egipcio is Tapioca Pop then maybe this is Milk Bottle Pop? Before Maggie stole it, of course:

A Classic Education seen here in a weak metaphor

They have a six-track EP called Hey There Stranger, but I think there might be more out there through Italian labels.

Finally an artist whose had a fair bit of exposure now, but I'd like to mention How To Dress Well because, erm, I just like it loads. It's all a bit du jour with the lo-fi dream-dub production and indie-meets-R&B vox, sure, but Tom Krell projects that strange and ambivalent mood that I find so appealing both in the hypnagogia (sorry) of Sun Araw and Hype Williams and in the dubsteppy mournfulness of Burial or Holy Other. Nothing is simple here, beginnings are endings, we move sideways through the songs catching half-remembered hooks and budget versions of the hip-hop staples - the razor-sharp compressed handclap is reduced to, well, just a guy clapping. I love the fact that there's no element of kitsch to be found - it's an honest appreciation of R&B that reminds me of the excellent (though sporadic) clubnight So Bones at The Nest in Dalston, where the music policy is like an anti-Guilty Pleasures of the best R&B, hip hop, chopped and screwed etc. If I had to choose a foodstuff for this type of pop I would go for Extra Thick Vanilla Shake Pop. The kind that's too thick to get through the straw without giving yourself brain-freeze.

This track, 'Decisions', is far too short and has a beautiful video.

So yeah, definitely looking forward to hearing more from this Sacramento-based label. Sometimes you can forget how brilliant labels can be as curators and exhibitors rather than companies.

No smoke, no mirrors: Katy B live at Koko

2011-06-01T21:54:00.000+01:00

First published in Loud And Quiet

Katy B at Koko, London
12th May 2011

There was a time in Popworld when a silk bomber jacket and a pasting of Juicy Tubes lip gloss counted as ‘making an effort’ – think back to that classic wave of early Noughties combat-trousered lady-pop, the am-I-bothered cool of Miss Dynamite, All Saints and early Sugababes. Fast forward 10 years and prosthetic face humps and a foghorn voice are just the start of a very, very long checklist for the new breed of starlets who think Gaga was the first person to draw a bloody lightning bolt on her face.

Sigh. And yet here we have Katy B, a pop star who clearly did not receive that memo. And here we are at her first headline tour of the UK, squeezed into a sold-out Koko crowd (about 50/50 male to female) who can only be described as ‘up for it’, watching her bounce around on stage in silk bomber jacket and curls, effortlessly trailing dust in Jessie J’s airbrushed-to-all-hell face.

And effortless is the operative word with the Princess of Rinse and her youthful pop swagger. Her voice – so girlish, so untroubled – nails every note with unforced finesse while she slides stage right to stage left, serving up her already-formidable back catalogue of hits: ‘Perfect Stranger’ (live version above), ‘Broken Record’, ‘Lights On’, ‘Katy On A Mission’. Saxophone and trumpet provide jazzy punctuation to one side while a drummer and DJ provide the beats – it’s such a basic set-up you could barely call it a stage show. No smoke or mirrors, no wigs or pyrotechnic corsetry, no self-help “love yourself” bullshit or patronising motivational pep-talks. Just that effervescent voice trilling about boys she wants to dance with and beats she wants to dance to.

And it just works. Ignoring that checklist, Katy B has hewn together her own authentic pop formula from the echoes of the club, fragments of UK funky rhythms and big fat dubstep, touting chart-ready bangers to pop-pickers who just want the songs and not the rest of the wannabe crap and the Autotune and meat dresses and crocodile tears. I wish her Gagazillions of global mega-stardom, sure, but for now, can we keep her? Can we?

Multiple-Bank-Holiday-Madness: Summer daze with Dananananaykroyd (srsly)

2011-05-24T23:12:00.000+01:00

It's like pop and punk, together! No, not pop-punk. Or punk-pop. It's fight pop, apparently.

I simply cannot believe that I like this record. Not just like, actively fucking love. I had to give a mark out 10 for L&Q but it's very difficult to do that at the best of times, and with the new Dananananaykroyd album, boringly titled There Is A Way, I ended up in all kinds of brain squiggles about it. I love it, but is it really "good"? I s'pose this is the problem that lies at the rotten heart of music criticism. A problem you learn to ignore.

Maybe because there's a certain amount of guilty pleasure in listening to an album so gleeful, so ridiculous, so summery - attributes I normally despise in music, especially from a chirpy guitar-wielding band who've opted for precision radio-friendliness on a record that's not gonna be on the radio much. I can't explain it! Except I love it! Most people would think that was perfectly okay. To my post-gradu-addled critical theory brain it's almost vertiginous.

But I promise you. If you think this is the sort of thing you don't like, you might be wrong. Go on, have a sniff. (Works best on about the fifth listen.)

First published in Loud And Quiet

Dananananaykroyd
There Is A Way
Out on Pizza College, 13th June

Likely the only “fight-pop Glasgow six-piece” in history, Dananananaykroyd roped in Slipknot producer Ross Robinson for knob-twiddling duties on their follow-up to 2009's Hey Everyone! – not an obvious choice, you'd think, but the breakneck thrashiness and razor-sharp clarity of these 11 tracks recall none other than hardcore squealers The Blood Brothers, another Robinson-produced band.

Dananananaykroyd carefully pair that heaviness with contagious melodies and arch lyricisms (“A spider's corpse is carried away by ants/Like voluntary coroners”) for a regionally-accented anti-pop much in the vein of Future of the Left. Stand-out tracks include 'Think and Feel', a ridiculous slice of accelerated punk funk with a dash of B-52s oddballsiness, immediately followed by super-bouncy would-be radio hit 'Muscle Memory'. Best consumed at full volume through knackered car door speakers, rampaging down to the seafront with the windows down: a total summer-gasm of a record.

"Like a red star/ Like a bruised scar": EMA's deconstructed grunge

2011-05-23T12:47:00.000+01:00

EMA is Erika M. Anderson, formerly of Gowns. The other week she played the Macbeth in London and shot an arrow through my grunger girl heart. There's something so simple and fresh about her record, Past Life Martyred Saints, despite its constituent parts being mined from other genres - lo-fi, riot grrrl, grunge, folk, noise - that it made me want to grab my guitar. Not many records I like at the moment can say that. I'm feeling a rock revival coming on (might be limited to one bedroom in N5).

This is the single, 'California', and although it's pretty different to the rest of the album it's a hell of a calling card. Below is my live review for L&Q.

First published in Loud And Quiet

EMA at the Macbeth, London
11th May 2011

Seventy-two inches of bleached-blonde, bourbon-soaked, stung-lipped American Woman lopes on stage in hotpants and grabs a star-covered guitar. Erika M. Anderson, wearing a necklace bearing her alias EMA, ain’t too easily ignored. Formerly of Gowns, the cult drone rock duo that imploded at the end of 2009, EMA tonight plays through most of Past Life Martyred Saints, a debut of deconstructed grunge that places her bold-but-fragile voice at the eye of the storm, circled by drawn-out riffs and warped desert rock.

Stripped of the record’s extensive multi-tracking and distortion, that voice takes on a different character, somehow more vulnerable, like a runaway teen with too many tall tales and battle scars. Between songs she jokes with us, slurring her words as she snaps on her “showtime suspenders” (patterned with piano keys), but it's a clownish façade that slips once the guitar kicks in and she's spitting her stories of high school and violence and bluebirds and the Viking funeral ships that bear her ancestors.

Closing with 'California', an astonishing ode to the state that “made me boring”, she pulls the mic lead round her neck like a noose and raises two fingers on her right hand: the all-American ambassador, armed with religious blessings and a gun. We're not so much her audience as her battle casualties, joyously martyred to serrated edge rock and roll.

Sit Down. Stand Up. Red Stripe: Gigs are sometimes the worst way to hear music

2011-05-22T23:09:00.000+01:00

Last month I wrote about the Halls gig at the Old Blue Last for L&Q, and felt kinda bad about having to conclude that it was mediocre. Essentially, I thought they'd done the music a disservice by failing to turn their bedroom producer fare into any kind of live show. I'm seeing them again tomorrow, same place (according to the line-up that's been floating around), supporting Beat Connection and the rather good Entrepreneurs. If bands ever took advice from sideline snipers and blather-boxes like myself then I'd expect them to rock up with some freshly-honed stage moves and stunning visuals at the very least; ideally they'd make their entrance from the door of a 35 ft mirror ball lemon. But somehow I think this will not be the case.

Last night, at the other end of the synth-dude spectrum, I caught Emeralds at Village Underground. This arpeggio-humping synth/ambient/drone trio came to my attention last year with their album Does It Look Like I'm Here (s'on Spotify), but they've been around for a few years and apparently have about 40 releases behind them on various small labels, including Thurston Moore's Ecstatic Peace imprint. So they're a little more established than Halls, shall we say. But how much better was the live show? Well, there were no laptops involved (that I could see) and they had wisely set up the synths side-on to the audience so that we could seem them pressing stuff, a bit. And they have a guitarist! He sways around in a post-rock sorta way.

All the same, I don't think more than a handful of people could have been described as 'engrossed' in the Emeralds live experience. This is not to say that there's anything wrong with it - at the very least it's cool to see how such complex, textured tracks are brought to life through the beating heart of analogue - but it makes me wonder about the limitations of the standard gig format. When Brian Eno patented his Ambient music it was all about creating sounds that could happily exist in the background, while the listener splits her attention with something else. Likewise when you're listening to a DJ in club surroundings you're free to dance and chat and move around without looking over to the booth (unless you're one of those creepy booth-snoopers with your eyes fixed on the decks. Weirdo).

And on and on - so much music is designed as part of an overall experience, not as the experience itself. Like in ballet or dance where music is just one of the required elements. Or in many non-Western musical traditions where participation is expected and there's no performer-audience divide. Or, in fact, in its recorded state as the soundtrack to your day. Music doesn't need to be 'Ambient' to be literally 'ambient' - how much time do you spend listening to music while doing nothing else? Most of my listening happens while I'm getting on with other things.

So when it comes to the music of Emeralds, or even Halls, I just wonder if its anti-flamboyance, evolving textures and slow-burn dynamics wouldn't be better served in a less straightforward 'gig' situation. If there's nothing to look at, why are we all facing the same way? Are there other ways of presenting live music that are better suited to the actual sounds being made? By way of example, a couple of memorable gigs: Yo La Tengo at the Royal Festival Hall, providing a soundtrack to a '70s French documentary about marine life. Lucky Dragons at the Scala, handing out homemade electronic instruments to the audience. Both were totally engrossing and gave the audience a sense of purpose and belonging, as though it really mattered that we were there, creating an atmosphere together (ergh, what a hippy I'm becoming). But without that, we risk reducing the gig to something functional and replicable, a simple product to be touted now that CDs are virtually worthless.

Wow, downer post. I'll dish up some happy clappy shit next time!

Normal service resumes shortly

2011-05-15T15:04:00.001+01:00

Public Service Announcement:
A month of academic toil is now behind me, so expect normal blogging service again within days, if not hours.

COMING UP!!!

EMA's deconstructed grunge is like an arrow to my heart

A raucous and unexpectedly addictive comeback from Dananananaykroyd

Popping my Richie Hawtin cherry at the Mute-curated day of the Short Circuit festival

The effortless pop magic of First Lady of Rinse Katy B

Gatekeeper and Laurel Halo soundtrack the half-seen horror vids of my unsupervised childhood

And many many many more exciting things, probably from the worlds of 'post-dubstep' and 'hypnayawnic pop' and 'offensive mainstream pop I feel the need to lash out at', among others.

Departures

2011-04-26T21:19:00.000+01:00

July 3rd 1957- April 25th 2011

By complete coincidence, I put the

wrong t-shirt in my bag today.

It was my X-Ray Spex t-shirt.

Some people say little girls should be seen and not heard...

Digital Love: Extended thoughts on Record Store Day

2011-04-17T11:57:00.000+01:00

The thing about record shops* is that they aren’t actually any fun. The old Rough Trade in Covent Garden was good for 20 minutes of circling the staircase and ‘scuse-me-pleasing round the imaginatively classified collection (by country or genre or era, or just ‘The Fall’).

But I can’t say I ever formed a band there, or got a date, or even had anything recommended to me. Rough Trade East is no better – the staff seem polite enough but there’s usually silence in the racks, with that day’s chosen record playing in the background. There used to be these noticeboards near the front with Bassist Wanted messages and houseshares available and unglamorous record label internships on offer, but then the boards got moved to the back and forgotten about. There’s a good range of music books and magazines, which is helpful now that Borders has closed, although I don’t suppose you’re allowed to read them while you have a coffee at the front. (There is actually a by-law in Shoreditch requiring all shopfloors over a certain square footage to operate a Gaggia.)

Oh, the records. Well, it’s nice to browse. Most of the records I want are at least £3 more in Rough Trade than I would pay at Fopp or online, so obviously I don’t do my main music shopping there. Why should I? It’s a business, not a bloody charity. The artist gets a piss-poor amount either way. No, what record shops are really good for is rarities – vinyl, cassettes, special editions, bonus CDs, posters, badges, Buddha machines, signed copies, instore gigs and exclusive playbacks. This is obvious when you see that the busiest day of the year – Record Store Day, on this very Saturday – draws huge crowds with the tantalising promise of super-limited edition vinyl (in some cases so limited that there aren’t any. Oops). They aren’t there to pay £11.99 for the latest Panda Bear CD.

You have to understand that I have zero emotional attachment to music as a physical object (with the exception of guitars I guess). I like vinyl as a novelty item – it’s fun and I used to enjoy cueing up Dylan and Baez on my dad’s record player, which I hauled into my own bedroom aged 14. I got into cherry-picking odd 7” or 12” records from charity shops or HMV, often ones with unusual packaging or just cheapo bits and pieces – I’ve got a Guns n’ Roses 7” on orange vinyl if you’re making offers, and some scratchy Lenny Kravitz, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd; all the junk shop perennials.

But the record player would skip when I walked across the room, and on the whole vinyl was an expensive hobby – there were only a couple of proper record shops within an hour’s drive of my house. So I mostly stuck to CDs, half of which were burned from friends’ collections, song names scrawled in biro on the covers. The entire collection got ripped to computer for efficiency when I was about 15, filing everything alongside my latest Napster downloads, which were themselves a labour of love at 56kbps. I remember trying to hear The Smiths for the first time (being without an older bro/sis/neighbour to mentor me) and hogging the phone line overnight for a pathetically low-bitrate MP3 of ‘The Boy With A Thorn In His Side’ – a disastrous choice which delayed my love of The Smiths for another three years.

This guy had too many records. Whaddya know.

And you know what? CDs get in the way. CDs are just stuff that you buy. They’re not musty and organic and papery like vinyl. They’re plastic and they shatter and wobble and the liner notes get creased and ripped if you slide them in too quickly. So even if you have a massive record collection you end up playing them through your computer, right? Because you probably also have an MP3 player. If all your music is on your hard drive and on your iPod, do you really need to have shelves and shelves of plastic? Is it to congratulate yourself on how much you love music? Or to prove that to anyone who steps into your living room?

I'm not advocating giving up physical records for shitty low-quality MP3s, YouTube rips and Spotify Mobile, however. One of the main sticking points with my desire to abandon plastic record collections is the continuing tyranny of Apple software and hardware, a development that has profoundly shaped the last 10 years of music listening and buying and shafted everyone except Steve Jobs & Pals in the process. The rise of the iPod meant the rise of poor quality listening, because Apple imposed a lockout on decent quality files (ie, WAV), forcing users to adopt the mediocre AAC file quality. Not bad for listening on the street, but not something you want to convert your whole collection into. And what happens when Apple eventually phases out the iPod?

It would be great if the majority of our listening was 320k MP3 and lossless formats like FLAC. The fantastic online shop Boomkat regularly offers a choice between MP3 and FLAC on its download products, with a price difference of a couple of pounds at most. This is presumably to cater for the DJs and bedroom producer types who also use Boomkat for its extensive vinyl offerings, as MP3 files are noticeably rubbish once you put them through a set if Funktion Ones. And that’s great – if you’re a DJ playing out then vinyl and CD will often beat digital for quality. On the other hand, plenty of DJs and live electronic musicians now do completely digital sets – not iPod sets, but high quality WAV/MP3 files played through Traktor or similar DJing software. (Boomkat also offers an incredible wealth of knowledge at your fingertips, with extensive reviews and contextualisations for every release as well as audio previews. It's rad.)

So it seems to me that shops like Phonica and Sounds of the Universe, specialising in techno, house, jazz, funk and related dancefloor-orientated music, are currently more vital than indie peers like Rough Trade and Sister Ray. If playing records loud in a dark room is integral to the music itself, then physical records will remain important for a long time. The punters aren’t just collectors, they’re DJs making their own living off those records. But when the record stands as an inert signifier of a possible live show – as it does for a rock band – then owning the vinyl seems a little less important.

There are a number of strands branching off from each of these thoughts – in many ways this is the issue that underlies all music (and music writing) at present. Ie, What Does The Future Hold?

Who can say, but a final word regarding Sister Ray’s Phil Barton, who recently told the Quietus: “Increasingly we’re moving out of what I call ‘the dance market’, or what was the dance market, because there is no market – so there’s no point in stocking house records anymore, because nobody buys them.”

The man who runs one of the biggest and supposedly best record shops in the country says nobody is buying house records. Dude, if they’re even bothering to go to a shop for their vinyl anymore, they’ll be at Phonica. EVERYONE is buying house records.

*For they are shops! Not stores!

JUDAS: You can't 'go electric' if you're already a cyborg

2011-04-15T21:47:00.000+01:00

Pushing envelopes harder than Postman Pat

I'm going to briefly break from the Gaga moratorium imposed on this blog generally to comment on NME's initial reaction to 'Judas', which was released to the world in a shower of binary code and retweets this afternoon.

"[I]ts genius (and we are going to very tentatively use the word 'genius', in the sense that we believe pop music at its best is a genius medium) is that it really doesn't sound like Gaga in her comfort zone at all. [...] The breakdown has elements of the hardest techno and the boingiest dubstep, yet the chorus is so instantly pure-pop unforgettable that it just might – might – be even better than 'Bad Romance'."

I'm sorry to do this to you, but let's just focus on this line. To even try to come to terms with the 'phenomenon' that is Lady Gaga is beyond the scope of this blog and my own sanity. Suffice to say I was given a promo copy of The Fame in the antediluvian closing days of 2008 - I hated it, laughed at the lyrics, binned it and waited for her to go away.

I have never claimed to be a weathervane of pop.

But again: "The breakdown has elements of the hardest techno and the boingiest dubstep".

Here's the track. You can skip to the breakdown at 2m 40s if you wish.
Judas by gagadaily

Yup. So in the spirit of SHARING MUSIC AND LOVE, here's some boner-fide-ay hard techno for NME's Dan Martin to swivel on: To your publication's second trollworthy blog of the week, sir! I'm not going to link to either of them because Air France, the current banner ad on NME's site, would then have WON this little tit for tat.

Mote017 :: Marcel Fengler - Thwack by Mote-Evolver

Gaga moratorium now reinstalled.

The Radiophonic Rediscovery of Daphne Oram

2011-04-05T21:35:00.000+01:00

Daphne Oram from Setla Productions on Vimeo

Electronic music can seem a strange and distant world, populated by equally strange and distant individuals, including the man-machine (Kraftwerk), the teenage prodigy (Aphex Twin), the defiant non-musician (Eno), the nutty professor (Xenakis) and all manner of socially awkward nerds and fruit loops.

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was one such eccentric, and she remains remarkable not only for her lifetime of unique work, which was all but forgotten until recently, but also for her unusual status in electronic music as a Daphne and not a Dave.

In 1942, the Wiltshire-born teenager turned down a place at the Royal College of Music to become a studio engineer at the BBC, where she became obsessed with the emergent possibilities of electronic and synthesised sounds. Over the next 15 years, she experimented at the forefront of sound technology, working with tape recorders, sine wave oscillators and any electronic equipment she could find.

Oram apparently struggled to convince the BBC of the value of her work, and would painstakingly set up a makeshift studio after broadcasting had finished each night, before taking it all apart again before morning. Finally, in 1958, the BBC saw the potential of this newfangled electronic musicalia and made Oram the director of a pioneering new department at the corporation – the Radiophonic Workshop.

Read the rest of this blog over here...

The Wire Salon on Daphne Oram is on Thursday 7th April
Cafe Oto, E8 3DL, London, 8pm, £4 on the door

Cults: Daydream pop with a heart of darkness

2011-03-31T23:12:00.006+01:00

Cuter than you.

First published in Loud And Quiet

Jim Jones had a band named after him and so did Charles Manson. The exploits of Anton Newcombe and Brian Warner respectively have tended towards the eccentric aesthetic of both those terrifying cult leaders, if not to the same grisly extent. So you'd expect Cults, the Californian two-piece of Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin, to be ploughing a similarly deranged furrow of dark music for dark people.

Erm, wrong. One listen to 'Go Outside', the song that brought Cults to the attention of Gorilla vs Bear and Pitchfork this time last year, and you'll know that West Coast sunshine is embedded in the bones of this couple, who met while studying film in New York. Xylophones sparkle, a girlish voice cries out for you to get up and live your life. Except – just who is that grainy voice in the background, warning you that living is treacherous? Oh yeah, it's Jim Jones.

“We just casually chucked it on the front of 'Go Outside' one day, and then we ended up writing the lyrics. He says death is not a fearful thing, it's living that's treacherous, and sometimes everyone feels that way,” they explain.

Cults are in London playing one of their first UK shows. In the back room at The Lexington, Madeline and Brian (real name Ryan) are brimming over with the eloquence of young Californians who know their Antonioni from their elbow. Though Cults got together little more than a year ago, they're preparing for a big U.S. tour before the debut album comes out on In The Name Of in May. Has their rapid ascent been damaging to the band's evolution?

“It's hard adjusting to,” says Madeline. “For a year of playing shows we're confident enough,” adds Brian. “It's just better stepping up, better to take risks.”

For a while they tried to avoid the internet hype-mill with a hard-to-Google name and no MySpace page, but their reticence only fed the insatiable hunger of the indie blogosphere, perversely creating even more buzz around a band who have released just three songs. “When all that happened we had a bunch of songs we could have put out,” explains Brian. “But we realised instead of letting it eat itself alive, we should just take a break, become a band, play shows and focus on touring.”

Unsure of what Cults was even going to be, they ignored the press and focused on putting a band together, which now includes Madeline's brother (lying on the sofa next to us, trying to get some shut-eye) as well as old friends and even Madeline's mum as manager. “We were film school students, not musicians, so we think about our band as more of an art project. When we write songs we're thinking more cinematically about them than like, y'know, jamming them out,” says Brian. “And we try to translate that visually too rather than just being the dudes in the band that show up in the flannels and rock out,” he laughs, saying that they are so steeped in film they're too afraid to make a video.

Last year a glossy promo for 'Go Outside', featuring James Franco's brother and Julia Roberts' niece, popped up on MTV as part of a creative project run by the music channel. Verdict? “Off the record?” asks Brian. “It's exactly what we expected it would be,” Madeline says. For an MTV production with celebrities in it, you mean? “Exactly!”

But treating Cults as a simple artistic outlet gives the songs a breezy, vivacious quality that more single-minded musicians might struggle to create. Light and dark elements freely interweave as Madeline sings about wanting to live life, not “stay inside and sleep the light away.” 'Go Outside' is about “battling against yourself, being lazy, being a procrastinator, and the fear of growing up,” says Brian. “Madeline and I would be graduating from college now – that's the mindset we were in while making the record, like, if this doesn't work out we're going back to school!”

You could always join a cult, of course. What'll it be? “I guess I'd be a Scientologist, 'cos that'd mean I had a lot of money,” laughs Madeline. Brian opts for Heaven's Gate, “just 'cos it's a San Diego cult. My friend was neighbours with them.”

“And they ate all the food that was my favourite,” Madeline offers. “They had like, vanilla pudding, Doritos...” So you'd join on the basis of the menu? “Yeah!”

“I wouldn't wanna be in any cult that actually murdered someone,” Brian adds. “They were just kinda peaceful freaks that went over the edge.” They both laugh, long black hair falling into their eyes.

Peanut butter pop: Nodzzz live in Dalston

2011-03-31T23:05:00.003+01:00

Nodzzz at The Victoria, Dalston

12th March

First published in Loud and Quiet

“I don't wanna! Smoke marijuana! I just wanna get high....on another drug!” American twee may be louder than British twee, it may have retro guitars in Formica colours and crashy, clashy, garage stylings, but as Forrest Gump might've said, twee is as twee does.
And talking of Gump, Nodzzz singer and guitarist Anthony Atlas has really committed to those high-waisted trousers, paired splendidly with check shirt and dorky specs. They say he was voted 'Most Likely to Succeed' in his 1968 high school yearbook. Hot!

More to the point, Nodzzz have also committed to that niche brand of sub-two-minute lo-fi-pop-ism plied by bands like Grass Widow and tour buddies The Mantles (who are “delirious” with jet lag but excellent tonight), with a handful of songs about girls, smoking, karaoke and their hometown San Francisco.

Other discernible influences come from the early years of punk rather than '60s garage rock – the squareness of Jonathan Richman meets the playing-dumb of Ramones, Buzzcocks or Television Personalities – with lightweight, off-key solos and melodies as weak as diluted orange squash. How much of this punk-pop finger food you can stomach will depend on your taste for bite-size treats and quirky flavours. See also: Reese's Pieces.

The return of PJ Harvey: Angel of Death

2011-03-31T22:49:00.006+01:00

PJ Harvey at the Troxy
27 February 2011

First published in Loud and Quiet

An Edwardian angel of death glides onto the Troxy stage, feather headdress bobbing, widow’s weeds swishing, leather tightly binding a bird-like chest. PJ Harvey's captive audience whips itself into a frenzy of earnest fandom at odds with the singer's sombre exterior. “Polly, you look wonderful!” they burst out, ejaculations met with disapproving shushes from embarrassed grown-ups.

And grown-up is the tone of the evening. Harvey tackles the none-more-serious topics of war and nationhood on her acclaimed new record, Let England Shake, which makes up the bulk of tonight's set. Her new higher register marries well with the thorny subject matter as she wavers between control and hysteria like a rock & roll Hecuba, twisted and vulnerable.

But you'd think wearing half a bird of prey as a hat while strumming an autoharp in an East End bingo hall would suggest a playful sense of theatricality, perhaps? Nope, we get barely a word. Harvey's static, almost functional performance and the makeshift atmosphere of the Troxy (Sunday afternoon's roast dinner is wafting round) weaken the emotional punch, with the exception of 'England', a haunting hymn to a nation that never really existed.

Arbeit Macht Frei with Fleet Foxes

2011-03-05T21:53:00.004Z

This new Fleet Foxes track is really very beautiful and it's even getting some mainstream radio play. I think I prefer Local Natives in terms of earnest, flannel-shirted, West Coast adult-pop, but I'll give props to FF for sheer skill, musicianship and whatnot. Sometimes there are bands who you can't love, but you can easily admire. On this side of the pond I might place Elbow in that niche.

But hear this: I have some serious grievances with those lyrics, poetic as they are. The sentiment of 'Helplessness Blues' - unless I have massively misconstrued this - comes from the mind of a person so blindly privileged, so steeped in lazy, developed world luxuries and Oxfam-donating platitudes that it would be offensive even to a working class American, let alone one of the world's billion people living on less than a dollar a day.

The idea that anyone would want to escape a life of writing smart arse love songs and touring the world in order to spend their days doing manual fucking labour in an apple orchard while their girlfriend waits tables is so embarrassingly facetious, so idiotically sexist, so creepily Soviet, in fact so positively fucking Stalinist that I can barely believe they recorded it.

No matter how insignificant and meaningless you feel your life is, as you wander round downtown Seattle/Montreal/Brooklyn/Hackney drinking Americanos and sighing as you open your MacBook Pro for yet another grinding 5-hour day of checking Twitter and pissing around on Final Cut, let's GET A GRIP HERE PEOPLE. You are not picking rubbish off a poisonous dump. You are not mining koltan in the Congo. You are not pulling turnips out of a frozen field in East Anglia, you are not even working in a bloody supermarket or driving a bus or anything that might be considered a PROPER NORMAL JOB with sick pay and benefits - and if you really, really want to work on an orchard you can fly off to have a HOLIDAY on a FARM!

Life isn't always easy, but let's not glamorise fruit-picking, waitressing or arthritis in old age as though it's somehow the more noble and honest choice. That way lies the labour camp, my friend. Wow, I sound like a fucking neocon technocrat here. Ah well, I'll risk it.

Please, have I missed the point? Is there a whole level of irony that has passed me by? I'm more than willing to step off my soapbox if presented with the evidence. Take a listen.

"If I had an orchard
I'd work til I'm raw
If I had an orchard
I'd work til I'm sore
And you would wait tables and soon run the store"

OMG! with S.C.U.M., live at The Garage

2011-03-05T21:20:00.005Z

S.C.U.M.
Upstairs at the Garage
11 February 2011

First published in Loud And Quiet. FYI, I didn't want to bring up the girlfriend thing, but it just couldn't be ignored. And then I saw our humble frontman's bashful guest appearance on OMG and wished I'd actually got my claws out.

With high-waisted wide trousers and spivvish greasy locks, Tom from S.C.U.M. is like Christmas-come-early for uninspired Topman designers. No wonder he's attracted a certain 'celeb' girlfriend, whose 100,000 Twitter followers must be delighted to receive daily photo updates of their budding love story.

Is that unfair? I wish I could say so, but tonight S.C.U.M. are thoroughly failing to live up to their early potential, when they took their performance cues from the alienation-as-spectacle style of Suicide or ATR, and also failing to sound anywhere near as good as they do on record.

Having been on the scene a couple of years they've now smoothed off the abrasive noisenik prickliness of their early shows, back when they were part of a mini-zeitgeist of London bands associated with Offset festival, like O Children and the late Ipso Facto.

Heck, this gig is even part of an HMV-sponsored series, Next Big Thing (oh, the irony). Instead we get a performance that's very nearly commercially viable, but all the more boring for it, with the detail and atmosphere of the recorded material impossible to discern in this sterile mishmash of New Wave synth and industrial rhythms, while Tom's almost vaudeville vocals seem lost in the mix entirely.

\\\ Happy Valentine's ///

2011-02-14T01:19:00.001Z

OUT NOW >

Downbeats: Visions of Trees live (from Loud And Quiet)

2011-02-12T22:49:00.005Z

Visions of Trees at XOYO, 6th December 2010

'Tropical pop' is a neat – if kind of crude – tag for those sun-drenched songs built on rippling textures, polyphonic rhythms and 'primitive' percussion (as if played by whooping loin-clothed islanders, maybe – told you it was crude). But over on the shady side of the island, where the vegetation lies in damp tangles rarely brushed by the equatorial sun, a cooler, dreamier kind of 'tropical pop' germinates.

Visions of Trees add a dose of minor-chord industrialism to this darker side of trop-pop, like the twisted steel of a burnt-out propellor plane rusting in the jungle. Without labouring the metaphor any further, the duo carve a downbeat niche from Joni's mournful beats and Sara's R&B-inflected vocals, like the sadface rave of The Knife or Crystal Castles.

Annoyingly, all that ethereal dreaminess falls pancake-flat on stage at XOYO, with the untreated vocals too plain and too high in the mix to chime with the lazy Liz Fraser comparison I'd heard. While the beats are interesting enough, if nowhere near ground-breaking, the show would be more captivating if VoT fucked with the good-girl vocals. There's no denying the potential, but maybe they can't visualise the wood for the – nah, I won't say it...

Charting the Unlistenable, pt. I: Albert Ayler

2011-02-02T08:58:00.005Z

As someone who writes about music, getting tangled up in genre is an obvious occupational hazard (although tell that to the musicians - for some reason genre is a dirty word even for those who blatantly use it to sell their product).

One common reductive argument when faced with the fragmented multiverses of musical styles, rhythms and subcultures is to say that there are two types of music: good music, and bad music. Those who invoke this argument tend to fall into two camps. First, you have the genuinely disinterested muso who will give anything a listen in the hope that it might stimulate his or her sonic receptacles. Second, you have man-on-street who believes his attitude to be very much like that of the muso, but who actually equates 'good' with a sort of layman's canon of historically approved bands: Beatles, Stones, Clash, Joy Division, Smiths, White Stripes and, oddly enough, Daft Punk.

If we want to make an already reductionist argument even more reductive, we could say that the former is the Wire, and the second is Q (in which case we can add Lily Allen to the approved canon).

So I'd like to propose my own answer to a question that has plagued man from ancient times: WAT MUSIC IS GD???

Under the header 'Charting the Unlistenable', I'm gonna post some tracks old and new that occupy the blurred region that you know your parents would call 'unlistenable rubbish', but that you may well call 'genius', or at least, 'unlistenable genius'. I welcome comments and suggestions on this topic.

My first choice is perhaps an obvious one, but it should get the ball rolling nicely: free jazz pioneer, avant garde psychonaut, cosmic voyager and all-round certifiable nutbar Albert Ayler.

This track is taken from Spiritual Unity, the record which brought Ayler to the attention of the variously horrified, bemused and enchanted jazz world. The 30 minutes of crazed free improvisation, where timbre and texture took centre stage in place of melody, harmony or modality, set a new standard for the free jazz school influenced by Ornette Coleman.

How listenable is it on an everyday basis? I think the ideal setting for Ayler is while doing nothing else, preferably in a darkened room for maximum cosmic vibes. Although I have been known to listen to Music Is The Healing Force of the Universe while walking to work on a Sunday morning...

Ayler's take on free jazz was also a huge influence on one Jim Osterberg of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Stooges of course also took their fair share of criticism for being unlistenable trash: squealing guitars recorded in the red, the bark of a tenor sax and Iggy Pop's double-sided voice, leaping from smooth baritone to primal yelps. All I hear is bonafide genius, naturally...

'Ordinary Things': The mutant garage beast grows and grows

2011-01-26T11:51:00.004Z

XXXY, a producer from Manchester, makes the kind of warm'n'glitchy future garage that so brazenly appeals to my senses, as if he's hooked me up to some electrode brain scanning contraption that measures the exact pitches, frequencies, chopped beats and head-nod-ability that I'm genetically programmed to vibe off.

'Ordinary Things' is apparently the b-side to his track 'You Always Start It', already sold out on the Ten Thousand Yen label, but I marginally prefer it to the main event - it's not the most original or groundbreaking of tracks, but somehow it ticks all the boxes to become the quintessential sound of this microgenre. Not that it's formulaic by any means - you'd have to be a chronic neophile to believe that this sound has reached such a tipping point - but it goes where you want it to go, propelled on by a gently modulating chord progression and some seriously funky breaks towards the end.

Car-crash pop: Chillwave is serious business (sort of)

2011-01-25T23:41:00.013Z

In a recent post, I mentioned what I find to be the compulsive-yet-repellent character of the hypnagogic-chill-fi-whatevs-scene, with reference to Hype Williams. Annoyingly, someone from the insanely high-quality Fact mag just wrote a bunch of stuff about HW that congealed many of my thoughts about the band into half a sentence and then went on to say something far more interesting.

Anyway, a couple of other quotes I CTRL-Ced lately have helped me to articulate just what it is about these bands that makes me feel - well, not exactly compelled or repelled, but somehow uneasy.

The first comes from the esteemed yet divisive Simon Reynolds, who wrote a piece for the Village Voice called 'Leave Chillwave Alone'. The title is misleading 'cos it's essentially Reynolds hatin' hard on chillwave for 500 words. But hey:

In "Hardcore Pops Are Fun," from 2006's House Arrest, Ariel Pink provided a kind of hymn/manifesto for this generation's ahistorical omnivorousness: "Pop music is free/For you and me . . . Pop music is wine/It tastes so divine." But he still had a foot in '90s irony ("Hardcore Pops" was actually recorded in 2001). Archness gets burned off completely in the music of those that came after him, replaced by an earnestness that aspires to spirituality.

Reynolds has picked up on the surprisingly irony-free take on New Age sounds, 80s MOR and AM radio drivel we've been hearing over the past couple of years, largely produced by timewarped dudes in stonewash denim.

Where Ariel Pink's music is ironic and arch (often annoying attributes in themselves), his numerous musical disciples have dropped the humour in favour of a more ambiguous attitude, one that's impossible to read: not joking, yet not serious.

Reynolds goes on:

Earnestness is one of the defining attributes of "digimodernist" culture identified by the theorist Alan Kirby—other hallmarks are "onwardness" and "endlessness." On Altered Zones and its constellation of blogs, the flow is relentless: What matters is always the next new name, the latest micro-genre, another MP3 or MediaFire. Artist careers likewise are a continuous drip-drip-drip of releases, a dozen or more per year—there's no reason to edit or hold back, every reason to keep one's name out there.

He points out that where Pitchfork is firmly rooted in a pre-internet conception of music and its industry accoutrements (live shows, albums, reviews and criticism), its sister site Altered Zones is run by a mostly younger generation of bloggers, who tend to see tracks as a steady flow of 3-minute experiences: on and on and on.

Reviews are irrelevant; the critic's job of assessing and archiving is hopelessly out-of-date. Songs are almost impossible to own or play physically (often existing only on cassette or VHS) and disseminated indiscriminately through the infinite reproducers of copy>paste and rightclick>saveas.

Chillwave sounds like the past, but exists only in the present. And when the track ends, it belongs to the past too, making way for the next track from the future. Onward, endless.

Back to that earnestness that aspires to spirituality:

"This reality is twisted, but for me it's really fascinating because seeing past the deranged hypnosis, or merging with it, can also represent our human potential," the experimental musician and hypnagogic hero, James Ferraro, told [David] Keenan [of the Wire magazine] back in 2009. "So it inspires me in that way. KFC, TV et cetera are perfect examples of dark energy temples that alter people's reality in a psychotic way, but it also shows the power of dreams and it is a testament of our ability to plug into our dreams and experience them on Earth."

KFC as a dark energy temple? Personally, feeling lost somewhere in between the P4K and AZ mentalities, my natural assumption is that Ferraro is just dicking around, talking pseudo-spiritual rubbish for the lulz. But I think the truth is he doesn't know - or care - either way. Earnest or ironic, lulz or serious business, the chillwave attitude encompasses everything and nothing.

Tim Burrows from The Quietus goes on:

The attempt to suggest that KFC – an admittedly necessary purchase at various kinds of time-poor/inebriated/frivolous states – has some kind of new age, transformative significance sums up the scene quite well. There is a refusal to look beyond what has been already experienced, a kind of kick back and ignore attitude that, if anything, does not make it unique. It makes it our cultural norm.

I don't have anything against chillwave. I like a lot of it. But as I said, it repels as much it compels me. Car crash pop. Slow motion car-crash pop. Abject slo-mo car-crash pop.

Here's a great video...

Rounding up to move on: James Blake, Hype Williams, Teengirl Fantasy

2011-01-20T13:18:00.008Z

Once again it has been too long since my last post. I am my own worst enemy.

To ease myself back in, here are a few nuggets of audio joy, all of which I have been rinsing this week through my fucking awesome new soundcard. Even with lame Logitech speakers the following tunes sound heavy like a first day period, as Janet Jackson once said.

#1

James Blake, 'Wilhelm's Scream'

[Had to choose a different video as the Radio 1 version is too wide]

This looped refrain has been pulsing through my brain on and off for the past week now, but the real joy is when I get home and stick it on and am reminded of how damn classy and 'mature' the production is. A lot of people seem a bit surprised/confused at the sound of JB's album, which is so sparse it makes the XX sound like Wild Beasts, but after you get over your initial shock at how many moments of pure silence there are, you start to warm up to all the little production treats scattered throughout. Not to mention his voice - one of my favourite games over the past couple of months has been informing people that 'Limit To Your Love' is not a sampled vocal...

Also I have to briefly boast about seeing James Blake at Plan B last Friday, which @Dummymag pointed out was pretty much a 'We were there' moment. Again, the voice is proper spine-tingly live, plus hearing the bass out of the venue's Funktion One's made 'Limit To Your Love' a quite literally visceral experience. Excited to hear that he's planning a residency in February at a church in King's Cross.

# 2

Hype Williams, 'Rescue Dawn'

Yes, yes, I know hipsters were on this 4real like waaay back in 2010 but I haven't blogged for ages, 'kay? So I've been listening to the elusive duo's album (released on De Stijl) for a while now, having been slipped the promo ages ago and utterly failing to act upon it. It's called Find Out What Happens When People Stop Being Polite, And Start Gettin Reel.

Initially the whole concept of Hype Williams made me feel a bit sicky, partly because of the extreme alt.coolness of it all, with its pixellated visuals and anti-aesthetic aesthetic. Strong Dalston vibes emanate throughout, combined with not so much the 3am night bus atmosphere we've had from so many great records of 2008-10, but more a 7am 'oh my God, why am I still awake' feeling, which marries perfectly with the dubious 'hypnagogic pop' label defined by David Keenan of the Wire (hypnagogic meaning the state between awake and asleep). See also, #3 of this post.

Also, something about the warmth of the warped cassette effects, twisted vocals and repetitive infinite loopiness all came together to take me back to being a carsick 7-year-old on the way to Gatwick at sunrise (really). In particular I recall a tape we had in the Renault 21 of Chris Rea's Road to Hell, the cover of which most chillwave bands would kill to have come up with, and which had some sort of profound effect on my developing only-child psyche as it whirred round on its own infinite loop. Listening to the opening track of that album now, I think I get it. It's amazing.

Anyway, Hype Williams' woozy conveyor belt of barely there vocals and distant reverbed drums finally sank in just before Christmas and I learned to accept the fear and love them anyway. I also really enjoy the track names, which sound like placeholder project titles on Logic that they never bothered changing ('Rescue Dawn', 'Rescue Dawn 3', 'Untitled'). It adds to the digital-DIY feel of their of pixellated home videos, which of course works in perfect ironical symmetry with the band name.

#3

Teengirl Fantasy, 'Make The Move'

Yes, I KNOW, I know you've heard them and that 'Cheaters' was Fact mag's top song of 2010, I know all this. But I haven't blogged for a while and I'm seeing them at White Light tomorrow. After being informed that I missed the best show evah at XOYO a few months ago, where they supported Oneohtrix Point Never, I am looking forward to catching up. Sadly Becoming Real has now been demoted to DJ support, when I was expecting a live set of some kind. I dunno, a lot of new artists are having trouble working out how to do show-and-tell with their music now that everyone is a bedroom producer. Do you just bring in loads of musicians and mates to trigger sequencers and hit floor toms? Er, apparently so. But it seems a bit pointless. I applaud James Blake for having found a way round it (i.e. playing piano and singing, with live drums and a bit of looping thrown in).

So Teengirl Fantasy: another 7am 'why am I still awake' album, so much so that it's actually called 7AM. This time I don't feel carsick, just blissed out and over-tired. To me, this kind of beautiful glitchy techy music has a sort of cleansing quality to it, as though all those modulated crackles and stutters are washing out my furred-up insides like ice cubes spiked with bleach, or sugar-free lemonade... am I over-emoting that? Probably. But that's one of the pleasures of dancing about architecture, don't you think?

Enjoy!

What Difference Does It Make?: We can save 6Music, but not our universities

2010-12-08T22:28:00.009Z

A small warning. Some political comments follow.

In a Guardian blog yesterday, Dan Hancox, a writer who's groped the muddy underbelly of politics before, lambasted Britain's music industry elite for sitting on their hands throughout the student-led campaign against education cuts.

He pointed out that the campaign to save BBC 6Music, the digital radio station threatened with closure last year, was backed by dozens, and then hundreds of well-known figures in the industry - Lauren Laverne, Jarvis Cocker, David Bowie, Emily Eavis and more. A huge internet campaign and reams of column inches eventually gained so much momentum that The Man changed his mind and The People got their music back.

The People, in this case, being exactly the population segment you'd also expect to be miffed about enormous cuts to education and the arts: middle-class, indie-loving, media-savvy 18-40 year olds, in Dan's words. So why aren't they standing up for the big picture stuff, which is just as likely to affect them in the long-term as the closure of a radio station?

My guess is this. They are just about media-savvy and educated enough to know that the British government see its citizens as little more than bots, with two functions. Press up and down to pay tax. Press left and right to vote. Game over.

As one of the commenters pointed out, the situation is different in some regards. The 6Music campaign was small, manageable, essentially apolitical. Nearly everyone agreed that the Beeb needed to cut executive and celebrity pay cheques, potentially saving millions, and then nearly everyone was baffled when the corporation choose to bring the axe down on a low-cost, niche radio station that provides a unique service to a small but loyal group of listeners (one that could never be matched by the commercial sector).

So The People made their voice heard, backed by celebs and media-savvy types, and the BBC decided to listen to the licence fee-payers and retain 6Music.

Success! Power to the people! Or is it?

The BBC is essentially publicly funded, as very few people do not have a television. If you have a telly, you have to pay the licence fee. But it is a choice, a service. We are essentially consumers in this transaction (as a horrified Reith turns in his grave). In fact, you don't even have to pay the licence fee to listen to 6Music - you just have to live in the UK.

Education is also publicly funded, largely - a proportion of our tax goes towards it. That proportion may change, but the principle remains the same. But you are not a consumer of government; taxes are mandatory and the way they are spent is chosen on behalf of you as a citizen. You can't cherry pick your service; there is no free market of competing governments from which you select your favourite, red or blue. Democracy involves compromise, essentially. Your vote is counted (press left, press right) and then you can like or lump the results.

Christ. Does that sound right to you? Is that what democracy is all about, in the end? The sacred D-word that took us to Iraq, Afghanistan and back?

Look at the BBC. I know the Beeb is unique because of the way it is funded, I remember the old idents, but come on - it isn't a principality. The licence fee is not a tax, because it's bloody optional. Throw away your TV if you don't like it (I'm simplifying here, but bear with me). And yet, even as consumers, we were able to shout loudly and get things done the way we wanted them done - and save 6Music. We would have paid the licence fee anyway, most of us, yet the BBC listened.

Now compare that with the way the government operates. This government in particular is all about 'choice', it seems. But no one can choose not to pay their taxes. (Well, except Vodafone. And Topshop. And Barclays. And...)

So we're not buying a service here. We are deeply involved in the running of this service as citizens, not consumers. We shouldn't be fobbed off with a sneer or teased with promises, broken promises and backtracking. 'You pays your money, you takes your choice', they shrug. But that is exactly what true democracy should not be.

What happens when a few hundred media bods and a few thousand music fans run an online campaign to save a radio station, mostly via a petition and some celebs mouthing off?

And what happens when hundreds, then thousands of students, school pupils, teachers, parents and ordinary citizens march through the streets, occupy their classrooms, make banners, wave flags, stage flash mobs in high street stores and invade a political party's headquarters?

The BBC ends up looking a hundred times more democratic, open and progressive than the Liberal Democrats, or contemporary British politics, could ever hope to be.

Apparently Jarvis Cocker will be speaking at the demonstration in central London tomorrow, but somehow I don't think David Cameron will be paying much attention. If only someone could persuade Morrissey to lead the troops down Whitehall...

Coming live from a distant subwoofer: Local Natives at the Forum, 23rd Nov 2010

2010-12-01T15:14:00.012Z

From London Student, December 2010

Even avoiding my usual two-for-one cocktail deal up the road, there is just no getting past the fact that the sound quality at one of London's few remaining mid-sized venues is utterly, unforgivably woeful. Think of the bands who have played here this year – Jόnsi, Wolf Parade, Liquid Liquid, Einstürzende Neubauten – and it seems bonkers that the Forum can get away with this half-arsed set-up; a feeble rig aimed straight into the ears of the front row and no further.

Local Natives' particular brand of finely balanced and tightly harmonised indie, like a cheerier Grizzly Bear or Fleet Foxes, is treated with asbestos mittens by the muddifying speakers. Standing in what should be a prime spot, 10 rows back and smack in the middle, the L.A. band's set comes off like listening to their precocious debut, Gorilla Manor, through a single subwoofer.

But! Local Natives are bigger than this sonic set-back. Their amazing too-tidy harmonies and fractured afro-popisms almost crave the shitty sound to make the thing sound like a live performance at all, so tight and polished is their set – but whereas a Grizzly Bear show leaves you open-mouthed at the fidelity to the record, Local Natives reanimate their songs with a welcome dash of vim and vigour.

The band seem genuinely chuffed to be playing their final show of 2010 here in London, where their following has grown exponentially since a tiny gig at Hoxton Bar & Kitchen in January. The unexpected disco dénouement of closer 'Sun Hands' ties up Local Natives' year just so, before they bow out gratefully to a satiated crowd.

Mescaline Hoedown: Jaill at Old Blue Last, 9th Nov 2010

2010-11-26T02:19:00.004Z

From Loud and Quiet's December issue

How are we feeling about guitar rock, people? Were 60 long years enough? Can we plough this furrow every season and still get the full nutritional benefits, or will the yield be measly and blight-ridden? The answer, as the state of Wisconsin pointed out in 2008, is Yes We Can – and three Milwaukee boys in blue jeans are showing The Old Blue Last how, dripping sweat on their guitar pedals and imploring us to bring some green to the merch table after the show.

Kicking off their European tour in London, Jaill demonstrate what a provincial U.S. three-piece (the fourth member got lost in the airmail, it seems) can do with a decade of beers, tokes and psych-rock records. But if they smoke as much as they want us to think they do, the results are something of a surprise: juddering mescaline hoedown numbers (think Black Lips with a splash of Thermals) about real get-up-and-go topics like, um, shooting craps and lovin' their babies.

Jaill's parents might have made homebrew in the bathtub, but these guys just cruised around town looking for the best mini-mart deal on six-packs and Cheez Doodles. A band made in heaven for Sub Pop, who released their album That's How We Burn back in July.

The Boy with the Marling Tattoo: Regrets? I've Had A Few...

2010-11-25T23:23:00.007Z

This week I saw Local Natives play their last show of the year at the Forum. I'll be posting my review of that shortly, but first I'm gonna mention a slightly odd encounter we had on the way home.

I was just saying goodbye to my friend, and as usual we were dawdling near some Tube escalators and getting into a rant, this time about the X-Factor charity single. You'd be surprised how often I get into rants deep in the Underground. Anyway, we were commenting on the Help For Heroes charity when a youngish dude started to interrupt. Usually in this situation it means I have riled or offended a passer-by with my ker-azy pinko politics and am about to get told off for expressing my opinion in the airspace of someone who holds a different one.

But this time it's just a guy, about my age, on his way back from a gig. He asks us if we know who Laura Marling is, and we say we do, and he says we look like we would (I don't know what that means). He'd been to see her that night, on his own, and had been standing right in front of the stage and had lifted his leg up there to reveal to Laura Marling a tattoo, from his ankle to halfway up his calf.

It said Laura Marling. In child-like handwriting, large, with two child-like flowers at each end.

It was not the best tattoo I'd ever seen.

The woman herself saw it and proclaimed him to be "the most chronically weird" fan ever, to which he replied that he was drunk when he got it done. So she told him he was "the coolest" fan ever. Respect to her for acknowledging him. It must be really, really odd when people you've never met ink your name on their body permanently.

So he tells us all this and explains that when he got the tattoo it had been a toss-up between Laura Marling or The Courteneers. "You probably did alright there," I tell him.

"Do you like Laura Marling?" he asks.

"Not especially. She's alright. Not really my kind of music."

"Do you like The Courteneers?"

"Um, no."

"Oh, why not? They're brilliant. Which album do you prefer? [Words to this effect. He natters on about the progression between the first and second albums, to which we can only offer two baffled but amiable expressions] I reckon Liam Fray is one of the best lyric writers there is."

"Really?"

"Don't you think so? Oh come on, he's amazing [more words to this effect]. Well, who do you rate for lyrics then?"

Obviously we go a bit blank at this. Sam chooses wisely, someone who this guy will obviously know.

"Morrissey?"

The dude is in general agreement but still rates Liam Fray up there with Moz. At this point I feel like there is not a lot I can add to the debate. He's incredibly friendly and obviously a very nice lad, if disconcertingly impulsive. He goes for the inevitable high-five and wishes us all the best, disappearing towards the Victoria line.

I can't imagine Laura Marling's fans are usually the type who'd get band tattoos done, so in a way the whole story pleases me. The sixth-form scarf-wearers were probably contorting their eyebrows at each other in that way that becomes really irritating on the other side of 18.

And it reminds me of a time that now seems almost like some other person's life, when I was barely even a teenager and plotting, with my next-door neighbour, our first tattoo - an occupation that has remained a staple, though I've never yet committed.

Which is a relief.

From the archives: ATP Nightmare Before Christmas 2009

2010-10-29T20:04:00.005+01:00

Five postcards from Butlins

#1 In the main pavilion, Warren Ellis jerks his stiltskin leg out at right angles, ducking and swooping with violin tucked under chin. Dirty Three deliver a roar of sound and feeling that seems to pull the wind out of all of us listening. Almost as if he’s embarrassed to be playing music of such force and intimacy, he fills his stage banter with apocryphal anti-explanations: “This is a song about trying to get crisps out of a vending machine… but finding you have no pound coins.”

#2 A sullen, grey afternoon. We find Josh T. Pearson (later to be crowned King of Butlins by Warren Ellis) holding court on Minehead’s barren strand, his beard twitching in the salty breeze. Earlier he’d delivered his desert sermons in a gust of fire, brimstone and spittle, pleading with the angels from under his cowboy hat while spinning a sandstorm of crackled guitar.

#3 In the drizzle we spy two Horrors in capes and impractical shoes, consulting a map of the chalets. Later onstage, the monochrome ones seem to win over a typically aloof ATP audience with a set drawn solely from the kraut-gaze gloompop album of 2009, Primary Colours. Though unwilling to offer any more solid approval than a collective raised eyebrow, the crowd swells to one of the biggest of the whole weekend.

#4 Very, very late on Sunday night, Lightning Bolt are making My Bloody Valentine sound like the Shangri-Las’ kid sisters. A rumbling monstrosity fronted by some horrific, mutilated head – through the dry ice we make out a bandaged ogre, beating the terrified shit out the drums like an organ-grinder’s monkey possessed. Aural itching powder for the tired and emotional, LB stir up the only genuine thrashpit situation of the festival.

#5 And then there’s My Bloody Valentine, doing all three nights on the smaller stage because they are clearly too loud to be let out to play in the main pavilion – louder than stupid, louder than hell, Kevin Shields’ curls just a frazzled halo above his unmoving body, shrouded in smoke, the band blasting out sonic weaponry that cleaves straight through the laughable standard-issue earplugs. We give up and pull them out, and sink under the weight of pure volume.

"It's not that we want to be garish": An interview with Everything Everything

2010-10-29T18:31:00.010+01:00

[written for London Student, October '10]

“We slide in from the epoch of Anglo American wire

And a Saxon spire, glint in the glare far above me

Put pressure on it!

She collapse me! Man alive, her every ache a baton to me!
Age of ending! Where’s the worth in proving I was here?”

- ‘Qwerty Finger’

These are the words of Everything Everything, a band who like to situate themselves outside of genre and convention, albeit with a generous nod to the catch-all of POP.

And poppy it is, if you disregard any kinship to ‘popularity’ and turn to the pop of artists Peter Blake and Eduardo Paolozzi: British eccentrics of the highest order with a taste for eclecticism, unpredictable juxtaposition and bric-a-brac display of non-sequiturs, naughty jokes and stripy jumpers. If you can take that mental image and reconfigure it as a three-minute audio experience, you are some way towards imagining Everything Everything on record, in case you’ve missed the hype and airplay the band have earned since January.

Receiving substantial support from BBC 6Music after featuring on the Beeb’s hype machine Sound of 2010 poll, the four-piece have actually spent much of this year familiarising themselves with Britain’s glorious roadside service stations. The never-ending tour is passing through London’s Scala tonight, but bassist Jeremy says he still has the stamina for splitter van life.

“Going back on the road is a bit like going back to school,” he tells me in the red gloom of the Scala bar. “Not in a bad way, but just that we know what’s gonna happen day to day, which we haven’t had for a while. It’s kind of comforting, actually.” He reels off a list of his favourite EE shows, from Reading and Leeds to their first gig abroad at a festival in Holland, but every band has one performance they’d rather forget

“Our worst gig ever remains one in a pub in Liverpool called Kelly’s Dispensary. In those days we used to just take any gig – it was very early days when we were all living in a house and rehearsing in a basement. We turned up and there was no PA and just one mic between the three of us. We were just shouting, and the bar staff kept coming over and turning our amps down! And nobody there wanted to listen to us. We were a much punkier proposition in those days,” he says.

Having polished off those rough edges, EE now find themselves on the threshold of the strange and fickle world of pop. Not that the music fans of 2010 would acknowledge a concept as retrograde as ‘genre’, flitting as we do from artist to related artist; scrobbling, blipping and sharing without a thought to the past or future. The marriage of music with the internet has given us an infinite real-time feed of single tracks from any year, label, city or genre.

But for all their name might suggest, EE aren’t necessarily a band cut of postmodern cloth. Jeremy is ambivalent about newfangled listening habits. “The great thing about it is that the music press has less influence than it used to in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when you’d open a magazine every week because you always read it, saying ‘Here’s what’s cool, here’s what to wear.’ And now younger people aren’t led by styles and genre. If you like the song, nobody’s completely loyal.”

But there are downsides for EE, whose skewed poppiness is surely made for the full-length long-player format. “It is a track-led culture, not an album-led culture. Maybe the majority of people who listen to this record aren’t going to listen to it all,” says Jeremy of their debut Man Alive. “But you can’t let that change your working processes, you don’t want to have a collection of songs that don’t have anything to do with each other, you want it to have shape. All the albums that we grew up on have that kind of feel to them,” he adds, citing classic British art-rock from OK Computer to The Holy Bible.

So will the energetic complexity of singles like the forthcoming ‘Photoshop Handsome’ be able to cut through the endless choice of tracks and more tracks, or will bands like EE lose out as listeners spend less time with full albums? “It’s kind of the industry’s fault and it’s kind of not anybody’s fault, it just happened and we have to face it,” says Jeremy, adding that their intricate music is “purely natural – it’s not that we want to be garish.”

Singer Jonathan’s lyrics often address the problems of postmodern fandom. “A lot of what he writes about is to do with information overload. Jon’s lyrics are quite hard to understand rhythmically and the way he writes is very dense. The meaning will be quite vague and then you’ll get this shaft of light, and it becomes clear.” The lyrics are opaque without a doubt, but they have a surreal beauty and depth to them that’s deeply satisfying when so many new bands are singing about smoking weed and going to the beach. It takes a certain boldness to sing lines like, “Chest pumped elegantly elephantine, southern hemisphere by Calvin Klein/ Watch your dorsal fin collapse, I know nothing about my history,” a couplet supposedly about “the limits of science, breast enhancement and corporate branding”.

But for every off-kilter line there’s a glorious pop hook, while wry politicking is balanced by eccentric joie de vivre and dirty misheard lyrics, like the now nearly infamous are-they-aren’t-they line in ‘Suffragette Suffragette’: “Whose gonna sit on your face when I’m gone? Whose gonna sit on your face when I’m not there?”

They promise they’re saying “fence”, but nothing is quite as pop as it seems in the technicolour universe of Everything Everything.

Departures

2010-10-22T00:52:00.002+01:00

17 January 1962 – 20 October 2010

"D/R/U/G/S are good, they're from Manchester"

2010-10-18T23:40:00.007+01:00

Tomorrow D/R/U/G/S are playing at The Nest in Dalston, formerly Barden's Boudoir. They are very much my cup of tea, at least on paper, so I'm expecting good things from the show, partly because the venue is the new project from the guy who used to run Fabric.

I'm not sure how I feel about a band called D/R/U/G/S. Initially it seems repellently Hoxtonite; later it's annoying to type; after a while you become immune to it and start saying things like this post's title when explaining the band to friends. Band name as infinitely variable gag machine. Not the first time, I s'pose, but it's a teensy bit Nathan Barley you'd have to admit (and saying that sounds hopelessly dated in itself).

At least they've updated it with the oh-so-2010 use of slashy symbols. The Guardian has noted this trend so it must have reached tipping point in certain London postcodes.

I'm going to stick my neck out a little and say that D/R/U/G/S have come up with a sound that is "original yet danceable" (my quote for the sleeve, if you will). A tricky marriage: clubbers (or 'people who go to clubs', if that makes you feel less sicky) tend to confine their appetite for experimentation to chemical and biological interactions, choosing their BPM and bass tastes long before leaving the house, home-strength Dark 'n' Stormy in hand. The aim of rave (in its earlier incarnations, especially) is to provide a steadily evolving fabric of pattern and texture that affects your brain and body in almost unconsciously felt ways, so that The Drop is that neuro-physiological pay-off used sparsely for optimum effect.

Not that I'm trying to reduce dance music to mere physical stimulant, but dance plugs directly into the spinal cord in a way the majority of popular music doesn't, which is partly the result of the bizarre circumstances we choose to experience it in (darkness, strobes, intoxication; a sanitised weekend bacchanal with only marginally less gory results).

Meanwhile, the constantly mutating strain of rave for the bedroom, for headphones, for gloomy moments staring out your bedroom window at a pavement strewn with mulchy autumn leaves, is inherently erratic, complex, less danceable. The slow builds and subtle shifts of dancefloor rave aren't necessary when you're soberly sipping tea, wearing your boyfriend's hoodie late on a Tuesday night.

And to combine those two rival aspects of danceability and intricacy is always a challenge. I think it very rarely works, but when it does it is Truly Great. Like so much of my favourite music of the past few years (Caribou, Four Tet, Luke Abbott and others whom I've written more than enough about in this blog), D/R/U/G/S appear to not only embrace complexity, variety, maximalism, bricolage, etc., they also seem to have one ear on the dancefloor, keeping the tempo up and referencing more traditional dancey sounds (like the housey vocal snippets on 'Rad Pitt').

If I elaborate anymore I might end up postulating a feeble cod-sociological explanation for the rise (or revival) of Intelligent(Intricate) Dance(floor) Music based on: the increasing costs of clubbing, alcohol, cab fares and city living; the weakening potency of 'dance drugs'; the relative affordability of home music production software; and the rise of both bedroom DJs and blogosphere tastemakers (who might typically be found in their bedrooms on Saturday nights listening to music on headphones, only prodded into dancing/blogging about dance music when that music is suitably 'headphones-y' and beard-strokey and intricate).

But it would basically be bullshit.

No More 'No More Running': Animal Collective design shoes

2010-09-29T23:56:00.006+01:00

As the Guardian reports, Animal Collective will be giving away their next album as a cassette with a pair of "otherwise plain canvas shoes" costing $75 (£45).

Apparently all profits will be going to some kind of eco-charity project, but wouldn't the most environmentally conscious move be to release the album digitally and donate all profits to the Socorro Island Conservation Fund? I suppose they're hoping that releasing music in such a physical (and expensive) way might limit online sharing, but really it punishes hardcore fans who will pay any price for a collector's item while rewarding fair-weather listeners and illegal downloaders who'll just BitTorrent it anyway once the audiophiles have done their worst on the cassette-to-MP3 conversion.

And just to keep things interesting (and pricey), the first pair will be designed by Avey Tare. Yep, in total you can expect Geologist, Panda Bear and Deakin to all put their stamps on "otherwise plain" sneakers in the next few months at a similar price. And of course there'll be kids out there who fork out £188 for the pleasure of owning four pairs of fake-Cons/Vans, four cassettes and a tape player off eBay.

I understand that bands are finding it increasingly difficult to make money from record sales and I totally sympathise, because there's nothing that kills creativity more than keeping musicians on the road for two years solid to pay off their advance. But I don't think gimmicky, over-priced collector's items and limited editions are the answer.

Radiohead's Colin Greenwood recently reflected on this conundrum for the Index on Censorship. Excitement! Radiohead have apparently finished a new group of songs. But it sounds like they'll be coming up with another approach to releasing this album following the pay-what-you-like system they pioneered for In Rainbows three years ago.

Colin himself says: "I buy hardly any CDs now and get my music from many different sources: Spotify, iTunes, blog playlists, podcasts, online streaming - reviewing this makes me realise that my appetite for music now is just as strong as when I was 13, and how dependent I am upon digital delivery."

This pretty neatly sums up the best and worst of the dramatic shift to digital in the land of music consumption. Pro: Music from many different sources means a wider variety of music can be exposed and shared; younger music fans particularly tend to be less preoccupied with genre and more open to new sounds. Pro: Music from many different sources means MORE MUSIC. Yay! Like Colin, I reckon my appetite for music is just as strong as when I was 13. My access to music isn't mediated by a weekly magazine or what my friends listen to (my GOD, that'd be dire) but is a constant stream of suggestions and blips and scrobbles and tweets and interaction that brings me right into the industry, amazingly.

But. The con: "I buy hardly any CDs now." Alright, I know Colin is getting some of his music from iTunes or 7Digital or Bandcamp, but he is also streaming. And so am I, and so are you. Spotify, Myspace, Last.fm, Soundcloud, podcasts... all free, and that's why my appetite is just as voracious as when I was 13. It would be incredible to relive my teenage years with the kind of overwhelming access to music I now have (although perhaps not desirable. So much pressure!), but with everything free and streaming just a few clicks away, where does that leave the artist? On bloody tour, again, that's where.

And not everyone likes Ginster's Steak Slices. Especially not Animal Collective, I reckon.

To be continued...

Luke Abbott, Holkham Drones

2010-08-24T20:59:00.005+01:00

Luke Abbott, Holkham Drones

Border Community

This week comes another excellent new release from the excellent Border Community label, accompanied by what will most likely be an excellent show at Ginglik in Shepherd's Bush. The line-up includes Walls (the brilliant splicing of Allez Allez and Banjo or Freakout) plus DJ sets from Nathan Fake and James Holden.

The record is Luke Abbott's first proper album, Holkham Drones, which follows last year's mini-album Whitebox Stereo (also on Border Community) with essentially more of that same quintessentially BC sound, strongly influenced by label head James Holden. Pulsing, underwater beats, woozy analogue synths, warm rushing drops and percussion like icicles shattering in your cochlea.

And early listens got me thinking. Rock hacks and everyday folk often like to reel off sad little top tens of 'druggy' albums like Screamadelica or Forever Changes or fucking Sgt. Pepper, but really none of those records, acceptable as they may be in their own individual ways, come close to actually offering an auralisation of the drug experience.

Not that I'm going to stoop so low as to start some debate on the authenticity of 'drugginess' on record; Christ, what could be more boring, really, than talking about how drugs have influenced music, or vice versa? As though 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' is any more than a nursery rhyme about the munchies just because - OMG! It's got DRUGS in the title!! They were proper on it! Shit, they should sack off the whole David Mitchell-the-doggie-drugs-mule ad and just broadcast a Public Service Announcement in the shape of all the lamest 'head' music ever committed to wax: Kids! Put down your cocaine pills and syringes full of 'the new terrifying legal high' Ivory Wave! Don't be like Jerry Garcia!

"Well, I had some very weird experiences. My main experience was one of furious activity and tremendous struggle in a sort of futuristic, space-ship vehicle with insectoid presences. After, I had this image of myself as these little hunks of protoplasm that were stuck together kind of like stamps with perforations between them that you could snap off."

Woah, crazy shit, right kids? You'd definitely give acid a bash if you thought it'd be that exciting. Except - nope, turns out that's what Jerry was seeing when years of Elvis burgers in roadside diners put him in a diabetic coma. Mmm.

So to get back on point, psychedelic ker-aziness is just not what I call an "auralisation of the drug experience". I'm going to ignore psychedelia-influenced stuff that does attempt this in other, more successful ways (Spacemen 3 maybe) and just argue that Luke Abbott (and by extension, Border Community releases in general, because they do have a very identifiable shared sound) manages to replicate in sound not so much the state of 'being on drugs', but the emotional responses held within all of us that drugs can sometimes toy with, either by exacerbating them or cutting them off or reshuffling them in ways not previously experienced.

I think Abbott does this through a combination of 1) pulsing, almost soft beats, like hearing your heartbeat in your inner ear, or playing a drum kit made of cotton wool, and 2) a rushing warmth that's constantly tweaked up and down, in and out, sometimes dropping you from high into that full, analogue warmth that's like a pure serotonin hit; like walking outside on a hot and beautiful Sunday morning when you've nothing to do but go get the paper and make scrambled eggs.

So not drugs. Just emotions, I guess. But those kind of emotions that, though they're available to everybody, tend to get unlocked more readily with recreational drugs (I'm not going to get scientific and talk about serotonin/dopamine levels etc because I don't understand enough about it, and probably neither do you, and it's really not terribly important to the point I'm trying to make).

And I suppose that's what I look for in so much of my favourite music, maybe without realising it. There are certain songs that I find I can't listen to too much because I fear I'll somehow deplete the effect they have on me, an almost physical effect that taps into those emotions and neurological responses and reassembles my brain jigsaw in disorienting but intensely satisfying ways. I'm sure everybody has different songs that do it for them. But 'Whitebox', by Luke Abbott, is probably one of them. Check out the YouTube clip above - but don't go overboard now.

These New Puritans, Hidden

2010-02-12T23:22:00.005Z

These New Puritans, Hidden
Angular/Domino

Two amazing albums in one month? And I haven’t even had time to listen to Four Tet, Vampire Weekend, Beach House, or Magnetic Fields, et cetera and et cetera, yet. (Note: Yeasayer is out in February, officially. But who cares about official release dates, right?)

Is January turning into a perennial bumper crop of music in the same way as it always is for cinema, with movies trying to cash in during awards season? Too bad these awesome albums are preening and posing for an awards ceremony that doesn’t exist. Sometimes it’s kind of sad that the Brits and the Mercury Prize are so pathetic (and that there’s no real alternative since NME took its finger off the pulse about five years ago), but on the other hand it’s distinctly satisfying that brave and innovative albums like the one I'm about to review aren’t lowered to competing on a shortlist with La Roux or The Killers for a hollow golden token which serves only to place a full stop at the end of a career spurt while allowing hacks to move on to the Next Big Thing.

Well, These New Puritans were The Next Big Thing a couple of years ago; I was totally in love with their debut Beat Pyramid and pissed off that so much criticism of the band was based around them being pale, angular and from Southend, which in a pre-Primary Colours world was still a joke ("Look at those naff provincials with their pretentious sixth form ‘philosophy’ and ironic love of Wu-Tang Clan", etc).

Well, no. They’re just weird. Like the many of the genuinely great musicians, composers and artists of the past 50, no – 100 years? 200? Not that I’m pushing the whole ‘tortured genius/mad artist in his garret’ thing, which is one of those ridiculous clichés that means nice and talented people are seen as ‘lesser’ in comparison to bastard miserly megalomaniacs with vast and delicate egos, like some of the sainted ‘legends’ of rock and pop sneering at me from the semi-matt covers of respectable music monthlies. Naturally, I digress.

So, Hidden. The second album from These New Puritans. But first: did you hear that Blakroc record? Where the Black Keys teamed up with Wu Tang, Ludacris and Mos Def to play hip hop with live instruments? Well, turn that concept inside out. Invert that shit. This is electronic beats, razor sharp production and white boy vocals, nasal and half-mumbled – and oh yes, did I mention the bassoon motif popping up throughout the album?

‘We Want War’ is the single; you may well have heard it by now – make sure you soak up the gorgeous video embedded above. Bear in mind that it's the first single, and it's seven minutes long. The production is really what hits you first. Though Beat Pyramid showed a lot of flair and innovation from such a young band, TNP have clearly made staggering leaps ahead. The silvery shrrrring! of a gleaming sword pulled from its hilt couldn’t be a sharper contrast to the cavernous gravity of the bass and beats, showing that the band’s production sensibility is first and foremost a hip hop one, focused on pristine sounds and rigid rhythms, with vocals taking a supporting role.

The beat on ‘Thought Rush’, for instance, a track on the Rough Trade bonus CD, is very, very much like that 2003 number ‘Never Leave You (Uh Oooh Uh Oooh)’ by Lumidee, which, interestingly, is a much worse version of the Ol' Dirty Bastard track 'Welcome Home' - no doubt TNP had both those songs very much in mind. It’s also weirdly sparse and more ‘live’ sounding than any track on the album proper, and also includes some brilliantly inappropriate bassoon polyphony near the end.

Also on the extra CD, a competent dark and techy remix of ‘We Want War’ ticks some boxes, but I’m sure it’s only the tip of the iceberg for dissecting Hidden into dozens of incredible remixes. The inclusion of an instrumental version of the track – thoroughly listenable in its own right, so well produced is it - is surely a canny move. Also, an alternative mix of ‘Hologram’ offers a cleaner, stronger vocal performance and a captivating piano arrangement which is about 94,758 galaxies away from the usual ‘piano song’ on an indie album, and in fact reminds me a touch, what with Jack’s half-spoken Estuary lines, of a couple of the almost jazzy arrangements on Original Pirate Material (the ones that had less to do with Mike Skinner, we must assume).

‘White Chords’ is also ripe for a seriously good remix, with a Thom Yorke style vocal and light and dark elements flashing in and out; a girlish ‘ooh’ reverberates and glitchy buttons ripple as the bass spreads out thick and spacious over a dubsteppy beat.

‘5’, the album’s coda, is weird, subtle and oddly affecting, and sees Jack Barnett try his hand at pure composition. Apparently he had to learn notation and write the bassoon sections ‘deaf’, as it were, before the band travelled to the Czech Republic to hear it played to them for the first time by a 13-piece brass and woodwind ensemble. A number of influences make themselves known, including, I suppose, Benjamin Britten and Edward Elgar, as the band has mentioned in interviews, but there's also a Reich/Riley-esque minimalist phrase played (I think) on tubular bells and sounding like nothing less than the soundtrack to The Exorcist – which is then butted out by a ghostly children’s choir and Jack Barnett’s sombre, quiet monotone.

Like the rest of Hidden, it’s like nothing I've ever heard - and it's exquisite.

As a final word – please do buy this record. It’s really not going to sell that many copies and this band very much deserve to make another album. Sermon over.

Endnote:

Imagine how good it would be to be a youngish indie fan who’s been learning bassoon for years ‘cos his parents made him, and all he wants is to be Johnny Thunders – wait, this is 2010: Ezra Koenig? – but then he hears this and he’s like, Wicked, now I can be an indie star too, I’m gonna start a band!, etc etc. Cue new generation of proper weird pop, a true post punk revival.

[On a related note, this is of course the reason why a disproportionate amount of girls are into twee. It’s not that females are naturally programmed to prefer pretty ickle tunes with earnest lovesick lyrics (obviously), it’s that it gives bored 15-year-olds a chance to be in a band and put to use those ridiculous violin/flute/piano lessons that Mummy forced on them for 10 years in some sickly remnant of a 19th century ladies’ education, all of which seemed so incredibly boring before but now turns out to be an excellent way to get foppish lads from Upper Sixth to write earnest lovesick lyrics about their wavy red hair and awkward smiles that they hated until they realised their true cultural value in Twee Land. Cue girls on keys/flute/harp etc in twee bands. I'm not sure it's The Answer, but it'll do for now]

Yeasayer, Odd Blood

2010-02-02T17:48:00.001Z

Yeasayer, Odd Blood
Secretly Canadian

Do not adjust your set. Two voices, twisted and treacly, ooze out of the speakers over bubbling synths and booming drums. What the hell? Check to see if the track is corrupted – everything seems okay. Well, what did you expect from a band like Yeasayer?

Weird and brooding opener ‘The Children’ gives you an inkling of where these Brooklyn experimentalistas want to take us with their second album, Odd Blood – a retrofuturist prog-pop journey which stands on the shoulders of their acclaimed debut LP All Hour Cymbals, travelling deeper into the realms of the uncategorisable and becoming an early contender for 2010’s album of the year in the process.

As part of a wave of U.S. bands defining a new pop aesthetic influenced by African rhythms, Eastern scales and other sounds that used to be lazily described as ‘world music’, Yeasayer have always stood out as the village elders of the scene, with their extravagant and meticulously crafted songs and live performances.

The first single from Odd Blood, ‘Ambling Alp’ (released last year) is a perfect example of the band’s refined ear for detail, with their trademark hollow, artificial drums and funky, clipped bass underpinning a whole palette of unidentifiable noises dropping in and out over Chris Keating’s acrobatic gospel-tinged vocals. It’s about the most certifiably bonkers a band can get within the four-minute pop song framework. Your brain latches on to the almost embarrassingly earnest, sing-along lyrics (“Stick up for yourself son/ Never mind what anybody else done”) while the music sneaks in round the back, and by the second or third listen ‘Ambling Alp’, and the rest of the album, seem instantly familiar.

‘Madder Red’ in particular, with its chanted opening, off-kilter melody and colossal enormo-drums, is completely weird but totally immediate, with a minor key chorus that might as well be Duran Duran – it’s immaculate, dazzling pop.

Just trying to pay attention to each sound – with every verse and chorus different to the one before – is hard work. ‘Love Me Girl’ starts somewhere between commercial trance and the YYYs’ ‘Heads Will Roll’, but mutates into a pulsing, jerking electro gem so sleek and polished you can see your face it. Is it prog? Is it electro? Is it pop? Erm. It’s bloody odd, that’s what. And I’ll put money on it – Yeasayer have made one of the best records you’ll hear this year.

Get a pen - it's tips for 2010

2010-01-09T20:14:00.006Z

Right, I've gone and done it - as if you needed another list of hot! up and coming! fresh! new bands. Well sod that, here's a few that I like and that you might too.

Esben and the Witch

I saw Esben and the Witch supporting Josh T. Pearson at Cargo in December, and despite only catching the second half, I was genuinely captivated by this odd little Brighton trio.

Using guitars, laptops, DIY drum kits and various percussion instruments, Esben… (named after a creepy Scandinavian fairytale) create a dark, romantic atmosphere of nocturnal journeys, wild creatures and black magic, without resorting to obvious Kate Bushisms or twee lyrics. In their live set especially, they use electronics and heavy drums and bass to prove they’re not aiming for folky and delicate but dark and stormy – much more Snow Queen than Snow White. Fans of Bat for Lashes and Patrick Wolf will definitely be enamoured.

Their track ‘Eumenides’ is, according to an interview with the band, inspired by Aeschylus’ Oresteia via a Francis Bacon painting, with lyrics influenced by Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Yikes. If that sounds too pretentious for you, they also do a cover of Kylie’s ‘Confide in Me’ (see above). They mostly reminded me of Portishead, with their use of bass-heavy electronics and singer Rachel’s expressive and very English voice bearing a resemblance to Beth Gibbons’. Her note-perfect performance managed to completely hush the audience without any stage gimmicks – in fact, they’re still finding their feet on stage and struggling a bit with the amount of instruments and things going on around them. Given a bit more time and a brave producer (Geoff Barrow would be the obvious safe bet), I think they could be pretty special.

The band’s EP, 33, can be downloaded for free here

Warpaint

Warpaint is three girls (and, I think, a fourth changeable member) from Los Angeles playing smoky, strung-out post-rock topped with wispy, velvety harmonies. Imagine if the XX had misspent their youth on the beach smoking pot around campfires instead of setting alight skate park bins – add a splash of gothic psychedelia, and you’re there.

More importantly, Warpaint are exactly the kind of band I’d love to be in, although clearly they have a pretty strict America’s Next Top Model-approved application process. Never mind. They blatantly have ‘shroom-fuelled sleepovers watching The Wicker Man and running amok in the neighbourhood, hatching plans in their treetop clubhouse and sneering at boys.

Their exceptional debut EP Exquisite Corpse was released by Manimal Vinyl and now they’ve been snapped up by Rough Trade and are touring with Yeasayer and Akron/Family. Going by tracks like ‘Elephant’, with its twisted vocals, shuffling drums and bouncy post-punk bass, we can expect an excellent debut long-player in 2010. Check out the video, above – girls, guitars, wind machines, awesome. I also like how the camera keeps zooming in on their instruments – look! They can play! No, really! Ha. Lots more good tracks on their Myspace.

Gold Panda

Next up is producer and sound collager Gold Panda who, aside from being my ideal man in oh-so-many ways, produces dreamy splice-ups of charity shop records and video tapes over Four Tet-style percussion clicks and bleeps. Which is interesting, ‘cos he’ll be playing with Four Tet and James Holden at Fabric in a couple of weeks and – oh! I’m going to be there. Stalking him.

‘Quitters Raga’ (no apostrophes, apparently, but brilliant title nevertheless) is a choice cut, if you’ll excuse the MixMag terminology, with a muffled bass drum underpinning cut-up raga sitar and singing while the beats blurt in and out in a very Border Community-approved manner. However, he's also been making his name at the controls for Little Boots and Bloc Party remixes, ensuring him some real crossover potential.

Hilariously, Gold Panda has made it on to the BBC Sound Of 2010 list, which probably does him no favours and only serves to boggle the minds of 50-quid men hoping to update their record collections. A five-track CD-R, entitled Miyamae and released on electronic and dubstep label Various Production, will set you back the meagre sum of £5. Check out his other tracks on Myspace, too.

Ellie Goulding

I’m just going to say a little something about Ellie Goulding because she’s appeared on all the major tip lists and has clearly been lined up as the next in a seemingly endless line of washed, prepared and ready-to-serve electro starlets.

One thing to love about Ellie Goulding, regardless of how you or I might feel about this seemingly endless line of ready-to-serve electro starlets, is that she’s clearly on the Little Boots end of the spectrum – obviously gorgeous and young and blonde and all, but also a bit…rubbish? In the way that Little Boots, though pretty and zippy and zappy with her glittery eyes, sparkly pop and Matthew Williamson frock, is still very much a lass from Blackpool who’d out-rave you all night and then be sick on your shoes.

Ellie’s vid for the single ‘Under The Sheets’ (not allowed to embed it, but the vid above is from Jools Holland), a really quite decent pop song helped out by oh-so-now production (massive drums, catchy electro chorus), sees her wandering around the set slightly awkwardly wearing a very 2010 outfit of slouchy hoodie over spangly top. Sometimes one Ellie will have a little go at dancing, and then other Ellies sit in the corner strumming guitar and looking much less uncomfortable, and then there’s a fuckload of splashy crashy glitter coming out of the drums at the end. Joyous.

I give her my total support, but somehow fear that she’ll do a Little Boots over the next 12 months, with annoying Marina and the Diamonds taking Florence’s spot as the favoured starlet.

A moment to mention Marina too – now, I’m *sorry*, but: So awful! So horribly produced! She’s described as ‘quirky’ and ‘flamboyant’ and yet, according to the BBC Sound of 2010 poll, she gets her inspiration “by studying DVDs of Britney Spears,” and she also “covers Gwen Stefani on stage.” She’s not Kate Bush-kooky, she’s Katy-Perry-kooky – all hot and tight and cheerleader-y and ironic and backed by a major record label. That kind of kooky.

Other shit tips from the BBC poll include Owl City, with an absolute lolocaust of a track which at first only reminded me of Nizlopi until I realised it was Maroon 5 doing nursery rhymes as community service. Is he using autotune or is his voice that disgusting without any help from a machine? It’s the kind of song that makes my friend Sam wince like he’s pissing blood.

The Drums

The Drums however, I can kind of dig. In case you haven’t heard them yet (it won’t be long – they’re on the cover of NME), think Girls and Washed Out and that whole chilled, surfy, Californicated fuzz that’s been coming out of the US lately, but make it a tad more ‘accessible’ and ‘tastemaker-friendly’.

Check out this commendably simplistic video for commendably simplistic track ‘Let’s Go Surfing’. Sadly, some of their other songs strike me as Cure rip-offs and not really that good, but that’s the joy of our disposable digital culture, eh? You can ignore them. Oddly, the BBC website seems to think that there’s something “unconnected” about a song that sounds like Iggy Pop or Lou Reed covering a 60s girl group (which none of The Drums’ songs do anyway, shame), as though Mr Pop and Mr Reed would turn their noses up at that kind of music. Dumbasses. Who gets paid to write that shit? Have a look at The Drums' Myspace for more.

And a final tip, thankfully not on the BBC list:

Perfume Genius

Apparently Perfume Genius, otherwise known as Mike, lives with his mom in Seattle and paints furniture for a living. He’s been compared with Antony Hegarty, for reasons that will become clear when you listen to this, as well as Neil Young, but I think Daniel Johnston is a good reference point too.

He’s clearly recording at home, on his own, his high-pitched voice sounding even more fragile breaking through the lo-fi murk. He’s signed to Transparent, home of Washed Out, and apparently makes his own videos too. Almost certainly he’ll finish the year as the least known of this little selection but, to be quite honest, I think he – and we – will be absolutely fine with that. Listen to more of his stuff here.

Food + Vladislav Delay, Union Chapel, 12th November 2009

2009-12-16T17:45:00.003Z

Food + Vladislav Delay, Union Chapel, 12th November 2009

Union Chapel is one of a handful of London’s holy buildings to have reinvented itself as a live music destination in recent years, with performances spanning jazz, electronica, avant-garde and experimental artists, acoustic shows and all kinds of music that requires people to shut up, stop fidgeting and LISTEN.

Tonight the chapel hosts Vladislav Delay, one of the many working names of Finnish electronic artist Sasu Ripatti, whose latest album Tummaa is out on The Leaf Label. Commonly described as a ‘clicks and cuts’ artist, Vladislav Delay is a more fluid, atmospheric exploration of that tag, where timbre and rhythm take precedence over melody and harmony.

Ripatti is accompanied by jazz musician Lucio Capece, who explores the unexpected sounds of soprano sax as well a couple of bespoke instruments. Avoiding jazzy phrases, Capece keeps his input minimal but engaging, making breathy percussive sounds using a drum mallet and violin bow which are then processed and warped by Ripatti, using drum pads and lashings of delay to create conflicting feelings of intimacy and distance.

Where Vladislav Delay is primarily an electronic music project, headliners Food take a more transparent, organic approach to their improvised tracks, combining astonishingly inventive percussion (largely played one-handed as drummer Thomas Strønen uses his free hand to add loops, layers and effects) with minimalist melodic lines from saxophonist Iain Bellamy, mutating with repetition and recalling experimental composers like Steve Reich and Terry Riley as much as free jazz.

Electronic music and jazz have obviously always been musical boundary-pushers, so it makes sense that the two should become acquainted through experimental artists like Vladislav Delay and Food. The relationship seems to be mutually beneficial too, with electronic music opening new horizons for jazz – which even in its freest, freakiest forms is still getting on a bit as a musical style – while jazz pushes electronic music away from dehumanised programmed rhythms and into more abstract and improvised territory, using real instruments played by real people.

Tonight’s show is like a sneak preview of future sounds, leaving us still and silent while our inner ears chatter with unthought thoughts and new beginnings.

Karen O And The Kids, Where The Wild Things Are OST

2009-12-16T17:38:00.004Z

Karen O And The Kids
Where The Wild Things Are Motion Picture Soundtrack
DGC Records

If your ex-girlfriend was the inimitable Karen Orzolek – besequined screechbag and noted friend to children (see also, Tiny Masters of Today, her pre-teen punk protégés) – you’d know who to call when it came to soundtracking your blockbuster kiddie monster movie. With some inevitability, director Spike Jonze turned to Karen O and The Kids to add music to his forthcoming film Where The Wild Things Are, an adaptation of the classic US children’s book.

The kids in question turn out not be the spaghetti hoops and Sesame Street kind (probably for the best) but a selection of Karen O’s musical compadres, most of whom are well-known enough to have been credited more explicitly: her YYYs bandmates Nick Zinner and Brian Chase; long-limbed Deerhunter frontman Bradford Cox; Dean Fertita of QOTSA and The Dead Weather; his bandmate Jack Lawrence, also of The Raconteurs; and multi-instrumentalist songwriter Imaad Wasif.

Often recalling Show Your Bones-era YYYs, the troupe of kidults contribute organ, marimba, bells and acoustic fingerpicking on gentle campfire songs and the occasional moment of Arcade Fire-style marching joyousness. A few bursts of kiddy chorus and a tinge of Americana almost tip proceedings into ‘wholesome’ territory, but the musicians’ punk credentials and Karen O’s yelped nursery rhyme lyrics serve as a balancing oddball factor.

The heartbreaking cover of Daniel Johnston’s ‘Worried Shoes’ is easily the standout track and should be bought by anyone with an interest in keeping their heart beating. Karen O’s voice – cracked and vulnerable, sweet but steadfast with that strong twang on her R’s – captures perfectly the childlike nature of both the film and Johnston’s songwriting.

Across the 14 tracks there are only a handful of proper songs, with some tracks barely making it past the minute mark and often reprising previous sounds and ideas – a typical soundtrack approach, but as an album it could do with turning those snippets into coherent songs like the tubthumping single ‘All Is Love’ or the wistful ‘Hide Away’. Still, like the film itself, the record has the difficult task of trying to appeal to everyone who loves the book, from adults to teenagers to toddlers. For that reason alone, Karen O and The Kids did good, making a record that goes beyond the call of duty and stands as a pretty ace album all by itself. A must-buy for fans of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Daniel Johnston, wistful indie-rock and huge shaggy monsters.

Dirty Projectors + Polar Bear + Lucky Dragons, Scala, 2nd April 2009

2009-04-13T00:49:00.002+01:00

Dirty Projectors + Polar Bear + Lucky Dragons
Scala, 2nd April 2009

A pile of junk is neatly laid out in the middle of the room, a spotlight shining down on it. Looking closely it still doesn’t make sense, like being drunk or taking off your glasses; the objects look half-familiar but your brain finds it impossible to alight upon their meaning or purpose.
Kids with beards, chunky cardigans, specs, plimsolls, checkshirts - all the necessary accoutrements of London scenesters - sit in a Brownie Guide circle, cross-legged and curious-bashful. Lucky Dragons appears – a youngish wiry guy – kneels in his exposed electronic playpen, and starts up.
The first five minutes he’s laying out his wares, seeing where he can go, dipping our ears in the possibilities. A laptop and a box of buttons and faders are discernible – they conduct throbbings, hummings & tweetings, skittering and shaking sounds melting together and crumbling apart. The second five minutes and this melodica-panpipe-stick emerges, through which he conjures some free riffing. Hmm.

It’s getting worringly ‘ambient’-slash-Sounds of the Amazon Vol. I, and I’m just about to turn to my compadre and call it bollocks when:

Mr Dragons starts shaking what we’ll call a ‘shakeysticknoisemaker’, dancing around with it, cobra-necking. He hands the shakeystick to someone nearby, picks up another and starts handing out a whole bundle of them, more and more, until the inner ring of spectators has become an instrument in itself, shakeysticks cracking and coming together spontaneously in-and-out of rhythm.

Cynicism dies.

The music goes on. Mr Dragons gives the people freedom without direction, and they respect the project. It’s too right-on for words.

Next, the shakeysticks are gathered in and what we’ll call toyrocknoisemakers are given out. This time there are dozens of them, it seems, and they work like magnets over a central box of conduction/magic, a bit like an E bow for a guitar but totally unfathomable to my brain. Later there’s the snakecordnoisemaker which comes alive when people grab its ‘tails’ and then lock hands, connecting circuits and chiming chords and sweet dischords, reaching across the circle in search of new sounds. It’s somewhere between a physics class and an autism therapy workshop – people are re-learning sounds, lights, shapes, each other.
It’s not music, man, it’s a sound-connection. It’s for hippies, dead simple, and maybe we all want to be.

Polar Bear, for the uninitiated, are a typically couldn’t-make-it-up Upset The Rhythm band – two sax, one drums, one double bass, one guitar/laptop/balloon/Xbox controller (it certainly looked like one), and one afro.
Exploring an invigorating seam of jazz/noise, they freefall into free jazz, almost abandoning harmony and melody at points, and scare you up with rubber pink balloon vs sax face-offs before shaking you up with madcap time signature wacky races, finally falling back into a groovy pulse - yes, groovy, which in their hands becomes a satisfying reprieve of Yow! funkiness after a section of skronking brainmelt.
Overall, it’s like having a pipe cleaner go in one ear and out the other. That, is a messy headfuck with squeaky clean aftertaste. Fresh.

I had forgotten quite how charming Dirty Projectors are. How can anyone in their right mind not fall for them as they knock out these gift-wrapped slices of crispy genius, barely breaking a sweat?
Dave Longstreth’s fingers glide over the strings, his left and right hands each apparently using their own brain, at a speed so fast it makes rhythm more like spasm, only accentuated by his Mother Goose neck-jerk moves. But it’s all perfect, incredibly perfect.
And the girls! Nothing is quite like a DP harmony performed live. How they get that kind of purity of tone, note & timbre live I just can’t understand.
Dirty Projectors have such an unadulterated streak of originality that you can never forget you’re watching a former Yale composition student and (possibly certified) genius here, even when he forgets how to play ‘Rise Above’. Only for a minute though.

The Horrors, 'Primary Colours'

2009-04-12T22:40:00.005+01:00

The Horrors, Primary Colours
XL, Out May 5th 2009

So the Resurrection Men return, this time stitching their musical Frankenstein from fragments of the mid-70s onwards – Kraut, post-punk, acid – and leaving behind the psych, freakbeat and garage rock drawn on so heavily for the Horrors’ debut Strange House.

Opener ‘Mirror’s Image’ sets out the new sound immediately: Krautish start, segueing into a tight bassline before even tighter drums throw you into a swirling epic featuring the most blatant My Bloody Valentine-‘inspired’ guitars you’ve ever heard (they even pan right to left, making your brain the calm centre of the maelstrom when listening through headphones), followed with a simplistic post-punk riff and a pulsating atmosphere of foreboding just like all your favourite moody bands of the ’78-’91 period.

I’m gonna pre-empt what you’re thinking with a little aside, here.

This kind of volte-face, if you will, can make it easy to dismiss a band. If you do garage rock, you gotta stick to it, right? Billy Childish would never ‘go all artsy’. Such a dramatic evolution can come across as insincere. Garage rock revivalists are unashamedly nostalgic, with an almost reverential treatment of the ‘real stuff’, the Golden Oldies and the obscure nuggets on 45s. To hear that the Horrors have moved on from the garage rock sound seems to show an ambivalence towards the Real Stuff - even a heretic attempt to better it.

In turn, this makes their new(er) influences seem almost arbitrary, like bored teens shopping for influences on a whim, scanning the racks for another sound to rip off now they’re bored with three chord frenzies. This behaviour is totally against the rules of garage rock, because three chords are all you will ever need in life if you believe in the Real Stuff.

On the other hand, you could (and I would) argue that the Horrors are merely following a thread of British rock created from what Bill Bailey calls a “wistful melancholy” brought on by 52% of our days being overcast. Added to that is the Britrock habit of ploughing the past to put it back together in new ways, as well as the more clichéd ‘eccentricity’ that British bands love to live up to. Strange House emerged from exactly this pool of rock (rockpool?), combining various elements of British R&B and freakbeat, the proto punk of the Sonics and the trash goth aesthetic of Nick Cave (to name but a few). In this light, the leap to Primary Colours looks much smaller.

The Spider and the Flies side-project had already pointed towards the new Horrors sound with their Something Clockwork This Way Comes EP, a record which sees Tom and Rhys playing jigsaw with Cluster/Harmonia knob-twiddling, half the Mute Records roster and miscellany from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. As the pair responsible for bass and keys, it’s only logical to discover that the authentic 60s organ has been pushed out in favour of magic analogue boxes and pulsing bass guitar has come to the fore.

So, that’s the New Sound explained for you.

Visually, this produces some problems. Will the capes and cravats go in to storage? It used to be that changing your look with each album only added to your star quality, being part of an overall artistic ‘journey’ or ‘vision’ or somesuch - Bowie being the classic example. But now, to see a band like the Horrors choosing to follow a different route, aurally and sartorially, just feels silly. Our postmodern sensibilities just laugh at their ‘popstar’ pretence. Check them out on the cover of NME – they look odd. Pastier? Ah, no eyeliner. Live at Rich Mix a couple of weeks ago they were still clad head-to-toe in black, but there was no sign of polka-dotted waistcoats or crushed velvet, just simple, serious, beatnik uniform. But what else can they do? Dig themselves deeper into their unfair ‘cartoon band’ reputation? Or just throw on a leather jacket and get on with it?

Let’s get back to the record itself.

You certainly can’t fault the raw ingredients. As a band they are so reliably tasteful that ‘Joy Division’ actually means something as an influence in the way it doesn’t for, say, White Lies. Their flair for their instruments (not so much skill and talent as an intuitive curiosity and inventiveness that comes from not being virtuosos) is pretty phenomenal for young band on their second album. The guitar work is identifiably the work of a physics graduate, while the clever layering of parts is subtly Spector-influenced, notably in the middle eight of new single ‘Who Can Say’ where the Wall Of Sound is gently alluded to with a spot of tambourine and kick drum before Faris’s sleepy, ironical voice intones, “And when I told her I didn’t love her anymore/ She cried […] And then I kissed her/ With a kiss that could only mean goodbye,” a nod to the teen heartbreak melodrama pop of the Shangri-Las and the Crystals. Impeccable.

On ‘I Only Think of You’ that drum-tambourine part resurfaces, but with added layers of dronescape and an uber baritone that combine to put me in mind of the current London skyscape with its endless network of cranes elegantly arching into the haze. Have you ever noticed how many cranes there are now in London? I advise you to have a look next time you’re roundat someone's tower block flat. It’s terrifying, and this song is its soundtrack.

The album’s simpler, starker aesthetic is continued in Faris’s lyrics, which work largely within the rhythms now, abandoning the wild garage rock shrieks and screams. In fact, they’ve abandoned altogether that trash aesthetic that's embedded in garage rock. The Horrors were never comfortable with the rockabilly beer-swilling hoedown stuff in the first place, and it does them good to shake it off.

Finally, there’s ‘Sea Within A Sea’, the seven-minute album outro used as a taster for Primary Colours on the band’s website. Don’t misunderstand the length - there are no freewheeling freak-outs here. Sounds are programmed, locked-in. And menacing too, until halfway through where it shifts up a gear and sounds, as they said in a recent interview, like going to the top of a hill on a summer’s day, “taking a load of really good E and then running down the hill really fast…”

With Strange House, there were complaints that the Horrors on record didn’t sound ‘free’ enough, didn’t capture the energy of roughneck garage rock or the velocity of their live show. They’ve now sidestepped that problem by writing songs with less freedom. By treating the Real Stuff with the ambivalence it deserves, and dispassionately abandoning the bits that didn’t work while seizing upon new ideas and new sounds, they’ve tightened up and pared down to create an album that genuinely grows on you, revealing more with each listen - and it's catchy as fuck to boot.

I mean, what else could they do?

Peter Doherty, Troxy, 28th March 2009

2009-04-05T20:36:00.003+01:00

Peter Doherty @ Troxy, East London, 28th March 2009

Pt I

Redwhiteandblue lights like bunting and Union Jacks as towels.
Pete ‘Peter’ Doherty in three piece suit and hat and looking – older? Not quite. Confident though. Focused enough to tie a tie. Flanked by Graham Coxon, who sips Coke from a can and rips up a ‘Time For Heroes’ solo graceful and raw, giving the song the service it deserves and has never really had with Babyshambles.
Adam Ficek on drums, Drew McConnell on bass, “the hardest-drinking string section in the country” at the back. Stephen Street wearing a Native American chief’s headdress, Dot Allison on ‘Sheepskin Tearaway’, someone taking care of organ (nice) and melodica (wrong), Mik Whitnall for a split second, Wolfman and Lee Mavers of the La’s, who does a pre-encore of ‘There She Goes’ but seems otherwise surplus to requirements in this village fete-cum-variety show-cum Pete Doherty: This Is Your Life flypast.

Old stuff: Pete opens with ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’. There’s a middle acoustic section with ‘Can’t Stand Me Now’, ‘The Good Old Days’, ‘For Lovers’. He’s remembered how to play guitar. ‘Time For Heroes’ and ‘Fuck Forever’ are the final, bruising encore.

Some of the new songs work well with Stephen Street’s production/arrangements, like the village band Chas’n’Dave type numbers which are twee but done with enough conviction to be reasonably successful. But other new efforts feel weighed down, too decorated. When Street produced Morrissey, he created a solid support for an expansive, resonant voice. But Pete’s is fragile and mercurial, punctuated with shrieking, whispering and mumbling. His lyrics are just as vital as Morrissey’s, but it’s always been hard to hear Pete when he’s singing live and his voice (and words) are squeezed out now by melodica, strings and the heavy Babyshambles bass that used to be necessary to keep the whole thing on the rails and now just feels impolite. Even Coxon’s sexy guitar squall feels a mite unnecessary, though some of us get perverse pleasure out of what he does to his Tele.

Pt II

Sonic Youth said to Kill Your Idols but in the end your stomach still tightens for ‘Music When The Lights Go Out’ as you remember how Pete’s words cut through the sad small town life of yours years ago, offering a taste of love and meaning and shared or imaginary-shared moments with an English thorn in your side.

But now of course there are the Lads, the Shambles army, the polo-shirted, arms-round-shoulders terrace singalong Lads who love Pete – how? Why? (And is the new additional ‘r’ an attempt to shrug off the advances of the Lads and their beery man-love?) And more: there are their ironed-hair girlfriends and the forty-something-till-I-die brigade; and the selfish cunt inside you who wants Peter and his words all to yourself is angry and can’t believe all these people, these people who talk through songs and go back-forth to the bar, laughing in your ear, you can’t believe all these people could possibly feel all that you feel/t hearing “alarm bells ring when you say your heart still sings when you’re with me/ Oh please forgive me…”

But the Lads are here, and so we move on, and the idol is floated out on a pyre and you’re left with a new album of old songs, embellished like a creased old tart dripping in gold baubles picked up through the years, painted over but not so you can’t still see old beauty through the cracks. And it’s okay, because at home in a bottom drawer there’s a handful of scratched-up CD-Rs of those sessions where Pete + guitar + coughs + “Got me nuts?” = EQUALLED everything, once.

Titus Andronicus, The Airing of Grievances

2009-03-21T20:58:00.005Z

[published Feb 2 2009]

Wipe down the wet patch Pitchfork left after their groin-thruster of a review and wrap your ears round The Airing of Grievances. It’s what they call a ‘blogosphere hit’.

Titus Andronicus are some guys from New Jersey who want you to know that they read lots of books and are, like, cultured. This here is their debut, and on first listen it’s a pain in the ass. Every song seems to be struggling under muddy overdubs and crappy distortions that they probably thought sounded like shoegaze. Kevin Shields would laugh these pups out the room. Actually, no, Kevin Shields would just make a noncommittal ‘mmph’ and get on with whatever he was doing before in Shieldsland.

‘Arms Against Atrophy’ has an admittedly fantastic fiddly guitar solo that could’ve come straight from the frets of Albert Hammond Jr., but really if you wanted that kind of stuff there are five separate full-length albums featuring the real thing available in a record shop near you. ‘My Time Outside the Womb’ also treads the fine line between referencing and karaoke, especially with singer Patrick Stickles’ mumble-shrieks and general Strokes-y rhythms.

And weirder: the psychology of Abraham Maslow mentioned in a song titled ‘Upon Viewing Bruegel’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”’? It should be wrong, but...it kind of works followed up with ‘Titus Andronicus’, a neat slab of ‘White Riot’ riffing that ends right when it should at 3:13. The way Stickles crams in lyrics so they bulge awkwardly off each line is pretty charming too, especially when they go like this: “Life's been a long, sick game of ‘Would You Rather’/ So now I'm going to medical school, as a cadaver.”

By third listen the songs are really laying down roots and the next day I've got that beery chanting glued to my inner ear. TA have clearly done their required reading - but next semester they should consider wearing their influences, musical and literary, further inside their sleeves and let their words take the music somewhere new. And maybe watch some bad movies.

Cildo Meireles, Tate Modern

2009-01-25T22:16:00.002Z

Cildo Meireles,
Tate Modern

‘Volatile’ is a mystery reserved for four people at a time. The final work in the Cildo Meireles retrospective at Tate Modern requires you to take off your shoes and socks and brave the step into darkness. What you find, when your eyes adjust, is Meireles’ work at its most dangerous and its most achingly beautiful.

Britain’s first comprehensive retrospective of this Brazilian artist’s work is an immersive, emotional and sensory experience. Down the river, the Turner Prize show is a mortuary of dry, sexless ideas in comparison. Meireles’ work, for me, approaches the apex of what Conceptual Art could and should be, leaping out at you in a shriek of red ink and ticking clocks. What he does, and what the Turner Prize has forgotten how to do, is to combine ideas with art to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts, so that the artwork is not merely a symbol of an idea or a representation of a bone-dry essay, but a thing that stands on its own, inviting a variety of responses including, perhaps, a non-intellectual one.

In a nutshell, Meireles’ work pours cold water on our contemporary artistic fixations. His concept of Conceptual is not to re-present objects in a way that frames some clunky, inflexible academic idea, reducing it to a full stop at the end of a train of thought, but to open up our responses with something playful that nevertheless conceals a darker heart.

Dynamic narratives are created from everyday objects like Coke bottles, pennies, radios and rulers – personal objects we all own that are laden with symbolism. From these nuts and bolts he explores political corruption, time and space, the subversion of authority and the concept of infinity. ‘For me,’ Meireles has said, ‘the art object must be, despite everything else, instantly seductive.’

In ‘Mission/Missions (How To Build Cathedrals)’, a pool of copper pennies invites you to dip your hand and rake the shallows, evocative of blood drip-dripping from the mausoleum of bones above you. A string of communion wafers ascends towards some higher spirituality, ironically offering the body of Christ in a bid to eradicate the cannibalism of the indigenous people of Brazil. Many artists can do political, historical and subversive. But few do it so sensually or with such simple meditative intensity.

The viewer – or, more accurately, the participant – is required not just to think but to feel, to hear hundreds of radios whispering in your ear, or the sheer volume of a room where every object is red, or cold shivers down your neck as glass cracks beneath you. Some mysteries are best left unexplained.

Shearwater, St Giles-in-the-Fields, 22 November

2009-01-04T22:50:00.002Z

Shearwater @ St Giles-in-the-Fields Church, 22^nd November

St Giles-in-the-Fields, nestled in the monolithic shadow of Centrepoint, imposes an attentive quietude on its congregation. Shearwater hold court as our hands and noses turn to ice and chasten our mouths into an awed silence.

Last time I was at St Giles, high priestess Patti Smith held a vigil for Saints Rimbaud and Hendrix, her religious imagery by turns blasphemous and sublime. Tonight, Shearwater scale down the lyrical content to songs for tiny sparrows (God’s most cared-for living thing, as you know), but scale up the sound, barging in on the freezing, silent air and crashing down in grand piano bashes, guitar squall, clattering percussion and, leading the charge, frontman Jonathan Meiburg’s mesmeric voice, mouse-quiet one moment and gale force ten the next.

The band, featuring upright bass, melting electronics and multi-instrumentalist dude Thor, also explores the quieter side of indie rock as originally intended by its two founder members, also of Austin, TX band Okkervil River. The evening ceremony is broadcast to our souls, clear and affecting in the pin-drop silence as we huddle together with scarves wrapped around ears and hands. We got that, loud and clear.

Hokaben, 93 Feet East, 7-8-9 November

2008-12-01T00:16:00.001Z

Hokaben Festival @ 93 Feet East. 7-8-9 October

Culture casts a wide net these days. John Cage pulled off his 4’ 33” of silence all the way back in 1952, so in a sense extreme music has already been pushed as far as it can ever go. Equally, listeners tend to accept almost anything on a CD as music, even if they can’t stomach it or don’t understand it.

Aufgehoben do their damndest to push that concept to its limits. Two drums engage in a perpetual clatter-battle backed by a guitar tricked out to deliver notes as white noise, and behind them chirrups and ambient sighs are teased from a tabletop of buttons and boxes. People are standing very still, earplugs safely installed. Concentrate. Concentrate! This is art! This is avant garde!

Aufgehoben aren’t the only band this weekend to pose the very open question: music, art or noise? Hokaben is billed as bringing the weirdest, heaviest and craziest bands together with, in their words, “not a foppish indie band or yawnsome postrock band in sight.” There are beards, there are moustaches, and there are males - lots of them. An asexual politeness pervades proceedings, almost extending into a tolerance rather than an appreciation of the bands, only a handful of which are well-known. The rest may have consigned themselves by default to a fringe existence: Bilgepump, Chops, Arabrot. Not top 40 stuff, on the whole.

Hokaben challenges the accepted boundaries of music, so much so that during another set of ear-warping heaviness the thought creeps in: is it possible that not all the bands playing are even supposed to be good? Guys like Trencher and DJ Scotch Egg tinker knowingly on the divide between music and noise, staying just on the right side of listenable. Occasionally though, the line-up veers into wildly different territory, forcing you to think a bit harder about what is and is not music. Illegal Seagull ‘curate’ the Gallery Bar on Saturday, and it’s basically a disaster. Looking like they got lost on the way to Bar Music Hall doesn’t really get the beardies onside, and their music is pure trash – garbled shouts over tacky backing tracks. Most take one look and leave, but you can’t help wondering if this was a Hokaben joke, pitting noise against noise and exposing the prejudice of one ‘alternative’ crowd against another. The Shoreditch kids and the beardos may like to pretend the other doesn’t exist, but in a sense they have the same ideas and ambitions for their art, driven by concepts of confrontation and alienation.

As a three-dayer, Hokaben is a weird one. By removing any trace of corporate sponsorship and branding, the Plan B magazine organisers have created a unique space for the audience to engage with music, art and noise. Playing different kinds of experimentalism off against each other, Hokaben exposes a rich seam of adventurism and artistry situated well and truly on the fringes.

Fashion V Sport, V&A Museum

2008-11-25T12:17:00.001Z

Fashion V Sport
V&A Museum

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been sartorially bamboozled by fishing. Hunting and shooting are easy peasy of course - jodhpurs for the first, a chic quilted Barbour for the second, and always pearl earrings. But riverside elegance has me stumped, and the fashion section of the Angling Times is hopeless. Thank god Chanel has come up with its own luxury fishing bag, with classic leather-and-chain straps, a monochrome reel and a separate clutch to carry the flies, bearing the double-C logo on each tiny wing. Now that’s luxury, baby.

Chanel’s fishing kit, looking decidedly pre-credit crunch now, is perhaps the ultimate expression of fashion versus sport. Luxury brand meets practical functionality in a tasteless collision powered by green dollar signs in Karl Lagerfeld’s eyes, and ironically enough, the end result is a product that’s not especially fashionable or sporty.

As attitudes to dress have relaxed over the past hundred years, we have adopted sports clothing as everyday wear, from polo shirts to running shoes to oversized hoodies. Sportswear also has close ties with the parallel fashion world of streetwear, and the boundaries between street, sport and couture are continually traversed as Chanel creates wetsuits while Nike launches a line of high heels and Dries Van Noten mimics skater style.

In Fashion V Sport, the V&A has put the spotlight on our voracious consumption of sports goods and the desires and obsessions that lurk behind our shopping habits. The items on display are extreme examples, certainly, but what is it that makes a man collect thousands of pairs of trainers, designed to be durable, comfortable and performance-enhancing, and not even put them on his feet? Kish has been collecting sports shoes since 1982, and a small sample of his vast catalogue is on display here. The sight of dozens of pristine shoes in neat rows and columns, virginal and brightly coloured, is a horrifying distillation of late twentieth century consumerism. At least Carrie Bradshaw wears her Manolos – this ostentatious display is showy and yet impotent. What does Kish do if he actually likes a pair? Does he buy two, one for his collection and one for his feet?

Adidas has embarked on dozens of collaborative projects with fashion designers including Stella McCartney, Yohji Yamamoto and Jeremy Scott, and even artists like Keith Haring (posthumously, but even so). With expensive high fashion goods, you pay for the technical skill, labour and quality materials that go into the product, as well as the brand itself. In sportswear though, the manufacturing process is designed to be as cheap as possible, with value added only once the label is stitched on. So the only way to hike up the price and create a feel of exclusivity to match that of couture is to limit production, knowing that demand will outstrip supply.

The Adidas 35^th anniversary Superstar trainers, made in collaboration with Japanese streetwear brand Neighborhood, are on display here. They’re pretty ordinary, although made with leather and rubber. But only 200 pairs have ever been made, making them one of the most desirable Adidas items around. Kish would be salivating at the thought. Adidas relies on collectors to pay over the odds for ‘exclusive’ trainers, and in turn encourages them by creating these collectable products. It’s a bizarre concept, but one that we barely question.

Fashion V Sport’s visitors are a mix of design students, families and young males getting far too excited over a pair of anaconda skin Nike Air Force Ones. They all browse around, skimming the clothes until their eye lands on this or that. “Weird,” they say at the hood of an Aitor Throup jacket, designed to look like an elephant with flappy ears and two limp jersey trunks. “I hate those,” says one mum as she spots the Vivienne Westwood ultra-low crotch sweatpants. Museum-goers seem to adopt a depressingly consumerist mindset at fashion exhibitions. They scan the displays as though they’re racks, shopping for things that appeal instantly and reacting by ‘”loving this” or “hating that”, failing to register clothes as design, art, or artefact.

It’s a somewhat inevitable problem, but as fashion in museums is becoming more popular and more academically acceptable, it’s really the curator’s responsibility to aid the visitors’ understanding. Fashion V Sport has something profound and alarming to say about our society, but it can slip away all too easily when baubles are displayed as art, and art as baubles.

Concrete and Glass festival, Shoreditch 2-3/10/2008

2008-11-05T20:16:00.003Z

Concrete and Glass festival
2-3 October
Various venues, Shoreditch
co-written with E. Ali

Thursday

In the corner by the stage there is either: a) a medieval weapon, like a catapult but with measly firepower; b) a loom; or c) an instrument. Turns out Owl Project is a kind of musicians’ woodworking club, and the rickety frame is a homemade lathe. Logs are chopped and wood is sawn, and slowly, slowly, the pieces slot together. Humming, sawing, scraping sounds grow organically as rhythms are picked up, looped and extended through a laptop. A dial-up connection bursts in and beats shuffle together and fall apart as tradition meets technology. It’s way cool, and it’s a perfect introduction to the Concrete and Glass festival, a new multi-venue event in East London featuring art across dozens of venues and a choice selection of music from the experimental (Owl Project definitely falling into this category) to the, er, experimental and more famous (TV On The Radio, Errors).

A fusion of Clash skanking, funeral marching and gypsy dancing isn’t so special these days, but how many bands do it in the same song? Quite a few probably, but Bodies Of Water have such an elegant way with splicing that when the ideas hit you all at once its neither contrived nor slapdash. Their DIY baroque is utterly beguiling, especially during a guitar-violin duel which gives the front row a solid drenching of perfect feedback. Your new favourite band.

Rounding off Thursday, Glaswegian foursome Errors are definitely on to a winning formula with their oddball blend of acid house and post-rock causing a mass migration to the upstairs of The Old Blue Last. There’s barely space to breathe, let alone dance, but the driving percussion and shower of bleeps proves hard to resist for most of the audience.

Friday

Sky Larkin’s new arrangement as a trio seems to have worked out, ‘cos their track ‘Antibodies’ is on 6Music every seven minutes, by my estimates. Sadly their new material is short on ideas and suffers from stodgy drumming that drowns out Katie’s voice and subtle guitarwork. Next at 93 Feet East though, Port O’Brien showcase their thoughtful folk-rock featuring banjo, pots and pans and sea shanty chants. Live, the songs have a stripped down, raw edge, with singer Van Pierszalowski’s impassioned and fragile vocals recalling Daniel Johnston.

It’s a simple idea but Bass Clef got there first – dubstep meets trombone, they make beautiful music babies together. The live experience in the basement of Zigfrid’s features heavy, heavy dread sounds and reverb brass from outer space, so it’s a must-see, really.

A massive crowd packs The Old Blue in anticipation of the stupidly talented 21 year old Micachu, who has already had one of her compositions performed by the London Philharmonic. Her early success is obviously deserved as she shows off her sneeringly clever songs in which genres merge together in a colourful, cerebral, beautiful mess.

Finally, after queueing for an hour, we make it into Plastic People where James Holden rounds off the night with a DJ set of the warmest, glitchiest minimal techno you could ask for on a Friday night in Shoreditch. Well played, C&G.

The House of Viktor & Rolf

2008-10-01T23:46:00.001+01:00

The House of Viktor & Rolf

Barbican Art Gallery

Viktor & Rolf are artists. They just happen to make clothes. Their first pieces, and in fact, a large proportion of all their pieces, are not exactly made to be worn. An early collection consisted of puffed out golden costumes, empty of a wearer and suspended above the ground casting ‘shadows’ of black organza shapes below. Wouldn’t fit too fabulously with your new Office pumps, probably.

Their art is all about the concept. Where most designers and shoppers want to have the prettiest, the sexiest, the most luxurious, V&R make no excuses for the challenges they pose to conventional beauty and the factory-farm fashion industry. Since their first meeting as fashion students at Arnhem art academy, Viktor & Rolf have struggled to come to terms with their own position within the industry.

Early collections saw the pair refuse to show at all, instead stationing models across Paris armed with placards: Viktor & Rolf on strike. At once in love and in hate with the glossy fashion cocoon that has showered praise on them from the start (even when, in doing so, it acknowledges the criticisms levelled at it), V&R seem to be obsessed with opposites.

Seeing the pair’s chronological progression in this career retrospective at the Barbican, it’s striking how they are so keen to abandon the sentiment of each previous collection while retaining a solid identity, obvious even in early prototypes. And that identity, that V&R essence, is like a controlled madness – the giddy whimsy of the Flowerbomb collection, complete with crimped afro hair pieces, saccharine florals and models dancing down the aisles, contrasts violently with the Black collection, featuring models painted a dusty charcoal on every inch of skin and parading the darkest of dark clothes from head to toe.

Elsewhere – because this show is really more of a gallery of separate installations than a list of past collections – the Blue collection uses chromakey technology to project clouds, cityscapes and helicopters onto exquisitely detailed outfits of purest Yves Klein blue, creating a surprisingly haunting, even poignant effect. Yet the centrepiece of the exhibition is a giant three storey doll’s house populated with miniature porcelain dolls wearing exact copies of V&R’s most iconic and memorable pieces, right down to the Tilda Swinton doll with slicked back flaming red hair and ten collars piled high on top of each other.

The fashion equivalent of a fondant fancy, it’s oversized, preening and playful against the seriousness of the Blue and Black collections. Head-to-toe black one season, purest white the next. Masculine tailoring meets the feminine goddess head-on in a floor-length chiffon dress the colour of marshmallow, one half of which is tucked into a single slim grey trouser leg. Opposites clash but always complement.

Viktor & Rolf recognise the inherent triviality and superficiality of fashion with its constantly changing trends and demands, but rather than shouting back in an overtly political way à la Katharine Hamnett (she of the 80s slogan t-shirt ‘CHOOSE LIFE’), they revel in its glossy vapidity. Marketing a perfume that doesn’t open as well as others that do, showing their clothes on mannequins with porcelain dolls’ heads - it’s a dressing up game with a childish appeal, and yet the ideas propping up the V&R show are entirely adult.

It’s bafflingly good, and likely to surprise and impress even the most hardcore of existing V&R fans. This is a design team who see the catwalk as their canvas, as a venue for a happening, as a place to protest and pout in equal measure. Though V&R have a ready-to-wear line, not to mention a high street collaboration with H&M two years ago, it still takes a certain woman to wear a cocktail dress filled with helium balloons. Polarising stuff.

These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid

2008-08-02T20:10:00.001+01:00

These New Puritans, Beat Pyramid
Domino

Like an agitated teenager adrift from the early 80s, Jack Barnett, the spindly frontman of These New Puritans, has one foot in our digitised urban jungle of tarmac and grime (in the physical and musical senses) and the other in parallel realms of occultist mantras, astrology and mythology. Beat Pyramid, the debut from the malnourished Southend four-piece, is a scatterbrain collection of urgent guitars, drone-fuzz bass, looping textures and wild tangents, veering from danceable post-punk to whirring soundscape interludes, all peppered with an ironic deadpan that makes no bones about its debt to Mark E Smith. The lyrics are both intensely cryptic and laughably banal; a bizarre reference to Michael Barrymore on ‘MKK3’ and the profound emptiness of the repeated “0800, 0800” on ‘Elvis’ place the record in a fantasy galaxy, floating alongside the magickal space-age of Myths Of The Near Future but with its roots in a very British melancholia.

For a debut record it’s an astonishing achievement. An ode to pre-Socratic philosophers on the sparse and fantastically grimy ‘Infinity Ytinifni’ rubs up against the playground punk of ‘Numerology AKA Numbers’ - but it’s obvious that this is a juvenile effort, in the best possible sense. The sheer volume of ideas and influences here could contribute to a truly classic album a few years down the line when they’ve grown out of their ADD mindsets and started drinking grown-up beer. Like when a four year old stops drawing stick-men and progresses to wobbly arms and googly eyes: TNP are way ahead of their peers, but Beat Pyramid ain’t their Mona Lisa. This really is a band that needs to be nurtured properly and not just shoved off the roundabout of indie fame when ‘the new New Puritans’ pop up in about, ooh, three weeks?

26/01/2008