While we've got a moment, let's talk about the rest of the year. We have a friend who for Christmas 2006 was writing a bathroom reader-style book and got the first test prints through that June for publication in September. The publishing house then decided that with demand exceeding their expectations they'd be best to knuckle down to improve the proofs and repro, which might have meant the release being delayed by a few weeks. On that news, the publishers decided to delay the release - a book that would most likely be a order filler, don't forget - by a full year, as the stockists were unlikely to even consider it for point of sale display if it arrived any later.
We're guessing it's pretty much the same with album release cycles. It's not exactly a trade secret to say the industry takes the summer off and lets the releases sort themselves out, which this year entails making a good deal of space Viva La Vida Or All That and running for it, hence the only real impact in the top ten by new albums since then being the increasingly die hard-led Primal Scream and this new thing where even faceless dance acts get to sell albums in decent numbers (Basshunter, Darren Styles). The labels are just about coming back with tans and straw donkeys now to give their new priority acts a quick leg-up, so this week you've got the debuts from Noah And The Whale, of whom more soon, and The Script, of whom more never, with any luck, but indicative of a new trend where labels get to push a big new contender into place when we're at our weakest - Kate Nash rushed into place and Newton Faulkner ambling in slightly later last year, Lily Allen and James Morrison in 2006.
Things don't actually get back into place until Reading & Leeds week, when suddenly the powers that be notice there's a lot of music interest going on and hence throw at us crucial comebacks from The Verve, The Automatic and Slipknot plus new Missy Elliott, grown up Miley Cyrus and another Michael Jackson Best Of. They still buy them, you know. In the first half of September, apart from Metallica bringing their release date well forward, there's a growing number of releases but they're clearly working towards something as the top line is a mix of more touted debutants (Glasvegas, Little Jackie, Sam Beeton) and singles collections (The Coral, Chemical Brothers). But then, the month turns the halfway mark and... Kings Of Leon! The Streets! Queen & Paul Rodgers! Nelly! Pussycat Dolls! Plus Nelly, McFly, Katy Sodding Perry, Paolo Nutini, Natasha Bedingfield... even Mogwai know the key is to time your run, and that's before October comes with its Oasis, Kaiser Chiefs, Keane, Will Young, Travis, James Morrison, Funeral For A Friend, Trivium and ex-G4 Jonathan Ansell, plus the latest rumoured ETA of Chinese Democracy. The end of the month? Rumours say U2, Razorlight and Bloc Party all vying for shelf space with Dido just afterwards and the Flaming Lips and Fall Out Boy possibly having something out before the labels lapse back into Greatest Hits and back catalogue for stocking filler mode. Morrissey has had to delay his album, initially due in September, to 2009 just to get it out of the pathway. Fucking hell, frankly.
So where does all this multinational star willy-waving leave us? Well, we were doing a stock check the other day into album releases that interest us and even in our little cloistered world there's little let-up, with virtually no end of interesting releases in that late September/early October critical period. 13th October, which already boasts Okkervil River (a good month after the rest of the world for some reason), Los Campesinos!, I'm From Barcelona and Eugene McGuinness with more announcements surely pending, is looking particularly bad on the bank balance but no more than 29th September, which boasts Jeremy Warmsley, Mercury Rev, the Hot Puppies and a Saint Etienne Best Of. It's all about timing, see, and an entire year's label outlay condensed into a month and a half. They call it choice.
So yeah, turning to What CD? matters, Noah And The Whale finally follow fellow young pretension travellers Marling and Flynn into the long form racks, although the success, and indeed the sound of the single that made them famous, has put something of a playing card into the spokes of Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down. Firstly, as is now traditional with all bands who've had demos circulating the net for some time we look to see what's made the tracklisting at this crucial stage and what has been left abandoned to the elements, and while Jocasta and Rocks And Daggers have made the cut, both boosted somewhat, Beating and Death By Numbers have been put down to youthful inexperience. Oddly, so has former single Two Bodies One Heart, although its lyrics have been cannibalised for opener 2 Atoms In A Molecule. It's a very hard album to dislike, overcoming all that nu-folk nonsense (which we technically started, so sorry) for one of those communal uplift masking dark lyrics collections you tend to hear so much about now, using the elements of stereotypical twee (ukeleles, handclaps, accordion, whistling) in a different context with the more than odd dip into self-aware melancholy that comes across like Adam Green gone serious, and you don't even stop to wonder what accent that is that the John Martyn-timbred Charlie Fink is affecting. And providing backing vocals throughout is La...oh, right, sorry.
It should also be very much noted that two of those we hold most dear are releasing new singles this week. Jeremy Warmsley starts the clock ticking towards album two How We Became with a download release of the increasingly ace Lose My Cool, while Broken Records' elegaic Slow Parade comes out on 7" on Club Fandango's label while the A&Rs continue circling.
Showing posts with label in shops tomorrow. Show all posts
Showing posts with label in shops tomorrow. Show all posts
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Diet Weekender: Sweeping The Nation is away, being killed by lightning
Most of the stuff we'll leave for next week, but wouldn't you know it, things are getting back into gear in terms of new releases this week. Oh, the new albums are much of a muchness, led by the not entirely satisfying re-recording of old favourites and if not by any means a disaster then perhaps slightly missing the boat from when they seemed really special of artier than artrock XX Teens' Welcome To Goon Island, followed by the diversion of another band who seem to have been around for a long time without going full-length until now, Kitty Daisy & Lewis. We're guessing if you've been paying attention you'll know what this sounds like.
In the reissues, though, alongside Dinosaur Jnr's so-so but featuring Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher 1997 effort Hand It Over, we find a Husker Du live album. And not just any old package but The Living End, issued in 1994 but recorded during the Warehouse: Songs and Stories tour across 1987 and spanning their entire career but unavailable for some years. Rolling Stone's respected senior editor David Fricke pens extensive liner notes about the period and the breakup that followed but the music, starting with New Day Rising and ending with a cover of Sheena Is A Punk Rocker, is left to speak for itself.
Meanwhile, for a couple of years before the BBC picked up the ball and ran into their treehouse marquee with it, Channel 4 broadcast Glastonbury for a couple of years with Mark Radcliffe and Mark Lamarr as chief hosts, supposedly having it taken away for not fully reflecting the spirit of the event. In 1994 Johnny Cash singlehandedly turned the Sunday afternoon novelty turn spot into a gathering place for legends (although it seems to have moved back since Brian Wilson did it) with a classic performance, arguably the start of his critical renaissance, coming as it did just after the release of the first volume of American Recordings. Quite a bit to live up to, then, documented on Johnny Cash Went To Glastonbury, thirteen career spanning songs from that set plus a Johnny Walker interview from said coverage.
Bill Drummond has a good record with putting his thoughts into print. The Manual, despite an introduction get-out clause stating its authors believe it will have ceased to be relevant in a year's time, is still being cited by new bands, while 45 was a triumph of honesty, humour and self-aware pathos. We're not sure we get 17 yet but it's sure to be an intriguing venture nonetheless. As the title suggests it follows on from his series of The17 performances, one-offs involving a choir/audience of seventeen people, behind which lies a theory about finding new ways to connect to the love of music. Actually, we'll just quote the synopsis, that'll be easier: "Drummond analyses the past, present and possible future of music and the ways in which we hear and relate to it. He references his own contributions to the canon of popular music, and he provides fascinating insider portraits of the industry and its protagonists. But above all, he questions our ideas of music and our attitude to sound... A time has arrived where we can listen to any recorded music, from the entire history of recorded music, wherever, whenever, while doing whatever we want. This has meant our relationship with music is rapidly and fundamentally changing, faster than it has done for many decades. This is good for numerous reasons. But a by-product of this is that recorded music will no longer contain the meaning it once held for us. The era of recorded music is now passing and within the next decade it will begin to look and sound like a dated medium. Recorded music will be perceived as an art form very much of the 20th century. These notions excite me."
In the reissues, though, alongside Dinosaur Jnr's so-so but featuring Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher 1997 effort Hand It Over, we find a Husker Du live album. And not just any old package but The Living End, issued in 1994 but recorded during the Warehouse: Songs and Stories tour across 1987 and spanning their entire career but unavailable for some years. Rolling Stone's respected senior editor David Fricke pens extensive liner notes about the period and the breakup that followed but the music, starting with New Day Rising and ending with a cover of Sheena Is A Punk Rocker, is left to speak for itself.
Meanwhile, for a couple of years before the BBC picked up the ball and ran into their treehouse marquee with it, Channel 4 broadcast Glastonbury for a couple of years with Mark Radcliffe and Mark Lamarr as chief hosts, supposedly having it taken away for not fully reflecting the spirit of the event. In 1994 Johnny Cash singlehandedly turned the Sunday afternoon novelty turn spot into a gathering place for legends (although it seems to have moved back since Brian Wilson did it) with a classic performance, arguably the start of his critical renaissance, coming as it did just after the release of the first volume of American Recordings. Quite a bit to live up to, then, documented on Johnny Cash Went To Glastonbury, thirteen career spanning songs from that set plus a Johnny Walker interview from said coverage.
Bill Drummond has a good record with putting his thoughts into print. The Manual, despite an introduction get-out clause stating its authors believe it will have ceased to be relevant in a year's time, is still being cited by new bands, while 45 was a triumph of honesty, humour and self-aware pathos. We're not sure we get 17 yet but it's sure to be an intriguing venture nonetheless. As the title suggests it follows on from his series of The17 performances, one-offs involving a choir/audience of seventeen people, behind which lies a theory about finding new ways to connect to the love of music. Actually, we'll just quote the synopsis, that'll be easier: "Drummond analyses the past, present and possible future of music and the ways in which we hear and relate to it. He references his own contributions to the canon of popular music, and he provides fascinating insider portraits of the industry and its protagonists. But above all, he questions our ideas of music and our attitude to sound... A time has arrived where we can listen to any recorded music, from the entire history of recorded music, wherever, whenever, while doing whatever we want. This has meant our relationship with music is rapidly and fundamentally changing, faster than it has done for many decades. This is good for numerous reasons. But a by-product of this is that recorded music will no longer contain the meaning it once held for us. The era of recorded music is now passing and within the next decade it will begin to look and sound like a dated medium. Recorded music will be perceived as an art form very much of the 20th century. These notions excite me."
Sunday, January 06, 2008
In shops tomorrow - slight return
The weekend weekly business begins again next weekend, as the music industry isn't back at work yet. We should take a moment out, though, to mention the first quality singles of 2008, British Sea Power's Waving Flags and the Kills' 7" U.R.A. Fever, both of which are out tomorrow.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 17/12 and beyond
Singles
Christmas number one week, of course, and as good as most of the recipients of such attention are there's a certain uncomfortableness round here with all the campaigns going on. If it's not the received wisdom that X Factor winners are never seen again after a couple of weeks on top of the chart - this two weeks after Leona Lewis and Shayne Ward were numbers 1 and 2 respectively on the album chart - it's the belief that the only way to overcome a one-off event is a one-off novelty campaign-driven viral event creating their own one hit wonder manque. That's not to denigrate anyone involved, especially not Malcolm Middleton, who appears amusingly pissed off that We're All Going To Die has been taken up as this year's big post-ironic dark horse (Malcolm Middleton, subject of an amusing Radio 1 daytime campaign - who'd have thought?) Probably not as wryly annoyed as Aidan Moffatt is with it, in truth. And especially not the mighty Lucky Soul, although nobody appears to have run with last.fm's 40p download Christmas Chart Attack campaign for Lips Are Unhappy, which you should know well enough about given how long we've been banging on about it and them. Somewhere in the background are much loved by certain factions Aldershot post-grunge trio Reuben, who've pitched their tent in with download-only Christmas Is Awesome. There's a Nativity-themed B-side to the new single by Kat Flint, who we covered on STN more than a year ago and then neglected for quite a while through every fault of our own. Our bad - Go Faster Stripes effortlessly laps much of the folk-pop female singer-songwriter brigade, a warm-voiced, intelligently thought out lament like KT Tunstall had she been more in tune with the Fence Collective. And better.
Albums
Special editions and cash-in compilations are by and large the order of the day this close to Christmas, but The Manhattan Love Suicides, who are neither, are sneaking in there with their self titled debut's first proper UK release. Like the Jesus & Mary Chain meets the Shop Assistants, some will call a trashier, more drone-C86 Raveonettes without Sune's vocals, or draw parallels with early Lush, but this is no bad thing at all, especially when it's this self-assured. Elsewhere, the Pop Art label is putting out a charity download-only covers album, Covered At Christmas. Download? See the Radiohead model for pricing details. Those involved include Fruitbat out of Carter USM, MJ Hibbett & the Validators, Monica Queen, Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences, Pocketbooks, Mr Solo (The Vessel from David Devant & His Spirit Wife) and Subliminal Girls, and just to set the scope out those covered include Lucky Soul (Queen is doing Lips Are Unhappy), the Indelicates and Fanfarlo.
The future
Who'd be mad enough to release something on Christmas Eve? Plangent folkie Mechanical Bride, apparently, who puts, of all things, a cover of Umbrella out on 500 7"s then. New Year's Eve ekes out long after the album event singles from the White Stripes, Conquest on three 7"s, and Bjork, Declare Independence on two 12"s. One album of note out on the same date, but you've got it already. And that's it from this section - from January the wedon'twanttothinkaboutitjustyetth it gets shortened subsumed into the rejigged Weekender. Even we can only put a finite amount of effort in.
Christmas number one week, of course, and as good as most of the recipients of such attention are there's a certain uncomfortableness round here with all the campaigns going on. If it's not the received wisdom that X Factor winners are never seen again after a couple of weeks on top of the chart - this two weeks after Leona Lewis and Shayne Ward were numbers 1 and 2 respectively on the album chart - it's the belief that the only way to overcome a one-off event is a one-off novelty campaign-driven viral event creating their own one hit wonder manque. That's not to denigrate anyone involved, especially not Malcolm Middleton, who appears amusingly pissed off that We're All Going To Die has been taken up as this year's big post-ironic dark horse (Malcolm Middleton, subject of an amusing Radio 1 daytime campaign - who'd have thought?) Probably not as wryly annoyed as Aidan Moffatt is with it, in truth. And especially not the mighty Lucky Soul, although nobody appears to have run with last.fm's 40p download Christmas Chart Attack campaign for Lips Are Unhappy, which you should know well enough about given how long we've been banging on about it and them. Somewhere in the background are much loved by certain factions Aldershot post-grunge trio Reuben, who've pitched their tent in with download-only Christmas Is Awesome. There's a Nativity-themed B-side to the new single by Kat Flint, who we covered on STN more than a year ago and then neglected for quite a while through every fault of our own. Our bad - Go Faster Stripes effortlessly laps much of the folk-pop female singer-songwriter brigade, a warm-voiced, intelligently thought out lament like KT Tunstall had she been more in tune with the Fence Collective. And better.
Albums
Special editions and cash-in compilations are by and large the order of the day this close to Christmas, but The Manhattan Love Suicides, who are neither, are sneaking in there with their self titled debut's first proper UK release. Like the Jesus & Mary Chain meets the Shop Assistants, some will call a trashier, more drone-C86 Raveonettes without Sune's vocals, or draw parallels with early Lush, but this is no bad thing at all, especially when it's this self-assured. Elsewhere, the Pop Art label is putting out a charity download-only covers album, Covered At Christmas. Download? See the Radiohead model for pricing details. Those involved include Fruitbat out of Carter USM, MJ Hibbett & the Validators, Monica Queen, Paul Hawkins & Thee Awkward Silences, Pocketbooks, Mr Solo (The Vessel from David Devant & His Spirit Wife) and Subliminal Girls, and just to set the scope out those covered include Lucky Soul (Queen is doing Lips Are Unhappy), the Indelicates and Fanfarlo.
The future
Who'd be mad enough to release something on Christmas Eve? Plangent folkie Mechanical Bride, apparently, who puts, of all things, a cover of Umbrella out on 500 7"s then. New Year's Eve ekes out long after the album event singles from the White Stripes, Conquest on three 7"s, and Bjork, Declare Independence on two 12"s. One album of note out on the same date, but you've got it already. And that's it from this section - from January the wedon'twanttothinkaboutitjustyetth it gets shortened subsumed into the rejigged Weekender. Even we can only put a finite amount of effort in.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 10/12
Singles
Tipping Foals for 2008 commercial success is, we feel, more out of hope than bitter experience - Skins or no Skins (and do search out that special episode for Yannis Phillipakis' acting cameo, proving David Bowie and Sting have serious upcoming competition in the pro-am stakes). They may want to make the fashionable kids dance, but the charts are so unpredictable at the moment and their own herky-jerkiness so left of centre that we might be sitting here in a couple of years wondering where it all went wrong. We learned the hard way from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. All of which is mere bagatelle next to the intricate mechanics of first full-scale release Balloons, the first fruits of their work with Dave Sitek. Holy Fuck also have their own approach, creating what often sounds like pre-programmed dancepunk sequences without the aid of any programming whatsoever, just a lot of antique synths, a lot of percussion and a lot of fluid rehearsal. Milkshake propulses like little else. It'd be stretching the point to call Miracle Fortress propulsive, but they made a pretty good stab at 2007's sub-genre of One Person Sounding A Bit Like Smile Did In Brian Wilson's Head, the person here being Montreal's Graham van Pelt. Have You Seen In Your Dreams also reminds us of the Sleepy Jackson's psychedelic excursions before Luke Steele stopped making out he was mad and became actually mad. The New Wave of New Wave of New Wave, as we like to think of it, may well have settled into bland orthodoxy by now but it can still provide the odd ear-pricking new band of excellence. The Chiara L's - fronted by one Chiara Lucchini, which while hardly thinking outside the box at least gives them a free pass away from the other modern trend of appalling new band names - take audible inspiration as much from Kill Rock Stars and K Records as C86 and fellow Leodensians Gang Of Four on debut double A Knives/Kate's Kid. Watch them carefully. The first Christmas single of the year is also out, and you'd think that they'd have been more careful with the release date with a full week still to go, especially as chart watcher - alright, BBC chart-based show watcher - Eddie Argos is involved. The Black Arts is, give or take a couple of people, Argos plus the reconstituted Black Box Recorder, and Christmas Number One is the post-modern, well-vowelled pre-ironic pop that combination sounds like it should be. Why is Fairytale Of New York back out again? (Unless it's for Justice For Kirsty, in which case fair enough)
Albums
They said it'd never happen, for mental health reasons more than anything else, but even in this age of the comeback it's a pleasant surprise to hear through the cyber-mouthpiece of Lord Snooty's giant poisoned electric head that thirty six years after Let's Make Up And Be Friendly, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band have made a new album. It's called Pour l'Amour des Chiens, and reunites all living members of the original line-up, the enormous hole in the middle that Vivian Stanshall left filled variously by Phill Jupitus and Adrian Edmondson, who went on tour with them last year (we saw them; it was spectacular), and Stephen Fry, who's been mentally filling Stanshall's position for a good twenty years anyway. No idea what it sounds like, and we can't say the prospect of a cover of I Predict A Riot fills us with great levels of anticipation, but you never know, and to quote Jupitus' final words on said night, "it's the fucking Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band!" There's a DVD of unreleased live material too. Anthony Reynolds was nearly the Big Shot around 1996-97 as singer with lowlife romantics Jack, and his debt solo album British Ballads still sees him treading the Scott Walker route, with guests Vashti Bunyan, Dot Allison and Simon Raymonde of the Cocteau Twins. Radiohead may now be bringing down the entire record industry and its antediluvian concepts of payment (apart from the £42.50 for London gig tickets, natch) from within their pre-fabricated concrete cold bunker but EMI will have the last laugh yet, as while Discboxes arrive at front doors nationwide they're putting out a box set of all six previous studio albums plus the live set I Might Be Wrong. If everybody knows that a healthy body makes a healthy mind, Shaun Ryder's lopsided lyrical flows have a raison d'etre. Bummed and Pills 'n' Thrills And Bellyaches recall the good times of 1988 and 1990 respectively and come with an extra disc of remixes, in the former's WFL's case those that nearly defined a clubbing generation. MF Doom and Madlib's Madvillain collaboration Madvillainy was enough to burst the bag, sir, of many a leftfield hip-hop fan in 2004 and is widely regarded as the genre's best independent release of the decade. And as the air turns cold and town centre international markets resemble the sweet essence of giraffe, those Christmas compilations keep on coming back out, this week's choice being last year's The Best KIDS Christmas Album In The World…Ever Ever Ever (the Wombats, the Young Playthings, Popular Workshop, Oppenheimer, It Hugs Back, Findlay Brown).
Books
Our bookshelf, just up there, has a steadily growing collection of the works of 33 1/3, the series of small books about influential albums. As a demonstration of its scope, 33 1/3 Greatest Hits Volume 2 features extracts from numbers 21 to 40 inclusive, which are about... Armed Forces, Murmur, Grace, Entroducing, Kick Out The Jams, Born in the USA, Low, Music from Big Pink, In the Aeroplane Over The Sea, There's a Riot Goin' On, Doolittle, Paul's Boutique, The Stone Roses, In Utero, Highway 61 Revisited, Loveless, The Who Sell Out, Bee Thousand, Daydream Nation and Court And Spark. Adding itself in fifty-second place to the big list this week is Nick Drake's Pink Moon, given the once-over by by Pitchfork's Amanda Petrusich including interviews with Joe Boyd, Robert Kirby and the creatives who chose the title track for an American VW advert.
Tipping Foals for 2008 commercial success is, we feel, more out of hope than bitter experience - Skins or no Skins (and do search out that special episode for Yannis Phillipakis' acting cameo, proving David Bowie and Sting have serious upcoming competition in the pro-am stakes). They may want to make the fashionable kids dance, but the charts are so unpredictable at the moment and their own herky-jerkiness so left of centre that we might be sitting here in a couple of years wondering where it all went wrong. We learned the hard way from Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. All of which is mere bagatelle next to the intricate mechanics of first full-scale release Balloons, the first fruits of their work with Dave Sitek. Holy Fuck also have their own approach, creating what often sounds like pre-programmed dancepunk sequences without the aid of any programming whatsoever, just a lot of antique synths, a lot of percussion and a lot of fluid rehearsal. Milkshake propulses like little else. It'd be stretching the point to call Miracle Fortress propulsive, but they made a pretty good stab at 2007's sub-genre of One Person Sounding A Bit Like Smile Did In Brian Wilson's Head, the person here being Montreal's Graham van Pelt. Have You Seen In Your Dreams also reminds us of the Sleepy Jackson's psychedelic excursions before Luke Steele stopped making out he was mad and became actually mad. The New Wave of New Wave of New Wave, as we like to think of it, may well have settled into bland orthodoxy by now but it can still provide the odd ear-pricking new band of excellence. The Chiara L's - fronted by one Chiara Lucchini, which while hardly thinking outside the box at least gives them a free pass away from the other modern trend of appalling new band names - take audible inspiration as much from Kill Rock Stars and K Records as C86 and fellow Leodensians Gang Of Four on debut double A Knives/Kate's Kid. Watch them carefully. The first Christmas single of the year is also out, and you'd think that they'd have been more careful with the release date with a full week still to go, especially as chart watcher - alright, BBC chart-based show watcher - Eddie Argos is involved. The Black Arts is, give or take a couple of people, Argos plus the reconstituted Black Box Recorder, and Christmas Number One is the post-modern, well-vowelled pre-ironic pop that combination sounds like it should be. Why is Fairytale Of New York back out again? (Unless it's for Justice For Kirsty, in which case fair enough)
Albums
They said it'd never happen, for mental health reasons more than anything else, but even in this age of the comeback it's a pleasant surprise to hear through the cyber-mouthpiece of Lord Snooty's giant poisoned electric head that thirty six years after Let's Make Up And Be Friendly, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band have made a new album. It's called Pour l'Amour des Chiens, and reunites all living members of the original line-up, the enormous hole in the middle that Vivian Stanshall left filled variously by Phill Jupitus and Adrian Edmondson, who went on tour with them last year (we saw them; it was spectacular), and Stephen Fry, who's been mentally filling Stanshall's position for a good twenty years anyway. No idea what it sounds like, and we can't say the prospect of a cover of I Predict A Riot fills us with great levels of anticipation, but you never know, and to quote Jupitus' final words on said night, "it's the fucking Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band!" There's a DVD of unreleased live material too. Anthony Reynolds was nearly the Big Shot around 1996-97 as singer with lowlife romantics Jack, and his debt solo album British Ballads still sees him treading the Scott Walker route, with guests Vashti Bunyan, Dot Allison and Simon Raymonde of the Cocteau Twins. Radiohead may now be bringing down the entire record industry and its antediluvian concepts of payment (apart from the £42.50 for London gig tickets, natch) from within their pre-fabricated concrete cold bunker but EMI will have the last laugh yet, as while Discboxes arrive at front doors nationwide they're putting out a box set of all six previous studio albums plus the live set I Might Be Wrong. If everybody knows that a healthy body makes a healthy mind, Shaun Ryder's lopsided lyrical flows have a raison d'etre. Bummed and Pills 'n' Thrills And Bellyaches recall the good times of 1988 and 1990 respectively and come with an extra disc of remixes, in the former's WFL's case those that nearly defined a clubbing generation. MF Doom and Madlib's Madvillain collaboration Madvillainy was enough to burst the bag, sir, of many a leftfield hip-hop fan in 2004 and is widely regarded as the genre's best independent release of the decade. And as the air turns cold and town centre international markets resemble the sweet essence of giraffe, those Christmas compilations keep on coming back out, this week's choice being last year's The Best KIDS Christmas Album In The World…Ever Ever Ever (the Wombats, the Young Playthings, Popular Workshop, Oppenheimer, It Hugs Back, Findlay Brown).
Books
Our bookshelf, just up there, has a steadily growing collection of the works of 33 1/3, the series of small books about influential albums. As a demonstration of its scope, 33 1/3 Greatest Hits Volume 2 features extracts from numbers 21 to 40 inclusive, which are about... Armed Forces, Murmur, Grace, Entroducing, Kick Out The Jams, Born in the USA, Low, Music from Big Pink, In the Aeroplane Over The Sea, There's a Riot Goin' On, Doolittle, Paul's Boutique, The Stone Roses, In Utero, Highway 61 Revisited, Loveless, The Who Sell Out, Bee Thousand, Daydream Nation and Court And Spark. Adding itself in fifty-second place to the big list this week is Nick Drake's Pink Moon, given the once-over by by Pitchfork's Amanda Petrusich including interviews with Joe Boyd, Robert Kirby and the creatives who chose the title track for an American VW advert.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 3/12
Singles
One of our most inventive and colourful singer-songwriters releases their third proper single on Monday, That's right, Stan's Bin Bag Song by Stan Boardman. Oh yeah, some chancer called Emmy The Great's got a 7" out as well. Again self-released, which when Adele is getting the sort of production treatment usually reserved for Melanie C records is a very good thing, Gabriel is apparently about a teenage fan, which makes the delicacy and turn of phrase of the kind of love song slightly disturbing if you ask us. In a land where the female singer-songwriter gates are flooded, as one fan of 60s female singers might have it, it's pleasing that they're not all signing the first deal that comes their way and are actually concentrating on making their art better and more individual. Don't you think? Surprise Radcliffe & Maconie record of the week Wake The President's Remember Fun? is, depending on what you believe, out either last Monday or next Monday, and as you know in all such cases of miscommunication we take the mean average. Whichever, it's well worth taking note of their Orange Juice-meets-Felt-meets-Malcolm Middleton indiepop like momma used to make. Definitely last week, but we've only just found out, saw the release of oddball antifolkers The Bobby McGee’s latest EP, S'Amuser Com Des Fous, featuring songs called When Father Died Ferrets Licked Away the Tears, Sussex Uni Solipsists Society, CoalMine Kampf 1984 and a touching Christmas song called Danny Baker/Bob Marley. If they still make glitter and tinsel-encrusted fanzines somewhere they'd be all over them, and they'd be sharing cover space with Bearsuit, whose handclap and Casio with an undertow pop now produces 7" Foxy Boxer. Back in the world of professional musicians with record deals and production budgets, Interpol get self-serious like few others can on download only No I In Threesome
Albums
Just when you thought you could settle into top thirty of the year complacency this year of plenty still has one more surprise up its sleeve. Le Loup are a live seven piece but in essence are Washington native Sam Simkoff, who with a laptop and a bare minimum of instruments put together an album bravely titled The Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations Millennium General Assembly, after a notable piece of outsider art. This is in our end of year chart, we'll tell you now, so marvellous is it, but if you want to beat the rush that will no doubt ensue you'll need to know that this takes in Sufjan Stevens' Appalachian dreaminess, Animal Collective's occasional calmness and the communal off-harmonies to the depths of just about half the bands North America currently produces. Clone Quartet may originate in Belfast but their heart is with those ever rising gangs of indie-electro kids based just outside greater London. Luckily they pull it off a lot better than most of those do, Well Oiled Machine just that, letting the electro touches enhance rather than overwhelm their Crimea-reminiscent hooks. They're also on the other new release by their label, the inestimable Smalltown America, who are also using this week for the latest in their roundup of new and unsigned talent, Public Service Broadcast #9, an album so long awaiting release that one of the 22 bands on it, Optimist Club, have split up. Also featured and still operational are Pagan Wanderer Lu, Holy Fuck, Pocketbooks, Dragonflies Draw Flame, Tiger Force, Lovvers and You And The Atom Bomb. From Upton upon Severn comes Luke Leighfield, a very English take on Ben Folds-esque poetic singer-songwriter who used to play violin for Get Cape Wear Cape Fly and now brings out Fan The Flames (mail order from here). Room for a quick Christmas album? A Very Cherry Christmas Volume 3 (mail order again) features new festive commissions from MJ Hibbett and the Validators, The Bobby McGee's, A Smile And A Ribbon and twelve bands we don't know. Why can labels never get anniversary reissues right on time? Ian Dury's seminal New Boots And Panties, an album whose themes and directness apparently shocked even seasoned punks who heard it, was released in September 1977, and thirty years and two months later it's back out with four extra tracks including Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - a phrase Dury brought to the language, lest it be overlooked - and two rarities on CD for the first time, from an NME cassette and a competition winners' 7" B-side. Also making its proper debut, via extra DVD, is the Blockheads at Queen Mary’s College, London for the BBC, which actually was thirty years ago this week. Ah, all comes round in the end. With the Wedding Present rounding off their twentieth anniversary tour two more albums fill a shelving gap, Ye Ye (The Best Of The RCA Years) taking in the high water marks of Bizarro and the Albini-altered Seamonsters plus the twelve singles in twelve months ploy, while Shepherd's Bush Welcomes The Wedding Present is a set from just two years ago. The second leg of The Verve's reformation tour kicks off at the O2 in a week, so high time the 2004 Best Of This Is Music: The Singles 92-98 sprouted a DVD. At least Mad Richard must have signed it off - something called Music Club Deluxe has brought out a load of 2CD Best Ofs to little fanfare this week, chiefly Killing Moon: the Best of Echo & the Bunnymen, Kings of Rock 'n' Roll: the Best of Prefab Sprout and - now come on - Dandy Highwaymen: the Best of Adam and the Ants. Out in the margins Music Club Deluxe would fear to tread we have B Loves Ze, another trawling of the New York discopost-punk label's highlights including James Chance and the Contortions, Lydia Lunch, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Alan Vega, Cristina and Was Not Was.
One of our most inventive and colourful singer-songwriters releases their third proper single on Monday, That's right, Stan's Bin Bag Song by Stan Boardman. Oh yeah, some chancer called Emmy The Great's got a 7" out as well. Again self-released, which when Adele is getting the sort of production treatment usually reserved for Melanie C records is a very good thing, Gabriel is apparently about a teenage fan, which makes the delicacy and turn of phrase of the kind of love song slightly disturbing if you ask us. In a land where the female singer-songwriter gates are flooded, as one fan of 60s female singers might have it, it's pleasing that they're not all signing the first deal that comes their way and are actually concentrating on making their art better and more individual. Don't you think? Surprise Radcliffe & Maconie record of the week Wake The President's Remember Fun? is, depending on what you believe, out either last Monday or next Monday, and as you know in all such cases of miscommunication we take the mean average. Whichever, it's well worth taking note of their Orange Juice-meets-Felt-meets-Malcolm Middleton indiepop like momma used to make. Definitely last week, but we've only just found out, saw the release of oddball antifolkers The Bobby McGee’s latest EP, S'Amuser Com Des Fous, featuring songs called When Father Died Ferrets Licked Away the Tears, Sussex Uni Solipsists Society, CoalMine Kampf 1984 and a touching Christmas song called Danny Baker/Bob Marley. If they still make glitter and tinsel-encrusted fanzines somewhere they'd be all over them, and they'd be sharing cover space with Bearsuit, whose handclap and Casio with an undertow pop now produces 7" Foxy Boxer. Back in the world of professional musicians with record deals and production budgets, Interpol get self-serious like few others can on download only No I In Threesome
Albums
Just when you thought you could settle into top thirty of the year complacency this year of plenty still has one more surprise up its sleeve. Le Loup are a live seven piece but in essence are Washington native Sam Simkoff, who with a laptop and a bare minimum of instruments put together an album bravely titled The Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations Millennium General Assembly, after a notable piece of outsider art. This is in our end of year chart, we'll tell you now, so marvellous is it, but if you want to beat the rush that will no doubt ensue you'll need to know that this takes in Sufjan Stevens' Appalachian dreaminess, Animal Collective's occasional calmness and the communal off-harmonies to the depths of just about half the bands North America currently produces. Clone Quartet may originate in Belfast but their heart is with those ever rising gangs of indie-electro kids based just outside greater London. Luckily they pull it off a lot better than most of those do, Well Oiled Machine just that, letting the electro touches enhance rather than overwhelm their Crimea-reminiscent hooks. They're also on the other new release by their label, the inestimable Smalltown America, who are also using this week for the latest in their roundup of new and unsigned talent, Public Service Broadcast #9, an album so long awaiting release that one of the 22 bands on it, Optimist Club, have split up. Also featured and still operational are Pagan Wanderer Lu, Holy Fuck, Pocketbooks, Dragonflies Draw Flame, Tiger Force, Lovvers and You And The Atom Bomb. From Upton upon Severn comes Luke Leighfield, a very English take on Ben Folds-esque poetic singer-songwriter who used to play violin for Get Cape Wear Cape Fly and now brings out Fan The Flames (mail order from here). Room for a quick Christmas album? A Very Cherry Christmas Volume 3 (mail order again) features new festive commissions from MJ Hibbett and the Validators, The Bobby McGee's, A Smile And A Ribbon and twelve bands we don't know. Why can labels never get anniversary reissues right on time? Ian Dury's seminal New Boots And Panties, an album whose themes and directness apparently shocked even seasoned punks who heard it, was released in September 1977, and thirty years and two months later it's back out with four extra tracks including Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll - a phrase Dury brought to the language, lest it be overlooked - and two rarities on CD for the first time, from an NME cassette and a competition winners' 7" B-side. Also making its proper debut, via extra DVD, is the Blockheads at Queen Mary’s College, London for the BBC, which actually was thirty years ago this week. Ah, all comes round in the end. With the Wedding Present rounding off their twentieth anniversary tour two more albums fill a shelving gap, Ye Ye (The Best Of The RCA Years) taking in the high water marks of Bizarro and the Albini-altered Seamonsters plus the twelve singles in twelve months ploy, while Shepherd's Bush Welcomes The Wedding Present is a set from just two years ago. The second leg of The Verve's reformation tour kicks off at the O2 in a week, so high time the 2004 Best Of This Is Music: The Singles 92-98 sprouted a DVD. At least Mad Richard must have signed it off - something called Music Club Deluxe has brought out a load of 2CD Best Ofs to little fanfare this week, chiefly Killing Moon: the Best of Echo & the Bunnymen, Kings of Rock 'n' Roll: the Best of Prefab Sprout and - now come on - Dandy Highwaymen: the Best of Adam and the Ants. Out in the margins Music Club Deluxe would fear to tread we have B Loves Ze, another trawling of the New York discopost-punk label's highlights including James Chance and the Contortions, Lydia Lunch, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Alan Vega, Cristina and Was Not Was.
Sunday, November 25, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 26/11
Singles
Friends Of The Bride are from Raynes Park, SW20, which according to Wikipedia is also home to Richard Briers, ex-Charlton midfielder Graham Stuart and Dave Benson-Phillips off the kids' telly. The Times called them "nu-croon", a title Google also ascribes to Josh Groban and Cherry Ghost. Friends Of The Bride sound like neither. What So You Think You Can Dance, their second far too cool for school single for and generally another ripe picking from Young & Lost Club, does sound like is Brit-beat meets swing meets post-ironic attitude, a sound we've previous labelled "rat pack fuzzpop". As we generally say about bands who sound simultaneously retro and modern, were radio not so much in the pocket of the self-appointed NME zeitgeist this sort of thing should be all over the daytime schedules and picking up more than the small but ever growing cult passing following they currently have. Judging by the turnout and audience participation for their End Of The Road Festival set the Wave Pictures already have a passionate enough live crowd, and of course we're going to love them - two of them are from Leicestershire, they were based for a while in Cardiff, they take their lead from Darren Hayman, they've been on tour with Emmy The Great, they've played with Jeffrey Lewis and have issued records on 4AD and, in the case of the splendid Richmanish double A side We Dress Up Like Snowmen/Now You Are Pregnant, Moshi Moshi's singles club. A very big 2008 album awaits. As if to remind us that we should never have doubted her, Emma Pollock's album Watch The Fireworks is turning into quite the slow burner. That it sounds not that far from the latter days of the Delgados helps, of course, but it's definitely a record bearing a very personal stamp. Paper And Glue has a gorgeous melodic glaze covering an awkward structural feeling and is rightly making Radio 2 sit up and take note. Speaking of ethereal songwriters, presumably Island picked The Piano from PJ Harvey's White Chalk because, featuring drums and a crescendo, it's as close as they'll find to something remotely commercial. Like the rest of the album, it's otherwise totally out of line. This Is Fake DIY have followed Drowned In Sound and PlayLouder into the online magazine-becoming-label market, and their latest signings are Love Ends Disaster!, the Nottingham outfit who've been 'promising' for far too long now without getting their deserved breakthrough's Suzanne/Dinosaur double-A 7" doing the Maximo Park-channelling-Sonic Youth 'thing'. It stays well on the right side of the clean/dirty equation of post-punkishness, which Editors' The Racing Rats is busy leaping Fonz-style. The Electric Soft Parade just had to finish off their comfortably reputation re-establishing No Need To Be Downhearted album campaign with Appropriate Ending, a digital release also bearing covers of Elliott Smith and the Aislers Set. Deerhoof are occasionally called pop by mad people, but Matchbook Seeks Maniac is as sunshine pop as the American underground will ever make, even starting with the Be My Baby beat (see Covermount passim), while Electrelane bid not farewell but adieu, or whichever form they intend the word 'hiatus' to take, with the ethereal shards of In Berlin. Also that Mules single documented last week got moved back.
Albums
One of the most interesting things in the last couple of years has been the rise of the mini-album, whether giving an up and coming act time to put their older material out while writing for the proper full-length debut or to give an explosive new talent a helping hand. It's very much the latter in the case of Birmingham trio Johnny Foreigner, who've had a couple of ground level 7"s out before but on Arcs Across The City explode into glorious Sony Bravia-style technicolour of taut leftfield heavy riffage and Sonic Youth-cribbing knives through the heart of dull old linearity. Imagine Seafood's American-flavoured melodic hyperactivity colliding at full pelt with Los Campesinos!' million ideas in three minutes or less, but Los Campesinos! (who they've supported on several occasions, as they have Sky Larkin, so it's a foregone conclusion we're going to follow them whatever) if Gareth's love of Xiu Xiu was all-pervading, in one airtight package. By God, this is an exciting 21 minutes 20 seconds to give hope at these end of the year blues. Once upon a time Johnny Foreigner would have had little problem with the blanket genre description 'indie'. Probably. Man, 'indie' used to be such an unbesmirched term, indeed one which told you nothing other than its circumstances of release, often therein acting as its own badge of quality. Of course, twelve or so years ago the majors barged their way into the private party like drunk latecomers possibly tipped off by a Myspace bulletin and now everyone hates it as a subjective we're seeing indie without its rug. How different to 1982-83, when indie was something Peel and perhaps Long played and the rest of broadcast media bought bargepoles specifically for the purpose of not touching that row with, and Cherry Red records brought out its celebrated label sampler Pillows And Prayers, complete with sleeve instruction "pay no more than 99p". Skinflints got to hear the Monochrome Set, Felt, the Nightingales, Attila the Stockbroker, far too many Tracy Thorn and/or Ben Watt projects and a splendidly out of place Quentin Crisp among other luminaries of the student bedsit, and now it's back out with an extra disc of label obscurities (ver Set's Jetset Junta? We'd have thought so!) and a bloody DVD. Someone should mount a sculpture dedicated to this stuff for Trafalgar Square's spare plinth. Pixies were never so downtrodden so they just settled for being the greatest rock band ever (our perspective only). Dig For Fire: A Tribute To Pixies sounds like one of those tribute albums featuring obscure Norwegian light metallers that get flung out into bargain bins every so often, but in fact features British Sea Power (Caribou), Mogwai (Gouge Away), They Might Be Giants, Joy Zipper, the Rosebuds, OK Go and assorted US underground flyweights. They've done all their reforming, but Squeeze head around the country from Monday and take with them self-released document of their summer US tour 5 Live and the second in Glenn Tilbrook's mining of his demos cupboard, In The Sky Above: Demo Tapes 1993-1998.
DVDs
There's quite a bit of Roxy Music revivalism going on at the moment, now that the coast is clear from the half-arsed half reunion tour, and it continues with The Thrill of It All: A Visual History 1972-1982, featuring the art school dandies doing what they did on video, telly and stage, much commercially unreleased before now. One thing it unfortunately doesn't feature, which we might as well give you as we're in a good mood, is their MusikLaden set of 1973, featuring this version of Re-make/Re-model chiefly notable because a) it's mad and b) the audience are only roused by the drum solo. Sparks, who did a similarly coolly received set for the same show around this time, have fans who would only cheer a drum solo were it fed in by the backdrop projection. Dee Vee Dee - Sparks At The London Forum is a document of their high concept show from last September.
Friends Of The Bride are from Raynes Park, SW20, which according to Wikipedia is also home to Richard Briers, ex-Charlton midfielder Graham Stuart and Dave Benson-Phillips off the kids' telly. The Times called them "nu-croon", a title Google also ascribes to Josh Groban and Cherry Ghost. Friends Of The Bride sound like neither. What So You Think You Can Dance, their second far too cool for school single for and generally another ripe picking from Young & Lost Club, does sound like is Brit-beat meets swing meets post-ironic attitude, a sound we've previous labelled "rat pack fuzzpop". As we generally say about bands who sound simultaneously retro and modern, were radio not so much in the pocket of the self-appointed NME zeitgeist this sort of thing should be all over the daytime schedules and picking up more than the small but ever growing cult passing following they currently have. Judging by the turnout and audience participation for their End Of The Road Festival set the Wave Pictures already have a passionate enough live crowd, and of course we're going to love them - two of them are from Leicestershire, they were based for a while in Cardiff, they take their lead from Darren Hayman, they've been on tour with Emmy The Great, they've played with Jeffrey Lewis and have issued records on 4AD and, in the case of the splendid Richmanish double A side We Dress Up Like Snowmen/Now You Are Pregnant, Moshi Moshi's singles club. A very big 2008 album awaits. As if to remind us that we should never have doubted her, Emma Pollock's album Watch The Fireworks is turning into quite the slow burner. That it sounds not that far from the latter days of the Delgados helps, of course, but it's definitely a record bearing a very personal stamp. Paper And Glue has a gorgeous melodic glaze covering an awkward structural feeling and is rightly making Radio 2 sit up and take note. Speaking of ethereal songwriters, presumably Island picked The Piano from PJ Harvey's White Chalk because, featuring drums and a crescendo, it's as close as they'll find to something remotely commercial. Like the rest of the album, it's otherwise totally out of line. This Is Fake DIY have followed Drowned In Sound and PlayLouder into the online magazine-becoming-label market, and their latest signings are Love Ends Disaster!, the Nottingham outfit who've been 'promising' for far too long now without getting their deserved breakthrough's Suzanne/Dinosaur double-A 7" doing the Maximo Park-channelling-Sonic Youth 'thing'. It stays well on the right side of the clean/dirty equation of post-punkishness, which Editors' The Racing Rats is busy leaping Fonz-style. The Electric Soft Parade just had to finish off their comfortably reputation re-establishing No Need To Be Downhearted album campaign with Appropriate Ending, a digital release also bearing covers of Elliott Smith and the Aislers Set. Deerhoof are occasionally called pop by mad people, but Matchbook Seeks Maniac is as sunshine pop as the American underground will ever make, even starting with the Be My Baby beat (see Covermount passim), while Electrelane bid not farewell but adieu, or whichever form they intend the word 'hiatus' to take, with the ethereal shards of In Berlin. Also that Mules single documented last week got moved back.
Albums
One of the most interesting things in the last couple of years has been the rise of the mini-album, whether giving an up and coming act time to put their older material out while writing for the proper full-length debut or to give an explosive new talent a helping hand. It's very much the latter in the case of Birmingham trio Johnny Foreigner, who've had a couple of ground level 7"s out before but on Arcs Across The City explode into glorious Sony Bravia-style technicolour of taut leftfield heavy riffage and Sonic Youth-cribbing knives through the heart of dull old linearity. Imagine Seafood's American-flavoured melodic hyperactivity colliding at full pelt with Los Campesinos!' million ideas in three minutes or less, but Los Campesinos! (who they've supported on several occasions, as they have Sky Larkin, so it's a foregone conclusion we're going to follow them whatever) if Gareth's love of Xiu Xiu was all-pervading, in one airtight package. By God, this is an exciting 21 minutes 20 seconds to give hope at these end of the year blues. Once upon a time Johnny Foreigner would have had little problem with the blanket genre description 'indie'. Probably. Man, 'indie' used to be such an unbesmirched term, indeed one which told you nothing other than its circumstances of release, often therein acting as its own badge of quality. Of course, twelve or so years ago the majors barged their way into the private party like drunk latecomers possibly tipped off by a Myspace bulletin and now everyone hates it as a subjective we're seeing indie without its rug. How different to 1982-83, when indie was something Peel and perhaps Long played and the rest of broadcast media bought bargepoles specifically for the purpose of not touching that row with, and Cherry Red records brought out its celebrated label sampler Pillows And Prayers, complete with sleeve instruction "pay no more than 99p". Skinflints got to hear the Monochrome Set, Felt, the Nightingales, Attila the Stockbroker, far too many Tracy Thorn and/or Ben Watt projects and a splendidly out of place Quentin Crisp among other luminaries of the student bedsit, and now it's back out with an extra disc of label obscurities (ver Set's Jetset Junta? We'd have thought so!) and a bloody DVD. Someone should mount a sculpture dedicated to this stuff for Trafalgar Square's spare plinth. Pixies were never so downtrodden so they just settled for being the greatest rock band ever (our perspective only). Dig For Fire: A Tribute To Pixies sounds like one of those tribute albums featuring obscure Norwegian light metallers that get flung out into bargain bins every so often, but in fact features British Sea Power (Caribou), Mogwai (Gouge Away), They Might Be Giants, Joy Zipper, the Rosebuds, OK Go and assorted US underground flyweights. They've done all their reforming, but Squeeze head around the country from Monday and take with them self-released document of their summer US tour 5 Live and the second in Glenn Tilbrook's mining of his demos cupboard, In The Sky Above: Demo Tapes 1993-1998.
DVDs
There's quite a bit of Roxy Music revivalism going on at the moment, now that the coast is clear from the half-arsed half reunion tour, and it continues with The Thrill of It All: A Visual History 1972-1982, featuring the art school dandies doing what they did on video, telly and stage, much commercially unreleased before now. One thing it unfortunately doesn't feature, which we might as well give you as we're in a good mood, is their MusikLaden set of 1973, featuring this version of Re-make/Re-model chiefly notable because a) it's mad and b) the audience are only roused by the drum solo. Sparks, who did a similarly coolly received set for the same show around this time, have fans who would only cheer a drum solo were it fed in by the backdrop projection. Dee Vee Dee - Sparks At The London Forum is a document of their high concept show from last September.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 19/11
Singles
This is more like it, plenty of 7"s, CDs and downloads to go round this week. Even for those who go down the Harvey/Marshall route of the emotionally charged while not overbearing female singer-songwriter, Scout Niblett can take some getting used to, even if there's fewer drum-powered songs than before on her current album This Fool Can Die Now. The single taken from it is the closest it ever remotely comes to commercial, Kiss being a duet with Will Oldham that resembles Cat Power in an iron maiden (no, not Iron Maiden, an actual iron maiden). Brighton duo/trio/loads Restlesslist, who form quite a solid piece of the interconnected Whitecentric web of Brighton music, seem to be appealing to a wider audience then they might have expected, their last single appearing in Mixmag's top fifty tracks of 2006. Your pilled up clubber would literally shit themselves at Dirty Pint, the imaginary soundtrack to an fairground ghost train based on Hammer Horror soundtracks. Just down the road literally and musically metaphorically, the Go! Team's Proof Of Youth received some criticism for its snail-like progression from the Thunder Lightning Strike sound, but in reality their style is so singular and so indubtedly theirs that it'd be difficult to see how much further it could be stretched. Third single The Wrath Of Marcie is therefore bracing funk brass, hip hop drums, half-buried Ninja rhymes and cartoon theme interludes, this one seemingly quoting J Geils Band's Centerfold. Baby-faced quasi-rustic folk storyteller and occasional National Theatre Shakespearian actor Johnny Flynn has somehow ended up on Vertigo Records (The Killers, Razorlight, Dirty Pretty Things, Amy Macdonald, OneKooks Night Only), and it'll be a nightmare for whoever's charged with trying to feed his sound through the A&R/publicity machine. The Box sees him continue to make his own corner of the London nu-'folk' scene. He's also subject of Rubbish ContactMusic Review Of The Week, wherein it is confidently stated "no matter how hard he may try, he will always be compared to Newton Faulkner". By that token the Raveonettes will forever be in the shadow of Amy Winehouse, being as both have betrayed Wall Of Sound influences in the past. The Danish ice duo again have their handstamped sound no matter where they take it, Dead Sound coming on with spooky distorted J&MC with Velvets to taste. Opinionated storyteller Chris T-T got distracted from his London trilogy of albums by his 9 Red Songs political repositioning for a good two or three years, but Capital is due out in February and advance notice is given on the This Gun Is Not A Gun EP. The album manages both the ying and yang of STN's musical worldview, featuring as it does both Emmy The Great and one of Razorlight (the drummer). The Rumble Strips do what they do, again, on Time, the Mules step out from the shadow of all their famous and talented friends with their very British take on Talking Heads '77, This Is Your Life; Australian youths Operator Please leave behind their meta-table tennis contextualising for the more streamlined Leave It Alone; Make Model, now on EMI, turn tail on their Canadian-influenced post-postrock for a more Heavenly-esque poppier/dark lyrical side on The Was; and the indefatigable Helen Love preview February's new album with the usual Ramones/J-Pop bubblegum of It’s My Club. Just as excitingly, someone's finally uploaded the video for Long Live The UK Music Scene, even if we suspect Ocean Colour Scene have now indeed sold more singles than Gina G.
Albums
Not much new to speak of, evidently. We're a UK music blog, so we're forced by law to namecheck Girls Aloud's Tangled Up, even if the new single sounds for the first time in their careers (bar the covers) like A N Other Girl Group. That's what happens when you recontextualise pop, everyone works out eventually what you were doing. Meanwhile Bonnie Prince Billy, or if you're Amazon Bonnie Prince Charlie, delves into the covers stopgap drawer on Ask Forgiveness and comes out with Bjork, Danzig, R Kelly, Merle Haggard and Phil Ochs. GoodBooks are probably as well renowned for their remixes as their originals, so it's no wonder that they've commissioned download-only Control Freaks, tracks from their underrated Control album reworked by the likes of the Teenagers (inevitably, being one guitar band with remix chops reworking another), Crystal Castles, Kissy Sell Out, Minotaur Shock and Lo-Fi-Fnk. Also going the repackaging route are Gorillaz, with second odds and sods compilation D-Sides, and Bloc Party, whose A Weekend In The City has grown Flux (after I Still Remember) and a DVD of Reading set and videos. Nowhere near as frenetic but just as heartfelt, The Drift Collective documents the highly promising Devon-based with Brighton offshoot folk label's best acts, including Thirty Pounds Of Bone, Mary Hampton, The R G Morrison and Actress Hands' Matt Eaton. New Boots And Panties is about to hit thirty, and reissued best of Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll demonstrates why no home should be without some Dury. 5CD set The Brit Box catalogues most of the notables that took guitar music through the 1990s - we'll be covering this in greater detail later in the week. Sufjan Stevens' Songs For Christmas is one of many festive issues this week. For no tie-in reason that we can make out, Neko Case's country-noir second and third full-lengths, Furnace Room Lullaby and Blacklisted, also return.
DVDs
"Am I going to have to do this by myself?" It had never occurred to us before that for all the words written about the TV broadcast and CD and everything read into its significance, Nirvana Unplugged In New York, recorded fourteen years ago today, has never previously been released in visual form. This has the whole thing for the first time, plus rehearsal footage and a documentary.
Books
You've probably heard the 13th Floor Elevators' disciples more than you've heard their own garage psychedelia, and it's probable you know even more about leader Roky Erickson's subsequent RP McMurphy-esque mental breakdown and three years in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators by Paul Drummond, with Julian Cope on foreword, tries to unpick legend from fact with everybody involved as interviewees.
This is more like it, plenty of 7"s, CDs and downloads to go round this week. Even for those who go down the Harvey/Marshall route of the emotionally charged while not overbearing female singer-songwriter, Scout Niblett can take some getting used to, even if there's fewer drum-powered songs than before on her current album This Fool Can Die Now. The single taken from it is the closest it ever remotely comes to commercial, Kiss being a duet with Will Oldham that resembles Cat Power in an iron maiden (no, not Iron Maiden, an actual iron maiden). Brighton duo/trio/loads Restlesslist, who form quite a solid piece of the interconnected Whitecentric web of Brighton music, seem to be appealing to a wider audience then they might have expected, their last single appearing in Mixmag's top fifty tracks of 2006. Your pilled up clubber would literally shit themselves at Dirty Pint, the imaginary soundtrack to an fairground ghost train based on Hammer Horror soundtracks. Just down the road literally and musically metaphorically, the Go! Team's Proof Of Youth received some criticism for its snail-like progression from the Thunder Lightning Strike sound, but in reality their style is so singular and so indubtedly theirs that it'd be difficult to see how much further it could be stretched. Third single The Wrath Of Marcie is therefore bracing funk brass, hip hop drums, half-buried Ninja rhymes and cartoon theme interludes, this one seemingly quoting J Geils Band's Centerfold. Baby-faced quasi-rustic folk storyteller and occasional National Theatre Shakespearian actor Johnny Flynn has somehow ended up on Vertigo Records (The Killers, Razorlight, Dirty Pretty Things, Amy Macdonald, One
Albums
Not much new to speak of, evidently. We're a UK music blog, so we're forced by law to namecheck Girls Aloud's Tangled Up, even if the new single sounds for the first time in their careers (bar the covers) like A N Other Girl Group. That's what happens when you recontextualise pop, everyone works out eventually what you were doing. Meanwhile Bonnie Prince Billy, or if you're Amazon Bonnie Prince Charlie, delves into the covers stopgap drawer on Ask Forgiveness and comes out with Bjork, Danzig, R Kelly, Merle Haggard and Phil Ochs. GoodBooks are probably as well renowned for their remixes as their originals, so it's no wonder that they've commissioned download-only Control Freaks, tracks from their underrated Control album reworked by the likes of the Teenagers (inevitably, being one guitar band with remix chops reworking another), Crystal Castles, Kissy Sell Out, Minotaur Shock and Lo-Fi-Fnk. Also going the repackaging route are Gorillaz, with second odds and sods compilation D-Sides, and Bloc Party, whose A Weekend In The City has grown Flux (after I Still Remember) and a DVD of Reading set and videos. Nowhere near as frenetic but just as heartfelt, The Drift Collective documents the highly promising Devon-based with Brighton offshoot folk label's best acts, including Thirty Pounds Of Bone, Mary Hampton, The R G Morrison and Actress Hands' Matt Eaton. New Boots And Panties is about to hit thirty, and reissued best of Sex And Drugs And Rock And Roll demonstrates why no home should be without some Dury. 5CD set The Brit Box catalogues most of the notables that took guitar music through the 1990s - we'll be covering this in greater detail later in the week. Sufjan Stevens' Songs For Christmas is one of many festive issues this week. For no tie-in reason that we can make out, Neko Case's country-noir second and third full-lengths, Furnace Room Lullaby and Blacklisted, also return.
DVDs
"Am I going to have to do this by myself?" It had never occurred to us before that for all the words written about the TV broadcast and CD and everything read into its significance, Nirvana Unplugged In New York, recorded fourteen years ago today, has never previously been released in visual form. This has the whole thing for the first time, plus rehearsal footage and a documentary.
Books
You've probably heard the 13th Floor Elevators' disciples more than you've heard their own garage psychedelia, and it's probable you know even more about leader Roky Erickson's subsequent RP McMurphy-esque mental breakdown and three years in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators by Paul Drummond, with Julian Cope on foreword, tries to unpick legend from fact with everybody involved as interviewees.
Sunday, November 11, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 12/11
Singles
Not much again this week, as all the really decent upcoming releases seem to have been moved to the end of the month. As there's lots to get through elsewhere this week we'll keep this brief, so as not to mention the Bloc Party single that tries to show their electro side but instead shows their Eiffel 65 side. Maths Class are really part of this whole post-punk-funk/mathrock Battles/Foals movement that was still coalescing when they came to our attention, in one of those synergic tricks musical timelines like to play every so often. Emporio Laser has all the tricks - it's electronically inclined, it's made for spasmodic dancing and it sounds a little like Q And Not U. You'd think with Jack Penate rockabillying his way into the nation's hearts EMI might have actually done something more with Vincent Vincent & The Villains, but there you go - On My Own leaks out this week. Correcto are the latest product of the Glasgow scene love-in, containing one of The Royal We and Franz's Paul Thompson. Joni is their appropriately pop-angular opening shot.
Albums
Our leadoff choice this week is a four track, 25 minute record, but we had all the farrago about whether these are EPs or mini-albums last week and it bored us already. It is, however, Wire, and for that respect is due, especially as we thought Colin Newman had finally conclusively left the band. Read & Burn 03 is the long-awaited third part in their "series of 'research and development' vehicles", the first two of which were put together in 2003 to form the band's last album Send, although apparently this will be a standalone release. Who knows what sort of post-post-post-punk drone will be involved here. In terms of proper full lengths, slim pickings - the Raveonettes return with much the same fuzz-Spector sound on Lust Lust Lust but in reduced circumstances on Fierce Panda, Fugazi bassist Joe Lally calls on Ian MacKaye's production and the guitar of Guy Picciotto (producer, lest we forget, of Standing In The Way Of Control) for a subtler take on the band's hardcore dynamics on Nothing Is Underrated and if pedal steel-driven hushed country rockers Japancakes calling their new album Loveless seems odd, there's a reason for it - it's a pedal steel-driven hushed country rock reinterpretation of My Bloody Valentine's classic, top to bottom. It might even rival Jeffrey Lewis for single album covers record of the year. LCD Soundsystem's Nike advert composition 45:33 makes it to CD for the first time, so you can spot which bit James Murphy reappopriated for Someone Great. Entertainingly, it's not 45:33 long. As he's been promising for a while now since regaining the rights to all his work, Darren Hayman has remastered his Richman-for-the-British-indie-kids meisterwork Breaking God's Heart and extended it with early singles including the recently lauded here Pull Yourself Together, B-sides, rare EP tracks, outtakes and whatever else he found in his cupboard. Despite being far more realistically grounded lyrically, it's a fair bet Hayman has heard some Robyn Hitchcock in his life. I Wanna Go Backwards is a five CD box set that randomly picks out (and these are also being reissued seperately for those already planning Christmas spending) 1981 solo debut Black Snake Diamond Role, 1984's I Often Dream Of Trains and its unoffical follow-up, 1990's Eye, gives them the remastering brushdown and adds While Thatcher Mauled Britain Part 1 & 2, a newly compiled two-disc collection of b-sides, outtakes and home demo recordings, many of them previously unreleased in the manner of kindred spirit Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles series. More box sets are promised. Les Savy Fav's long awaited emergence to take the artpunk crown that's been rightfully theirs all along, the Henry VII to so many others' Perkin Warbeck, means the reissues are on. The Cat And The Cobra is probably their weakest album, it still demonstrates how far ahead of populism's curve they were in 1999, and it's got We've Got Boxes and Who Rocks The Party? on it. Still on the sort of collegiate rock college radio wouldn't play, being the Neutral Milk Hotel album that isn't In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, On Avery Island has some trouble receiving its due, a lo-fi tinderbox of ideas and arrangements that wouldn't find their niche for a couple of years yet. Unless you're talking about the largely horrible American punk sub-movement, you can't claim to know about ska and not be aware of the Skatalites, the Jamaican studio collective who included pretty much anyone who was anyone in the instrument-playing ranks and backed the vast majority of the classic mid-60s vocal originators too. With a band active for so long bewaring of cheap imitations is always a worry, so tread carefully but skankingly so around mid-90s set Ska Splash, the excellently titled saxophonist tribute The Authentic Ska Sound Of Tommy McCook and studio reunion with the great Laurel Aitken Clash Of The Ska Titans. A very different country's alternative musical heritage comes from Os Mutantes, the leading lights, not that we in the west knew it at the time, of Brazil's Tropicalia movement. 1968 debut Os Mutantes sounds immense, blending psychedelia, Beach Boys song cycles, orchestral pop and found sound of all shapes. Finally, while we can never fully condone a mid-price compilation, Nervous Tension is subtitled 'The EMI Post Punk Collection' and so finds room for Wire, Gang Of Four, Public Image Ltd, Buzzcocks, XTC, Magazine, The Stranglers, The Monochrome Set, The Skids and Scars.
DVDs
Read this. "Girls Aloud - Style, offers an exclusive insight into what it takes to create the look of the hottest girl group in the UK. From award ceremonies to nights out on the town, Girls Aloud know how to rock a look and here they share their favourite tips and sought after industry advice on how to look great in front of the cameras. For the first time we see Cheryl revealing her beauty secrets, follow Nicola through the trials of finding that all important perfect pair of jeans, catch-up with Kimberley on the benefits of shopping online, and hit the stores with Sarah and Nadine while they hunt for accessories and shoes to get that Girls Aloud style. Packed full of practical tips and hints, Girls Aloud - Style, also contains the band's music videos with commentary from Cheryl and Sarah on all those outfits and hair styles be they great - or a retrospective nightmare!" So this is what marketing a band has come to. Last year when the best of came out it actually looked like their handlers were acknowledging their hipster cachet, but no, it was the Cosmo Kids readers they were after all along. Sigh. And the new single is basically one of those girl band knockoffs from around 1999. Someone who does have something of a history behind them is collected on the three disc The McCartney Years, two DVD of all his solo and Wings videos, including the frankly remarkable Coming Up, and one of a Wings 1976 gig, his MTV Unplugged and Glastonbury headliner.
Books
And still the Control tie-ins keep rolling, but Joy Division: Piece by Piece comes with a simultaneous stamp of quality and a fear of actual content, given it's written by Paul Morley. It's an anthology of everything he ever wrote about them, from Warsaw to now, indeed right up to a critique of Control, and also including the original work that inspired his novel Nothing. The 33 1/3 series continues moving with a heavyweight modern writer, Pitchfork managing editor Scott Plagenhoef, who gives Belle & Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister the once-over with contributions from band members, producers, management and fans. Garry Mulholland may be the patron saint of obsessing over music lists, and his second volume Fear of Music: The Greatest 261 Albums Since Punk and Disco arrives in no doubt wrist-breaking paperback size.
Not much again this week, as all the really decent upcoming releases seem to have been moved to the end of the month. As there's lots to get through elsewhere this week we'll keep this brief, so as not to mention the Bloc Party single that tries to show their electro side but instead shows their Eiffel 65 side. Maths Class are really part of this whole post-punk-funk/mathrock Battles/Foals movement that was still coalescing when they came to our attention, in one of those synergic tricks musical timelines like to play every so often. Emporio Laser has all the tricks - it's electronically inclined, it's made for spasmodic dancing and it sounds a little like Q And Not U. You'd think with Jack Penate rockabillying his way into the nation's hearts EMI might have actually done something more with Vincent Vincent & The Villains, but there you go - On My Own leaks out this week. Correcto are the latest product of the Glasgow scene love-in, containing one of The Royal We and Franz's Paul Thompson. Joni is their appropriately pop-angular opening shot.
Albums
Our leadoff choice this week is a four track, 25 minute record, but we had all the farrago about whether these are EPs or mini-albums last week and it bored us already. It is, however, Wire, and for that respect is due, especially as we thought Colin Newman had finally conclusively left the band. Read & Burn 03 is the long-awaited third part in their "series of 'research and development' vehicles", the first two of which were put together in 2003 to form the band's last album Send, although apparently this will be a standalone release. Who knows what sort of post-post-post-punk drone will be involved here. In terms of proper full lengths, slim pickings - the Raveonettes return with much the same fuzz-Spector sound on Lust Lust Lust but in reduced circumstances on Fierce Panda, Fugazi bassist Joe Lally calls on Ian MacKaye's production and the guitar of Guy Picciotto (producer, lest we forget, of Standing In The Way Of Control) for a subtler take on the band's hardcore dynamics on Nothing Is Underrated and if pedal steel-driven hushed country rockers Japancakes calling their new album Loveless seems odd, there's a reason for it - it's a pedal steel-driven hushed country rock reinterpretation of My Bloody Valentine's classic, top to bottom. It might even rival Jeffrey Lewis for single album covers record of the year. LCD Soundsystem's Nike advert composition 45:33 makes it to CD for the first time, so you can spot which bit James Murphy reappopriated for Someone Great. Entertainingly, it's not 45:33 long. As he's been promising for a while now since regaining the rights to all his work, Darren Hayman has remastered his Richman-for-the-British-indie-kids meisterwork Breaking God's Heart and extended it with early singles including the recently lauded here Pull Yourself Together, B-sides, rare EP tracks, outtakes and whatever else he found in his cupboard. Despite being far more realistically grounded lyrically, it's a fair bet Hayman has heard some Robyn Hitchcock in his life. I Wanna Go Backwards is a five CD box set that randomly picks out (and these are also being reissued seperately for those already planning Christmas spending) 1981 solo debut Black Snake Diamond Role, 1984's I Often Dream Of Trains and its unoffical follow-up, 1990's Eye, gives them the remastering brushdown and adds While Thatcher Mauled Britain Part 1 & 2, a newly compiled two-disc collection of b-sides, outtakes and home demo recordings, many of them previously unreleased in the manner of kindred spirit Andy Partridge's Fuzzy Warbles series. More box sets are promised. Les Savy Fav's long awaited emergence to take the artpunk crown that's been rightfully theirs all along, the Henry VII to so many others' Perkin Warbeck, means the reissues are on. The Cat And The Cobra is probably their weakest album, it still demonstrates how far ahead of populism's curve they were in 1999, and it's got We've Got Boxes and Who Rocks The Party? on it. Still on the sort of collegiate rock college radio wouldn't play, being the Neutral Milk Hotel album that isn't In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, On Avery Island has some trouble receiving its due, a lo-fi tinderbox of ideas and arrangements that wouldn't find their niche for a couple of years yet. Unless you're talking about the largely horrible American punk sub-movement, you can't claim to know about ska and not be aware of the Skatalites, the Jamaican studio collective who included pretty much anyone who was anyone in the instrument-playing ranks and backed the vast majority of the classic mid-60s vocal originators too. With a band active for so long bewaring of cheap imitations is always a worry, so tread carefully but skankingly so around mid-90s set Ska Splash, the excellently titled saxophonist tribute The Authentic Ska Sound Of Tommy McCook and studio reunion with the great Laurel Aitken Clash Of The Ska Titans. A very different country's alternative musical heritage comes from Os Mutantes, the leading lights, not that we in the west knew it at the time, of Brazil's Tropicalia movement. 1968 debut Os Mutantes sounds immense, blending psychedelia, Beach Boys song cycles, orchestral pop and found sound of all shapes. Finally, while we can never fully condone a mid-price compilation, Nervous Tension is subtitled 'The EMI Post Punk Collection' and so finds room for Wire, Gang Of Four, Public Image Ltd, Buzzcocks, XTC, Magazine, The Stranglers, The Monochrome Set, The Skids and Scars.
DVDs
Read this. "Girls Aloud - Style, offers an exclusive insight into what it takes to create the look of the hottest girl group in the UK. From award ceremonies to nights out on the town, Girls Aloud know how to rock a look and here they share their favourite tips and sought after industry advice on how to look great in front of the cameras. For the first time we see Cheryl revealing her beauty secrets, follow Nicola through the trials of finding that all important perfect pair of jeans, catch-up with Kimberley on the benefits of shopping online, and hit the stores with Sarah and Nadine while they hunt for accessories and shoes to get that Girls Aloud style. Packed full of practical tips and hints, Girls Aloud - Style, also contains the band's music videos with commentary from Cheryl and Sarah on all those outfits and hair styles be they great - or a retrospective nightmare!" So this is what marketing a band has come to. Last year when the best of came out it actually looked like their handlers were acknowledging their hipster cachet, but no, it was the Cosmo Kids readers they were after all along. Sigh. And the new single is basically one of those girl band knockoffs from around 1999. Someone who does have something of a history behind them is collected on the three disc The McCartney Years, two DVD of all his solo and Wings videos, including the frankly remarkable Coming Up, and one of a Wings 1976 gig, his MTV Unplugged and Glastonbury headliner.
Books
And still the Control tie-ins keep rolling, but Joy Division: Piece by Piece comes with a simultaneous stamp of quality and a fear of actual content, given it's written by Paul Morley. It's an anthology of everything he ever wrote about them, from Warsaw to now, indeed right up to a critique of Control, and also including the original work that inspired his novel Nothing. The 33 1/3 series continues moving with a heavyweight modern writer, Pitchfork managing editor Scott Plagenhoef, who gives Belle & Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister the once-over with contributions from band members, producers, management and fans. Garry Mulholland may be the patron saint of obsessing over music lists, and his second volume Fear of Music: The Greatest 261 Albums Since Punk and Disco arrives in no doubt wrist-breaking paperback size.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 5/11
Singles
Isn't it supposed to be albums that dry up in the last couple of months of the year? Actually that's not quite fair as there's some decent stuff out this month, but bar an Animal Collective Fireworks 10", and that's more out of expediency than artistic merit, we can find nothing that we'd feel safe in recommending to you this week. Luckily what we can talk about are...
EPs
...or mini-albums, if you prefer. The first one's got eight tracks in 31 minutes, so how would you class it? This is also probably something Pagan Wanderer Lu sweated over at some stage, we're sure. Perfection RIP is his doing a reverse Radiohead, in that having released quite a few releases on what we'll call analogue download (YouSendIt and so forth) since last year's Independent Scrutineer EP he's expecting you to go to a shop, or an online shop, or a download service, and pay for it. It, as per usual, being lo-fi electronica plus socio-political sarkiness plus far too many ideas to comfortably fit into any easy classification. Regarding the latter you'd say much the same, on a grander scale, for Grizzly Bear. Ten tracker Friend isn't for the curious newcomer, being as it is alternate versions of songs from their two albums plus a couple of covers, including their live favourite version of He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) and covers by CSS, Band Of Horses and Deerhunter spinoff Atlas Sound.
Albums
You'd be surprised how wildly Misty's Big Adventure split opinion. Well, no you wouldn't in truth, given if the upbeat cabaret with jazz and ska undertones doesn't get you the sight of Erotic Volvo will, but you rarely see a review or blogger that doesn't settle for either fervency or revulsion. If you're in the former category, you need to know that after transferring across labels with every release they've settled for their own Grumpy Fun imprint for Funny Times, a third selection of Grandmaster Gareth's wistful wryness to oddpop. Darren Hayman has long put records out under his own auspices, and literally under his own name, being Darren Hayman Records. It's been mostly Hefner rarities and reissues to date but there's been a steady flow of solo EPs too, which made it seem surprising to us that The Secondary Modern, named after his own country/bluegrass-ified backing band, is only his second full-length. Hayman, obviously, remains David Gedge's spiritual heir as bedroom love poet to the indie kid set. You wouldn't imagine the first thing that would come to mind of members of the Archie Bronson Outfit discussing a side project is raw blues-inspired garage - they could just make another album if that's the case - but Sam Windett and Mark Cleveland's The Pyramids's self-titled debut does indeed somehow wring even more direct intensity out. New Zealand duo the Brunettes' not entirely seriously minded carefully constructed Spectorish Shins-pop has been running for nine years but they've only just landed a wider deal with Sub Pop for Structure And Cosmetics. Ben Nicholls doesn't like making things easy for himself. Not only does he simultaneously operate guitar, bass drum, hi-hat, Vox organ and bass pedals, he's called his one-man operation Dennis Hopper Choppers. That's Dennis Hopper Choppers. Luckily Chop turns out to be accomplished murder rockabilly. Long Blondes fans, look this way for Glasgow scene glitter kids The Royal We, whose debut is also their farewell release, having already played their last gig before their singer returns to LA. In reissue news, it takes a brave marketer to squeeze out two CDs representative of Can's massively influential entire career but Anthology just about manages it, while the Slits' second, less mud-featuring 1981 album Return Of The Giant Slits gets remastered for all it's worth.
DVDs
It's often been the quick way out to describe Sigur Ros' glacial magnificence as instructive of their extraordinary Icelandic surroundings. Heima puts that to the test, as the band are filmed performing in caves, follies, hillsides, abandoned buildings and community halls on a summer tour that's like no guerilla gig you'll ever have seen.
Books
The Replacements should have been the breakout band from the early 80s underground, the youthful Minneapolis rock'n'rollers emerging in 1981 and producing a number of cult albums before it all fell apart. Sabotaged by their own actions, to be precise, as oral history All Over But The Shouting by Jim Walsh charts twelve years of drunkenness, FM rock and pressures of major label success.
Isn't it supposed to be albums that dry up in the last couple of months of the year? Actually that's not quite fair as there's some decent stuff out this month, but bar an Animal Collective Fireworks 10", and that's more out of expediency than artistic merit, we can find nothing that we'd feel safe in recommending to you this week. Luckily what we can talk about are...
EPs
...or mini-albums, if you prefer. The first one's got eight tracks in 31 minutes, so how would you class it? This is also probably something Pagan Wanderer Lu sweated over at some stage, we're sure. Perfection RIP is his doing a reverse Radiohead, in that having released quite a few releases on what we'll call analogue download (YouSendIt and so forth) since last year's Independent Scrutineer EP he's expecting you to go to a shop, or an online shop, or a download service, and pay for it. It, as per usual, being lo-fi electronica plus socio-political sarkiness plus far too many ideas to comfortably fit into any easy classification. Regarding the latter you'd say much the same, on a grander scale, for Grizzly Bear. Ten tracker Friend isn't for the curious newcomer, being as it is alternate versions of songs from their two albums plus a couple of covers, including their live favourite version of He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss) and covers by CSS, Band Of Horses and Deerhunter spinoff Atlas Sound.
Albums
You'd be surprised how wildly Misty's Big Adventure split opinion. Well, no you wouldn't in truth, given if the upbeat cabaret with jazz and ska undertones doesn't get you the sight of Erotic Volvo will, but you rarely see a review or blogger that doesn't settle for either fervency or revulsion. If you're in the former category, you need to know that after transferring across labels with every release they've settled for their own Grumpy Fun imprint for Funny Times, a third selection of Grandmaster Gareth's wistful wryness to oddpop. Darren Hayman has long put records out under his own auspices, and literally under his own name, being Darren Hayman Records. It's been mostly Hefner rarities and reissues to date but there's been a steady flow of solo EPs too, which made it seem surprising to us that The Secondary Modern, named after his own country/bluegrass-ified backing band, is only his second full-length. Hayman, obviously, remains David Gedge's spiritual heir as bedroom love poet to the indie kid set. You wouldn't imagine the first thing that would come to mind of members of the Archie Bronson Outfit discussing a side project is raw blues-inspired garage - they could just make another album if that's the case - but Sam Windett and Mark Cleveland's The Pyramids's self-titled debut does indeed somehow wring even more direct intensity out. New Zealand duo the Brunettes' not entirely seriously minded carefully constructed Spectorish Shins-pop has been running for nine years but they've only just landed a wider deal with Sub Pop for Structure And Cosmetics. Ben Nicholls doesn't like making things easy for himself. Not only does he simultaneously operate guitar, bass drum, hi-hat, Vox organ and bass pedals, he's called his one-man operation Dennis Hopper Choppers. That's Dennis Hopper Choppers. Luckily Chop turns out to be accomplished murder rockabilly. Long Blondes fans, look this way for Glasgow scene glitter kids The Royal We, whose debut is also their farewell release, having already played their last gig before their singer returns to LA. In reissue news, it takes a brave marketer to squeeze out two CDs representative of Can's massively influential entire career but Anthology just about manages it, while the Slits' second, less mud-featuring 1981 album Return Of The Giant Slits gets remastered for all it's worth.
DVDs
It's often been the quick way out to describe Sigur Ros' glacial magnificence as instructive of their extraordinary Icelandic surroundings. Heima puts that to the test, as the band are filmed performing in caves, follies, hillsides, abandoned buildings and community halls on a summer tour that's like no guerilla gig you'll ever have seen.
Books
The Replacements should have been the breakout band from the early 80s underground, the youthful Minneapolis rock'n'rollers emerging in 1981 and producing a number of cult albums before it all fell apart. Sabotaged by their own actions, to be precise, as oral history All Over But The Shouting by Jim Walsh charts twelve years of drunkenness, FM rock and pressures of major label success.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 29/10
Singles
Inevitably, quite a bit from last week's singles list got moved back a week - 4 Or 5 Magicians, Blood Red Shoes, Ladytron, that sort. So now that label indecision is out of the way, we can get onto Sons And Daughters, who started doing the country-punk thing, had a Bad Seeds phase and in Adele Bethel's case got through metre upon metre of gold fabric. An early taster of next year's third album, Gilt Complex adds a slight sheen to The Repulsion Box's underground club grime atmosphere but these are still people with rhythmic malice aforethought. Like that band, the Young Knives' last album was garlanded with STN end of year top ten honours - we doubt it's on their press release, in all honesty - and are promoting a spring 2008 follow-up with a single. Terra Firma may be fronted by Henry Dartnall's never that appealling choice of his declamatory/shouty voice, but it'd fit well onto Voices Of Animals And Men and it's far from the best of the new material. We know that for people who've never been there we go on quite a bit about the music coming out of Cardiff over the past year or so but it's a thriving scene not yet tainted by association by the big boys' trendsetting application. It's getting a bit out of our hands when people we already liked start moving there, as is the case with Bolton/Aberystwyth graduate Andy Regan, whom followers of bedroom electronic/acoustic dark wit, which should be all of you, will know as Pagan Wanderer Lu. One suspects from the lyrics of The Tree Of Knowledge that he didn't particularly get on at school, but - brace yourselves for this one - he definitely gets top grades for his scuffed up music!!!! It's been a long and busy week for us. His label Brainlove Records are on something of a roll this week, in fact, as not only do they also provide our top album choice still to come but also house electro-art-punks Applicants, whose throw everything at Cubase and see if it sticks tactics led them to be dubbed "Busted meets Daphne & Celeste" by TOTP magazine. Hypochondriac/Hurt sounds like neither. The pair of them, plus Napoleon IIIrd (that's ruined the surprise) and Keyboard Choir, are off on tour together in November - check local listings for details. The duo that make up Slow Club aren't that electronic at all, preferring the healing properties of acoustic guitar, basic drum kit and summery tweefolk on second single Me & You. Eugene McGuinness' star has somewhat got lost in the UV lighting surrounding some of his immediate circle but his mini-album The Early Learnings Of... is a highly impressive intro, from which Bold Street is taken. Before Yeasayer and Black Kids, the hype of the day in the American underground was the Afrobeat indie of collegiate kids Vampire Weekend, who launch with Mansard Roof. The Super Furry Animals, increasingly at risk of fading into the background which would be very unlike them, bring out Run-Away, our most unrecognisable major rock stars the Kings Of Leon - how did they get so big? Would you recognise any of them now they're beardless? - channel the Pixies on Charmer, and in the download, erm, folder Charlotte Hatherley, who's just been around the country on an acoustic tour, draws another from the unjustly overlooked The Deep Blue, Again.
Albums
Quite apart from legions of Thames Valley teenage girls with Joni Mitchell records and Garageband-equipped laptops, the real revolution in home recording is happening well away from Super A lists. We've dealt in the past with many a solo visionary starting with a head full of clashing melodically charged ideas and carrying them through where they sat to various degrees. We've previously dealt in this very post with Pagan Wanderer Lu, for a classic instance. And right up with the best of them we find Leeds' James Mabbett, the man behind the soubriquet Napoleon IIIrd. In Debt To: has been out on download for five months now but only now have Brainlove Records got together the finances to put it out on properly distributed CD, so we've had some time to live with this and know that when we say it's more than likely the solo album of the year you can rest assured we know what we're talking about. We could sit here and make a big list of all the reference points we hear, from the Beach Boys to Olivia Tremor Control to pre-fame Flaming Lips to Jim O'Rourke's solo adventures, but it'd still underplay the sheer weight of seemingly disjointed ideas that have been jigsaw-like fitted together with misleading ease to create this DIY whirl of broken melodies, glitchy offbeats, declamatory lyrics, heartfelt moments and endless invention. Channel 4 Teletext's Planet Sound referred to Untitled Musical Project as comprising ex-members of McLusky, which isn't true but might be an easy mistake to make given they come from exactly the same place of dirty great bass riffs, Albiniesque guitars and caustic lyrics. Bath isn't the first place you'd imagine would produce a heavy funk collective also inspired by RZA, Tom Waits and the Sonics, but such is the enclosing world of influence these days. The Heavy's great crossover potential has gone quiet after a very brief flowering a couple of singles ago, Great Vengeance & Furious Fire almost sneaking out for the discerning. With the kids wanting their choral multi-instrumental hymns to Valhalla and the actual record buyers being into yacht rock production it was inevitable a midpoint would cause people to wet themselves, and such has happened with Yeasayer's All Hour Cymbals. Anyone remember Day One? Storytelling over beats and acoustic guitar meant they were very briefly Bristol's post-trip-hop next big thing. After seven years off they return with Probably Art. Caution: contains Will.I.Am. Fabriclive's DJ set series reaches Fabriclive 36 with James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem drummer Pat Mahoney. Unsurprisingly it's virtually all semi-obscure turn of the 80s disco-funk, much (although not including him) of the sort Chaz Jankel was making when he first got his hands on synths and had some time off being Ian Dury's writing partner. Chaz Jankel - My Occupation: The Music Of Chaz Jankel charts such excursions.
Books
While there's clearly a book in the glam-art school pop inventing world of Eno-era Roxy Music, Michael Bracewell's Re-make/Re-model: Art, Pop, Fashion and the Making of Roxy Music, 1953-1972 suggests in its very subtitle that he's going to have a shot at two. Novellist Bracewell has long flown the flag for English pop pizazz and while the title's timescale doesn't suggest a surfeit of discussing the music the band made - their first album came out in 1972 - there's plenty to go at in the further education, fine art and extended theory surroundings they grew up in. We've just passed the fourth anniversary of Elliott Smith's death, plenty of time for photographer and video director Autumn de Wilde to provide a personal view, with close companion input, of his legacy. Doesn't The Official Punk Rock Book Of Lists sound like the most horrible post-Year Zero misnomer? It has credentials, though, co-writing credits going to Handsome Dick Manitoba of key pre-punks the Dictators and featuring input from assorted luminaries and sideline names.
Inevitably, quite a bit from last week's singles list got moved back a week - 4 Or 5 Magicians, Blood Red Shoes, Ladytron, that sort. So now that label indecision is out of the way, we can get onto Sons And Daughters, who started doing the country-punk thing, had a Bad Seeds phase and in Adele Bethel's case got through metre upon metre of gold fabric. An early taster of next year's third album, Gilt Complex adds a slight sheen to The Repulsion Box's underground club grime atmosphere but these are still people with rhythmic malice aforethought. Like that band, the Young Knives' last album was garlanded with STN end of year top ten honours - we doubt it's on their press release, in all honesty - and are promoting a spring 2008 follow-up with a single. Terra Firma may be fronted by Henry Dartnall's never that appealling choice of his declamatory/shouty voice, but it'd fit well onto Voices Of Animals And Men and it's far from the best of the new material. We know that for people who've never been there we go on quite a bit about the music coming out of Cardiff over the past year or so but it's a thriving scene not yet tainted by association by the big boys' trendsetting application. It's getting a bit out of our hands when people we already liked start moving there, as is the case with Bolton/Aberystwyth graduate Andy Regan, whom followers of bedroom electronic/acoustic dark wit, which should be all of you, will know as Pagan Wanderer Lu. One suspects from the lyrics of The Tree Of Knowledge that he didn't particularly get on at school, but - brace yourselves for this one - he definitely gets top grades for his scuffed up music!!!! It's been a long and busy week for us. His label Brainlove Records are on something of a roll this week, in fact, as not only do they also provide our top album choice still to come but also house electro-art-punks Applicants, whose throw everything at Cubase and see if it sticks tactics led them to be dubbed "Busted meets Daphne & Celeste" by TOTP magazine. Hypochondriac/Hurt sounds like neither. The pair of them, plus Napoleon IIIrd (that's ruined the surprise) and Keyboard Choir, are off on tour together in November - check local listings for details. The duo that make up Slow Club aren't that electronic at all, preferring the healing properties of acoustic guitar, basic drum kit and summery tweefolk on second single Me & You. Eugene McGuinness' star has somewhat got lost in the UV lighting surrounding some of his immediate circle but his mini-album The Early Learnings Of... is a highly impressive intro, from which Bold Street is taken. Before Yeasayer and Black Kids, the hype of the day in the American underground was the Afrobeat indie of collegiate kids Vampire Weekend, who launch with Mansard Roof. The Super Furry Animals, increasingly at risk of fading into the background which would be very unlike them, bring out Run-Away, our most unrecognisable major rock stars the Kings Of Leon - how did they get so big? Would you recognise any of them now they're beardless? - channel the Pixies on Charmer, and in the download, erm, folder Charlotte Hatherley, who's just been around the country on an acoustic tour, draws another from the unjustly overlooked The Deep Blue, Again.
Albums
Quite apart from legions of Thames Valley teenage girls with Joni Mitchell records and Garageband-equipped laptops, the real revolution in home recording is happening well away from Super A lists. We've dealt in the past with many a solo visionary starting with a head full of clashing melodically charged ideas and carrying them through where they sat to various degrees. We've previously dealt in this very post with Pagan Wanderer Lu, for a classic instance. And right up with the best of them we find Leeds' James Mabbett, the man behind the soubriquet Napoleon IIIrd. In Debt To: has been out on download for five months now but only now have Brainlove Records got together the finances to put it out on properly distributed CD, so we've had some time to live with this and know that when we say it's more than likely the solo album of the year you can rest assured we know what we're talking about. We could sit here and make a big list of all the reference points we hear, from the Beach Boys to Olivia Tremor Control to pre-fame Flaming Lips to Jim O'Rourke's solo adventures, but it'd still underplay the sheer weight of seemingly disjointed ideas that have been jigsaw-like fitted together with misleading ease to create this DIY whirl of broken melodies, glitchy offbeats, declamatory lyrics, heartfelt moments and endless invention. Channel 4 Teletext's Planet Sound referred to Untitled Musical Project as comprising ex-members of McLusky, which isn't true but might be an easy mistake to make given they come from exactly the same place of dirty great bass riffs, Albiniesque guitars and caustic lyrics. Bath isn't the first place you'd imagine would produce a heavy funk collective also inspired by RZA, Tom Waits and the Sonics, but such is the enclosing world of influence these days. The Heavy's great crossover potential has gone quiet after a very brief flowering a couple of singles ago, Great Vengeance & Furious Fire almost sneaking out for the discerning. With the kids wanting their choral multi-instrumental hymns to Valhalla and the actual record buyers being into yacht rock production it was inevitable a midpoint would cause people to wet themselves, and such has happened with Yeasayer's All Hour Cymbals. Anyone remember Day One? Storytelling over beats and acoustic guitar meant they were very briefly Bristol's post-trip-hop next big thing. After seven years off they return with Probably Art. Caution: contains Will.I.Am. Fabriclive's DJ set series reaches Fabriclive 36 with James Murphy and LCD Soundsystem drummer Pat Mahoney. Unsurprisingly it's virtually all semi-obscure turn of the 80s disco-funk, much (although not including him) of the sort Chaz Jankel was making when he first got his hands on synths and had some time off being Ian Dury's writing partner. Chaz Jankel - My Occupation: The Music Of Chaz Jankel charts such excursions.
Books
While there's clearly a book in the glam-art school pop inventing world of Eno-era Roxy Music, Michael Bracewell's Re-make/Re-model: Art, Pop, Fashion and the Making of Roxy Music, 1953-1972 suggests in its very subtitle that he's going to have a shot at two. Novellist Bracewell has long flown the flag for English pop pizazz and while the title's timescale doesn't suggest a surfeit of discussing the music the band made - their first album came out in 1972 - there's plenty to go at in the further education, fine art and extended theory surroundings they grew up in. We've just passed the fourth anniversary of Elliott Smith's death, plenty of time for photographer and video director Autumn de Wilde to provide a personal view, with close companion input, of his legacy. Doesn't The Official Punk Rock Book Of Lists sound like the most horrible post-Year Zero misnomer? It has credentials, though, co-writing credits going to Handsome Dick Manitoba of key pre-punks the Dictators and featuring input from assorted luminaries and sideline names.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 22/10
Singles
Record industry lore has it that the third single is the one on which your act goes for broke, the release which determines whether the public will (be forced to) have an interest in your pet project. Essentially, single three shows whether you daytime radio and press lionisation crossover potential. Los Campesinos!' third single, The International Tweexcore Underground, resembles a Cardiff Scene Broken Social Scene with carried away glockenspiel and sawing violin, and is described by the band as "a story of a friendship of two opposites and how they are in the best band in the world" which namechecks Henry Rollins, Amelia Fletcher, Ian MacKaye, Calvin Johnson and Sarah Records. Scott Mills' producer has not yet put a call in. It is of course magnificent, which we would say because it's Los Campesinos! and if they released a cover of No Charge played entirely on hosepipe and accordion we'd go a bundle on it. No, instead they're releasing a "concept single", the B-sides being covers of Black Flag's Police Story and Heavenly's Calvinist classic C Is The Heavenly Option. Presumably Wichita couldn't afford to press up a CD2 with Out Of Step and Pristine Christine on. Incidentally, someone started a since deleted Wikipedia entry for 'tweecore' claiming this record invented the term, which when shown to him made Gareth go a neat shade of puce (or so we imagine, it was an online discussion), not unreasonably as not only has the phrase been in net use for years - the Bobby McGees used to probably ironically call themselves "the inventors of tweecore" - but we found we'd employed it to describe Suburban Kids With Biblical Names last end of year. Sorry. Battles will never, ever be referred to using the word 'twee'. Indeed, by now most have run out of epithets, genres and lexicographal epiphanies employed to describe exactly what they do sound like, with their pitch control and their finger tapping and their big cymbal stand and all that. Tonto comes with remixes including one from Four Tet, live tracks and a DVD featuring both videos and a behind the scenes. Mirrored will be at or near the top of just as many end of year lists as Sound Of Silver, both taking the principles of the groove in completely different directions as if to say "fuck you, Sasha Frere-Jones". Someone Great is probably the next closest it comes to what a single sounds like nowadays. Two years in Blood Red Shoes are still taking the scenic coastal route of limited edition 7"s building up to January's album. I Wish I Was Someone Better, their fifth such single release by our reckoning, gives Steven a lead vocal and ratches up the two-person tension bred on endless support touring yet again. The other way to get attention is to whore your image out to the fashion magazines, hence the brief spell around June where everyone seemed to be going on about The Teenagers, three Frenchmen based in London with rudeness aforethought. Even the most horribly contrived i-D band usually have one thing about them, though, and in their case it's the synth Velvets Strapisms of the not exactly coded Starlett Johansson. Either out last week or next, so we're going for the mean average, comes another one from the Brighton alt-diaspora, 4 Or 5 Magicians, essentially just one Dan Ormsby, and if their/his debut 7" Forever On The Edge bears hallmarks of not only being slanted but enchanted also (and of Guided By Voices, come to that) there are far, far worse things to be. It's also a song about being in a failing band that works. Popular Workshop called their first EP Stutter And Dance, which just about does the descriptive job for us - rhythms that break themselves down and start back up at will, energetic angular screes and a lot of post-Sonic Youth flailing about around the ring roads of melody. Double A'd 7" William, It Was Really Something/Radical attempts to leash their hyperkinecity to mastertape. There's no good reason for the two year old Destroy Everything You Touch by Ladytron to come back out, but such are the industry's wiles. The Maccabees' Toothpaste Kisses isn't a tremendously obvious single choice but at least it's not got high speed hi-hat and declamatory guitar like all their other songs. Adele has been talked about as the ace in the New London Kids pack for so long now it's hard to think Hometown Glory is her debut, a 7" on Jamie T's Pacemaker label. Frankly it doesn't need its synthetically produced string section, it's good enough in its raw form. It's a good ten to twelve years since Gallon Drunk made their name in the realm of seedy London underbelly swamp rock, and despite many a lineup change James Johnston is still sounding like Nick Cave's perma-sozzled mate (which, oddly...) on Grand Union Canal. Middlesbrough's energetic female frontline pop-punk if that wasn't such a debased term kids We Start Fires start to come of age at last on Let's Get Our Hands Dirty, while after what seems like years making a small inroad in America and Liela Moss adding vocals for basically everyone who asks the Duke Spirit return for unwarranted Duke Special confusion aplenty on EP Ex Voto.
Albums
Recently seen supporting on the curtailed Decemberists UK tour, Land Of Talk were described by us not long ago and understandably by nobody else anywhere ever as Montreal's Sky Larkin. It's based on more than their being a female-fronted trio, you'll be glad to hear, more their adding to the Throwing Muses/Breeders/Veruca Salt lineage of same and leaving their own personal stamp of ambition and ideas on it. Applause Cheer Boo Hiss has been extended from mini-album to full LP status by the addition of three extra tracks for the UK market, exhibiting much the same sort of streamlined post-cool and determination. Holy Fuck, having self-titled their first, get out of second album titling horror the easy way by calling it LP. Very Public Image Ltd. Unlike the record, which is very !!! in that they create faux-electronic dance-punk by analogue means, using percussion, antique synths and found sounds to create a soundscape to dance to and think about later. Every Monday night through late summer at London's Big Chill House The Mules curated a bill of favourite new bands, which they've now collated together on Pick Your Own. what could have been an exercise in nose-thumbing is averted by the realisation that if the whole market for synth-post-punk-country becomes sluggish they can come and write STN for a bit, given their favourites include Emmy The Great, Lightspeed Champion, Napoleon IIIrd, Noah And The Whale, Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit, Eugene McGuinness, Jonquil, Son Of Dave and Fireworks Night. Krautrock sampler the easy way with Can reissuing nearly their whole back catalogue. Tago Mago is the one the legend is built on, Ege Bamyasi is preferred by many, Future Days' four tracks in forty-odd minutes signpost ambient's way. The Wedding Present are heading off around the country from Tuesday on a George Best twentieth anniversary tour (Lucky Soul are doing some support dates in the latter end of the tour in November), and to coincide the first two of the official bootleg Live Tapes mail order cassettes are remastered for Live 1987. Now that David Longstreth is getting attention for his Dirty Projectors' Rise Above project its 2005 predecessor The Getty Address gets its first proper UK release. According to Longstreth's notes "The Getty Address is about the conflict of Hernan Cortes and the Aztecs in 1519-21, the virtualization of wilderness on a completely circumscribed globe, dirty projection, and love cerebral and spiritual... inspired by Aztec mythology, the Eagles, and the 9/11 aftermath". Right.
DVDs
A month ago Frank Turner's DVD was talked up by us as a document of his life as the gig-booked acoustic wanderer, comprising live footage, a documentary, videos and fan contributions. That was before the inevitable processing delays, but All About The Destination finally hits shelves this week.
Books
A year and a half after its ignominious and pop schedule-landmining exit seems a curious point at which to write a tribute to Top Of The Pops, but Ian Gittins has done just such in the form of Top Of The Pops: Mishaps, Miming and Music - True Adventures of TV's No.1 Pop Show. If it doesn't include the anecdote about the production team on the first show realising the floor manager was bald and convincing him to wear a wig so he didn't stand out it's not worth the recycle bin its paper was scrounged from. We imagine Damon Albarn: Blur, Gorillaz and Other Fables is the first unofficial biography of the inscrutable son of Soft Machine's lighting designer (and yet we can't remember the birthdays of relatives) is because Stuart Maconie's worthwhile if already well out of date 3862 Days authorised Blur biography did such a thorough job both in and between the lines. The usual slew of old acquaintances line up to reminisce.
Record industry lore has it that the third single is the one on which your act goes for broke, the release which determines whether the public will (be forced to) have an interest in your pet project. Essentially, single three shows whether you daytime radio and press lionisation crossover potential. Los Campesinos!' third single, The International Tweexcore Underground, resembles a Cardiff Scene Broken Social Scene with carried away glockenspiel and sawing violin, and is described by the band as "a story of a friendship of two opposites and how they are in the best band in the world" which namechecks Henry Rollins, Amelia Fletcher, Ian MacKaye, Calvin Johnson and Sarah Records. Scott Mills' producer has not yet put a call in. It is of course magnificent, which we would say because it's Los Campesinos! and if they released a cover of No Charge played entirely on hosepipe and accordion we'd go a bundle on it. No, instead they're releasing a "concept single", the B-sides being covers of Black Flag's Police Story and Heavenly's Calvinist classic C Is The Heavenly Option. Presumably Wichita couldn't afford to press up a CD2 with Out Of Step and Pristine Christine on. Incidentally, someone started a since deleted Wikipedia entry for 'tweecore' claiming this record invented the term, which when shown to him made Gareth go a neat shade of puce (or so we imagine, it was an online discussion), not unreasonably as not only has the phrase been in net use for years - the Bobby McGees used to probably ironically call themselves "the inventors of tweecore" - but we found we'd employed it to describe Suburban Kids With Biblical Names last end of year. Sorry. Battles will never, ever be referred to using the word 'twee'. Indeed, by now most have run out of epithets, genres and lexicographal epiphanies employed to describe exactly what they do sound like, with their pitch control and their finger tapping and their big cymbal stand and all that. Tonto comes with remixes including one from Four Tet, live tracks and a DVD featuring both videos and a behind the scenes. Mirrored will be at or near the top of just as many end of year lists as Sound Of Silver, both taking the principles of the groove in completely different directions as if to say "fuck you, Sasha Frere-Jones". Someone Great is probably the next closest it comes to what a single sounds like nowadays. Two years in Blood Red Shoes are still taking the scenic coastal route of limited edition 7"s building up to January's album. I Wish I Was Someone Better, their fifth such single release by our reckoning, gives Steven a lead vocal and ratches up the two-person tension bred on endless support touring yet again. The other way to get attention is to whore your image out to the fashion magazines, hence the brief spell around June where everyone seemed to be going on about The Teenagers, three Frenchmen based in London with rudeness aforethought. Even the most horribly contrived i-D band usually have one thing about them, though, and in their case it's the synth Velvets Strapisms of the not exactly coded Starlett Johansson. Either out last week or next, so we're going for the mean average, comes another one from the Brighton alt-diaspora, 4 Or 5 Magicians, essentially just one Dan Ormsby, and if their/his debut 7" Forever On The Edge bears hallmarks of not only being slanted but enchanted also (and of Guided By Voices, come to that) there are far, far worse things to be. It's also a song about being in a failing band that works. Popular Workshop called their first EP Stutter And Dance, which just about does the descriptive job for us - rhythms that break themselves down and start back up at will, energetic angular screes and a lot of post-Sonic Youth flailing about around the ring roads of melody. Double A'd 7" William, It Was Really Something/Radical attempts to leash their hyperkinecity to mastertape. There's no good reason for the two year old Destroy Everything You Touch by Ladytron to come back out, but such are the industry's wiles. The Maccabees' Toothpaste Kisses isn't a tremendously obvious single choice but at least it's not got high speed hi-hat and declamatory guitar like all their other songs. Adele has been talked about as the ace in the New London Kids pack for so long now it's hard to think Hometown Glory is her debut, a 7" on Jamie T's Pacemaker label. Frankly it doesn't need its synthetically produced string section, it's good enough in its raw form. It's a good ten to twelve years since Gallon Drunk made their name in the realm of seedy London underbelly swamp rock, and despite many a lineup change James Johnston is still sounding like Nick Cave's perma-sozzled mate (which, oddly...) on Grand Union Canal. Middlesbrough's energetic female frontline pop-punk if that wasn't such a debased term kids We Start Fires start to come of age at last on Let's Get Our Hands Dirty, while after what seems like years making a small inroad in America and Liela Moss adding vocals for basically everyone who asks the Duke Spirit return for unwarranted Duke Special confusion aplenty on EP Ex Voto.
Albums
Recently seen supporting on the curtailed Decemberists UK tour, Land Of Talk were described by us not long ago and understandably by nobody else anywhere ever as Montreal's Sky Larkin. It's based on more than their being a female-fronted trio, you'll be glad to hear, more their adding to the Throwing Muses/Breeders/Veruca Salt lineage of same and leaving their own personal stamp of ambition and ideas on it. Applause Cheer Boo Hiss has been extended from mini-album to full LP status by the addition of three extra tracks for the UK market, exhibiting much the same sort of streamlined post-cool and determination. Holy Fuck, having self-titled their first, get out of second album titling horror the easy way by calling it LP. Very Public Image Ltd. Unlike the record, which is very !!! in that they create faux-electronic dance-punk by analogue means, using percussion, antique synths and found sounds to create a soundscape to dance to and think about later. Every Monday night through late summer at London's Big Chill House The Mules curated a bill of favourite new bands, which they've now collated together on Pick Your Own. what could have been an exercise in nose-thumbing is averted by the realisation that if the whole market for synth-post-punk-country becomes sluggish they can come and write STN for a bit, given their favourites include Emmy The Great, Lightspeed Champion, Napoleon IIIrd, Noah And The Whale, Johnny Flynn and the Sussex Wit, Eugene McGuinness, Jonquil, Son Of Dave and Fireworks Night. Krautrock sampler the easy way with Can reissuing nearly their whole back catalogue. Tago Mago is the one the legend is built on, Ege Bamyasi is preferred by many, Future Days' four tracks in forty-odd minutes signpost ambient's way. The Wedding Present are heading off around the country from Tuesday on a George Best twentieth anniversary tour (Lucky Soul are doing some support dates in the latter end of the tour in November), and to coincide the first two of the official bootleg Live Tapes mail order cassettes are remastered for Live 1987. Now that David Longstreth is getting attention for his Dirty Projectors' Rise Above project its 2005 predecessor The Getty Address gets its first proper UK release. According to Longstreth's notes "The Getty Address is about the conflict of Hernan Cortes and the Aztecs in 1519-21, the virtualization of wilderness on a completely circumscribed globe, dirty projection, and love cerebral and spiritual... inspired by Aztec mythology, the Eagles, and the 9/11 aftermath". Right.
DVDs
A month ago Frank Turner's DVD was talked up by us as a document of his life as the gig-booked acoustic wanderer, comprising live footage, a documentary, videos and fan contributions. That was before the inevitable processing delays, but All About The Destination finally hits shelves this week.
Books
A year and a half after its ignominious and pop schedule-landmining exit seems a curious point at which to write a tribute to Top Of The Pops, but Ian Gittins has done just such in the form of Top Of The Pops: Mishaps, Miming and Music - True Adventures of TV's No.1 Pop Show. If it doesn't include the anecdote about the production team on the first show realising the floor manager was bald and convincing him to wear a wig so he didn't stand out it's not worth the recycle bin its paper was scrounged from. We imagine Damon Albarn: Blur, Gorillaz and Other Fables is the first unofficial biography of the inscrutable son of Soft Machine's lighting designer (and yet we can't remember the birthdays of relatives) is because Stuart Maconie's worthwhile if already well out of date 3862 Days authorised Blur biography did such a thorough job both in and between the lines. The usual slew of old acquaintances line up to reminisce.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 15/10
Singles
We didn't discover Sky Larkin, of course - they were doing local media two years ago - but we can't help feel an element of paternal pride now more people are starting to wake up to their serrated melodies and Leeds Breeders/Muses come-ons since we first highlghted them last January following Nothing But Green Lights' enthusiasm. Currently, and perhaps forever doomed to be, on the road with Los Campesinos!, single two Molten, again on Dance To The Radio, is a scratchy, vaulting thing that cements Katie Harkin's place among our most nonchalant frontwomen. And while great, its quality is at the very least equalled by unsettling organ-led longstanding demo favourite Keepsakes on the B-side, a Weekly Sweep inductee last June. Von Sudenfed recently played a handful of dates, most notable for how Mark E Smith didn't even dare touch Jan St Werner and Andi Toma's equipment. The celebrations continue with 12" double A side The Rhinohead/Slow Down Ronnie, the most poppy moment from Tromatic Reflexxions allied to a new Mark E appeal to Ronnie O'Sullivan. Mixer of the moment Pilooski contributes a remix too. Forget that band he used to be in, Dev Hynes is very much his own man following his folk-pop heart, literally, as Lightspeed Champion. If the slide guitar at the start of 10" Midnight Surprise - ten minutes long, which for a second single proves he's brave too - suggests George Harrison, the rest reminds you that he recorded it at Saddle Creek HQ. Emmy The Great and assorted Tilly & The Wallers provide backup. Try Harder Recordings are a label we're all going to have to keep a close eye on - already home of Jonquil and Youthmovies and with two early Blood Red Shoes singles and Foals' debut release in the back catalogue, they now bring us another set of Leicester emigres, Tired Irie, who sound adjacent to Foals if they really did sound like being a new Q And Not U some lazy types claim them to be. Tired Irie EP is your first taste of something that could be quite impressive. If Lily Allen's presence proves the former conscious rapper Common has come well in from the cold - album Finding Forever is his first Billboard number one - the commodity cauterising and marching drum hook of Drivin' Me Wild make it the best big hit the genre has produced in a while.
Albums
With nine release Mondays left in 2007 we're coming towards the end of the contenders for people's varying lists of the best albums of the year, what with Best Of, compilation and cash-in season pretty much upon us. Someone who might make an appearance on a few is Emma Louise Niblett, Scout Niblett to you. The Nottingham raised, Albini trusting, wig sporting, grunge inspired occasional corporeal form of The Goddess could on fourth album This Fool Can Die Now surely easily be set to make the leap from small scale cult to uncomfortable critical darling. Will Oldham turns up on four tracks but it's all about Niblett's minimal guitar, maximum drums and raw nerve emotions, not easily shrugging off the Chan'n'Polly comparisons but proving that she can sit easily next to them in terms of going against the grain under cover of hoping the mainstream comes to her rather than the traditional vice versa. Uneasy listening, but spellbinding. David Longsterth of the Dirty Projectors supposedly hadn't heard Black Flag's Damaged since college when he decided to make a tribute album to its visceral power, Rise Above, which replaces the barrack-rousing hardcore with eclectic psych-folk, like world music era Talking Heads recontextualising with Grizzly Bear, whose Chris Taylor produces. It really doesn't help to be acquainted with the original, except to explain what the source of the juxtaposition of lyrical theme and pastoral backing is about. we nearly just wrote that one day Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger will find out how to coalesce their overflow of ideas and melodic steals and quirks into a fluid album whole, except it then occurred to us that by this fifth full-length Widow City they would have done so if they wanted to. It does however feature fewer wild tangents and no unifying theme for once, but with more of an overt 70s influence. The Hives have moved on from their overt Detroit 60s influence very, very slightly on The Black And White Album, their fat-free garage augmented by two tracks produced by Pharrell Williams, and not in his N.E.R.D. mindset either. Hundred Reasons have spent too many recent years hanging around the periphery not quite getting it right, and now they've got closer to their original fire on Quick The Word, Sharp The Action the zeitgeist seems to have drifted off. Shame. Anyone who has space for No Wave in their lives, listen up for K Records' Old Time Relijun, whose Catharsis In Crisis redirects Beefheart through Lydia Lunch and James Chance's studios and into the Birthday Party's back alley. We didn't get round to mentioning last week that Robert Wyatt has a new album out, Comicopera the twelth of the ever individual jazz-folk-worldly best beard wearer in, erm, jazz-folk-worldly music. Semi-regular contributors Eno, Weller and Phil Manzanera are back, but this is as ever his perspective only, on war, love, spirituality and globalisation from the view of the cultural dispossessed, apparently signified by Wyatt singing in Spanish and Italian in protest against the English speaking culture. It's also his first release on Domino Recordings, who got Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip to write the press release. Those Arctic Monkeys albums funded this, and that is why we must all have shrines to Laurence Bell in the most sacred parts of our homes.
And so to those compilations, Best Ofs and cash-ins. REM have got this far without a live album, but those revenue streams won't manage themselves. REM Live is a 2 CD and one DVD set recorded at the end of their Around The Sun world tour at the Point Theatre in Dublin in 2005. Luckily its 22-strong setlist is not heavily drawn from that album, which at least one band member now dismisses. There doesn't seem to be much Plus about The Teardrop Explodes' Peel Sessions Plus, just three sessions' worth of fried psychpop gold often reworked from the recorded version, here with Cope sleevenotes. Australia's The Lucksmiths continue that country's grand tradition of assuredly crafted alterna-pop and have enough left over for a third rarities and offcuts compilation, the double disc Spring A Leak. Ed Harcourt's piano-based inventive melodicism could and should have made him big on numerous occasions, and Until Tomorrow Then is full of songs you barely remember hearing on the radio and recognising that their intelligence made them stand out some distance. This claim was rarely made for Carter USM, and surely in the commercial indie sphere nothing marks out the early 90s post-baggy pre-Suede better than their puns, shorts and haircuts. You Fat Bastard is a 2CD round-up of a music that will surely never happen again. Non-chronological order is one thing, but leaving Sherrif Fatman until Disc 2 Track 14 is just silly. A Cellarful Of Motown Volume 3 is a third crate-digging exercise into the mounds of stuff the Hit Factory churned out that was for whatever reason deemed by Berry Gordy not worth the single journey at the time for the likes of Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Mervin Gaye, (Detroit) Spinners, the Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips and Edwin Starr. Norman Cook loves this sort of thing and when in the queue he'll be trying not to look directly at his Late Night Tales series contribution, which features a duff cover of Kraftwerk's Radioactivity but also Jonathan Richman, Sly and the Family Stone, Bootsy Collins, Dave and Ansil Collins, Mink Deville's Spanish Stroll and attempts to repatriate Willie Nelson and Kenny Rogers.
DVDs
Bob Mould has always had an ambivalent attitude to his past, putting out an album every three years - just signed to Anti, LP expected February 2008 - accompanied by some grand statement about not making an electrified album any more or putting out a dance album next. Luckily, then, Circle Of Friends - Live At The 9.30 Club acquiesces to take from all over his career, a fully fired-up band taking on Husker Du, Sugar and solo pickings. Any Mould set that starts with The Act We Act and A Good Idea and closes with Celebrated Summer (set proper) and Man On The Moon (encore) is worth the wait. Not quite sure there's the same demand for Lene Lovich - Live From New York At Studio 54, but who knows when it comes to Stiff's most oddball performer in a coterie of them. Lovich's guitarist, co-writer and partner Les Chappell always used to scare us.
Books
Two for bathroom reading this week, or as stocking fillers if such a concept still exists. LA documentary producer turned writer Tom Reynolds, whose last list book I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard caused many a broadsheet thinkpiece, returns with Touch Me, I'm Sick: The 52 Creepiest Love Songs You've Ever Heard. In a more caring bent, Little Black Book of Setlists: The Songs Behind Rock 'n' Roll's Most Famous Gigs is just that, the setlists and information about 150 legendary shows from Altamont to the Lesser Free Trade Hall to Live 8 to the roof of the Apple Building to, good lord, the Stone Roses at Reading.
We didn't discover Sky Larkin, of course - they were doing local media two years ago - but we can't help feel an element of paternal pride now more people are starting to wake up to their serrated melodies and Leeds Breeders/Muses come-ons since we first highlghted them last January following Nothing But Green Lights' enthusiasm. Currently, and perhaps forever doomed to be, on the road with Los Campesinos!, single two Molten, again on Dance To The Radio, is a scratchy, vaulting thing that cements Katie Harkin's place among our most nonchalant frontwomen. And while great, its quality is at the very least equalled by unsettling organ-led longstanding demo favourite Keepsakes on the B-side, a Weekly Sweep inductee last June. Von Sudenfed recently played a handful of dates, most notable for how Mark E Smith didn't even dare touch Jan St Werner and Andi Toma's equipment. The celebrations continue with 12" double A side The Rhinohead/Slow Down Ronnie, the most poppy moment from Tromatic Reflexxions allied to a new Mark E appeal to Ronnie O'Sullivan. Mixer of the moment Pilooski contributes a remix too. Forget that band he used to be in, Dev Hynes is very much his own man following his folk-pop heart, literally, as Lightspeed Champion. If the slide guitar at the start of 10" Midnight Surprise - ten minutes long, which for a second single proves he's brave too - suggests George Harrison, the rest reminds you that he recorded it at Saddle Creek HQ. Emmy The Great and assorted Tilly & The Wallers provide backup. Try Harder Recordings are a label we're all going to have to keep a close eye on - already home of Jonquil and Youthmovies and with two early Blood Red Shoes singles and Foals' debut release in the back catalogue, they now bring us another set of Leicester emigres, Tired Irie, who sound adjacent to Foals if they really did sound like being a new Q And Not U some lazy types claim them to be. Tired Irie EP is your first taste of something that could be quite impressive. If Lily Allen's presence proves the former conscious rapper Common has come well in from the cold - album Finding Forever is his first Billboard number one - the commodity cauterising and marching drum hook of Drivin' Me Wild make it the best big hit the genre has produced in a while.
Albums
With nine release Mondays left in 2007 we're coming towards the end of the contenders for people's varying lists of the best albums of the year, what with Best Of, compilation and cash-in season pretty much upon us. Someone who might make an appearance on a few is Emma Louise Niblett, Scout Niblett to you. The Nottingham raised, Albini trusting, wig sporting, grunge inspired occasional corporeal form of The Goddess could on fourth album This Fool Can Die Now surely easily be set to make the leap from small scale cult to uncomfortable critical darling. Will Oldham turns up on four tracks but it's all about Niblett's minimal guitar, maximum drums and raw nerve emotions, not easily shrugging off the Chan'n'Polly comparisons but proving that she can sit easily next to them in terms of going against the grain under cover of hoping the mainstream comes to her rather than the traditional vice versa. Uneasy listening, but spellbinding. David Longsterth of the Dirty Projectors supposedly hadn't heard Black Flag's Damaged since college when he decided to make a tribute album to its visceral power, Rise Above, which replaces the barrack-rousing hardcore with eclectic psych-folk, like world music era Talking Heads recontextualising with Grizzly Bear, whose Chris Taylor produces. It really doesn't help to be acquainted with the original, except to explain what the source of the juxtaposition of lyrical theme and pastoral backing is about. we nearly just wrote that one day Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger will find out how to coalesce their overflow of ideas and melodic steals and quirks into a fluid album whole, except it then occurred to us that by this fifth full-length Widow City they would have done so if they wanted to. It does however feature fewer wild tangents and no unifying theme for once, but with more of an overt 70s influence. The Hives have moved on from their overt Detroit 60s influence very, very slightly on The Black And White Album, their fat-free garage augmented by two tracks produced by Pharrell Williams, and not in his N.E.R.D. mindset either. Hundred Reasons have spent too many recent years hanging around the periphery not quite getting it right, and now they've got closer to their original fire on Quick The Word, Sharp The Action the zeitgeist seems to have drifted off. Shame. Anyone who has space for No Wave in their lives, listen up for K Records' Old Time Relijun, whose Catharsis In Crisis redirects Beefheart through Lydia Lunch and James Chance's studios and into the Birthday Party's back alley. We didn't get round to mentioning last week that Robert Wyatt has a new album out, Comicopera the twelth of the ever individual jazz-folk-worldly best beard wearer in, erm, jazz-folk-worldly music. Semi-regular contributors Eno, Weller and Phil Manzanera are back, but this is as ever his perspective only, on war, love, spirituality and globalisation from the view of the cultural dispossessed, apparently signified by Wyatt singing in Spanish and Italian in protest against the English speaking culture. It's also his first release on Domino Recordings, who got Alexis Taylor of Hot Chip to write the press release. Those Arctic Monkeys albums funded this, and that is why we must all have shrines to Laurence Bell in the most sacred parts of our homes.
And so to those compilations, Best Ofs and cash-ins. REM have got this far without a live album, but those revenue streams won't manage themselves. REM Live is a 2 CD and one DVD set recorded at the end of their Around The Sun world tour at the Point Theatre in Dublin in 2005. Luckily its 22-strong setlist is not heavily drawn from that album, which at least one band member now dismisses. There doesn't seem to be much Plus about The Teardrop Explodes' Peel Sessions Plus, just three sessions' worth of fried psychpop gold often reworked from the recorded version, here with Cope sleevenotes. Australia's The Lucksmiths continue that country's grand tradition of assuredly crafted alterna-pop and have enough left over for a third rarities and offcuts compilation, the double disc Spring A Leak. Ed Harcourt's piano-based inventive melodicism could and should have made him big on numerous occasions, and Until Tomorrow Then is full of songs you barely remember hearing on the radio and recognising that their intelligence made them stand out some distance. This claim was rarely made for Carter USM, and surely in the commercial indie sphere nothing marks out the early 90s post-baggy pre-Suede better than their puns, shorts and haircuts. You Fat Bastard is a 2CD round-up of a music that will surely never happen again. Non-chronological order is one thing, but leaving Sherrif Fatman until Disc 2 Track 14 is just silly. A Cellarful Of Motown Volume 3 is a third crate-digging exercise into the mounds of stuff the Hit Factory churned out that was for whatever reason deemed by Berry Gordy not worth the single journey at the time for the likes of Stevie Wonder, the Temptations, Mervin Gaye, (Detroit) Spinners, the Four Tops, Gladys Knight and the Pips and Edwin Starr. Norman Cook loves this sort of thing and when in the queue he'll be trying not to look directly at his Late Night Tales series contribution, which features a duff cover of Kraftwerk's Radioactivity but also Jonathan Richman, Sly and the Family Stone, Bootsy Collins, Dave and Ansil Collins, Mink Deville's Spanish Stroll and attempts to repatriate Willie Nelson and Kenny Rogers.
DVDs
Bob Mould has always had an ambivalent attitude to his past, putting out an album every three years - just signed to Anti, LP expected February 2008 - accompanied by some grand statement about not making an electrified album any more or putting out a dance album next. Luckily, then, Circle Of Friends - Live At The 9.30 Club acquiesces to take from all over his career, a fully fired-up band taking on Husker Du, Sugar and solo pickings. Any Mould set that starts with The Act We Act and A Good Idea and closes with Celebrated Summer (set proper) and Man On The Moon (encore) is worth the wait. Not quite sure there's the same demand for Lene Lovich - Live From New York At Studio 54, but who knows when it comes to Stiff's most oddball performer in a coterie of them. Lovich's guitarist, co-writer and partner Les Chappell always used to scare us.
Books
Two for bathroom reading this week, or as stocking fillers if such a concept still exists. LA documentary producer turned writer Tom Reynolds, whose last list book I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You've Ever Heard caused many a broadsheet thinkpiece, returns with Touch Me, I'm Sick: The 52 Creepiest Love Songs You've Ever Heard. In a more caring bent, Little Black Book of Setlists: The Songs Behind Rock 'n' Roll's Most Famous Gigs is just that, the setlists and information about 150 legendary shows from Altamont to the Lesser Free Trade Hall to Live 8 to the roof of the Apple Building to, good lord, the Stone Roses at Reading.
Sunday, October 07, 2007
In shops tomorrow: 8/10
Singles
We've talked in the past about the twee resurgence, bands who aren't afraid to sound like the days when indie didn't mean anything with a guitar but instead anything with pop ambitions and lemonade bottle returns recording budget. For such things we often have to cast aside the no further than scenester ambitions of us Brits and look to Scandinavia, where they're less uptight about how such things will play in the market and produce great songs for the hell of it. With that in mind, Those Dancing Days could be about to become a band to cherish for many people. Five seventeen and eighteen year old girls from the not at all child-amusingly named Stockholm suburb of Nacka, they take the usual influences - 60s garage/R&B, Motown, Northern Soul, ska, C86, girl groups, Belle & Sebastian - plus their self-admitted love of the Cure and Strokes and weave it all into something floor-fillingly magical. While you can tell they're from the same ballpark as Suburban Kids With Biblical Names, Shout Out Louds, I'm From Barcelona and other Swedish bretheren, their opening UK shot 7" on Wichita, Those Dancing Days/1000 Words, has a confidence and a hip-swinging louche greatness that belies their age and experience, and going on their recent domestic EP they've got even better to come. That they're actually named in honour of Dancing Days from Led Zeppelin's Houses Of The Holy makes them even more inscrutable. Another seventeen year old in a different milieu is Laura Marling, an inhabitant of Eversley, a village situated just about where Berkshire becomes Hampshire, who started playing live at the start of last year and quickly picked up a following, to the extent that she was barred from one of her own gigs last week because it was an 18+ venue. More Laura Nyro than Joni or Sandy, coming from a parental upbringing of the blues, she's already been labelled a New Lily, but only in the way KT Tunstall was originally the New Dido; the My Manic And I EP is far more well heeled late night introspection and promises much. Montreal's New Metric - nobody's really termed them that, but it's never too early to give a band a crutch - Land Of Talk finally release their acclaimed Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP in the UK in a couple of weeks on the back of their Decemberists support dates, preceded by the not exactly widely approved these days move of releasing an entirely different track as a single, Young Bridge. Does knowing exactly what you're getting from a band make them any less easy to promote? The Hives will never have the weight of commercial tailwind they had between Hate To Say I Told You So and the end of the following festival season again but they're still doing what is very much their thing on Tick Tick Boom. As Klaxons are to nu-rave Maps are to nu-gaze in that we're not entirely sure what it means but we know what it's supposed to indicate in that context. we weren't as taken by James Chapman's album as many but To The Sky is a highlight.
Digital EPs
It's the future! Two of high quality deserves a mini-section, we feel. British Sea Power seem to have been about to release a new album all year, having gone to ingest some of that Hotel2Tango immutable magic at the start of the year. The result, sadly, isn't called Now That's What I Call A First World War Joy Division, as suggested by one of their ever quotable if the writer is in a rush Newsboosts, but Do You Like Rock Music?, and it's out two Mondays into 2008. In the meantime comes Krankenhaus?, a five track EP described as "a pre-school understanding of atomic theory with ancient wisdom in amplified rock music" which basically means it sounds much like their usual Psychedelic Furs/Bunnymen/Pixies/Cold War meld, featuring two re-edited tracks from the album, three fresh songs, a live Spirit Of St Louis video ("filmed at London Forum in November 2005 and is the work of five camera operatives. See it and wonder why") and Water Tower, a short experimental film made at a derelict Suffolk tower near their recording base for part of the album; "it features compelling footage of BSP sweeping up, cleaning their teeth and walking around. The soundtrack is a mesmeric agro-ambient instrumental composed of traditional Fenland drumming and guitar styled after a drunk eel who's lost his ticket to the Sargasso Sea." One more? "The title of the EP is Krankenhaus?, which is German for hospital. This could equally allude to the healing and/or life-saving qualities of indie rock music, or perhaps the vast quantities of pharmaceuticals associated with both of these. The green cross adorning the front could be the one used to locate a chemist's, or maybe a symbol of a new ecological religion. The answer is up to you." Less agragarian but no less conceptual are the Decemberists, who've stuck together a The Perfect Crime EP featuring a single edit of the album track (The Perfect Crime #2.51? What happened to 2.5?) and remixes by Junior Boys, Diplo and A Touch Of Class.
Albums
Every time Stereogum refer to Jens Lekman, which given his blog popularity is quite often, someone in the comments box always responds "isn't he the Arsenal goalkeeper?", never caring that the target audience probably have no idea of the concepts of Arsenal Football Club or goalkeeping. While the Swedish pop writing genius will probably never see the end of that one, more widespread recognition on his own terms is deserved on the back of Night Falls Over Kortedala (Kortedala being a district of Gothenburg), only his second proper album (Oh You're So Silent Jens was a compilation of early EPs) and one that nearly didn't happen after, feeling the pressure and with his personal life in turmoil, he scrapped an album's worth of songs in 2005 and briefly went to work in a bingo hall. Out of it has come a collection of songs more openly personally rooted than before and not so reliant on samples but still with expansive chamber ambition, deadpan cleverness out of circumstance and the ordinary and ability to make something melodically special out of base indiepop materials, following in the footsteps of obvious influences Morrissey and Stephin Merritt. If it's the little things that matter, this album will change musical lives. We don't know whether Oxford's Jonquil are still just Hugo Manuel in the studio or the fruition of the live six-piece version, but Lions is a step on from their chamber folk origins, aiming towards Montreal-style chorality and widescreen dynamics. Back to Scandinavians influenced by proper indie, except this time it's Finland's Cats On Fire pulling directly from the Mozza'n'Murdoch source, but obviously with an organ, for the enjoyable The Province Complains. Busiest man in the American obtusely detailed alternative scene Spencer Krug has found time for a new Sunset Rubdown record, Random Spirit Lover; Levy made a small splash a couple of years ago and return with the bitter theatrics of Glorious; and Celebration's broken kaleidoscope of David Sitek-produced pulsing psychedelics are refined on The Modern Tribe. The latest in the well on form All Back To Mine series lands with Guillemots, currently on a writing break, which being Guillemots means Fyfe's on a commission to pen a piece for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra which is being performed at Thursday's reopening of the Birmingham Town Hall. As for this compilation it's as eclectic and magnificent as expected, including Sonic Youth, Bjork, the Supremes, Daniel Johnston, Sandy Denny, Liars, Joan As Police Woman, Roots Manuva, Four Tet, Amon Tobin, Charles Mingus and Buffalo Springfield. Oh, and according to the press release "Lauren Laverne even makes an appearance under her Kenickie guise". Her guise? Did Marie and Emmy-Kate die for this? It's I Would Fix You, as you need to know. It's taken a while for the entire recorded output of the Fire Engines to make it to one CD for the first time, Hungry Beat showcasing the Franz-namechecked Sound Of Young Scotland key workers' dissonant Velvetsisms and help in inventing angular punk-funk. Nobody has ever named Stump as an influence, landing as it does somewhere in the not exactly Gary Davies-charming field between the Cardiacs and Beefheart. A Fierce Pancake And Before is a reissue of their key work and assorted add-ons.
We've talked in the past about the twee resurgence, bands who aren't afraid to sound like the days when indie didn't mean anything with a guitar but instead anything with pop ambitions and lemonade bottle returns recording budget. For such things we often have to cast aside the no further than scenester ambitions of us Brits and look to Scandinavia, where they're less uptight about how such things will play in the market and produce great songs for the hell of it. With that in mind, Those Dancing Days could be about to become a band to cherish for many people. Five seventeen and eighteen year old girls from the not at all child-amusingly named Stockholm suburb of Nacka, they take the usual influences - 60s garage/R&B, Motown, Northern Soul, ska, C86, girl groups, Belle & Sebastian - plus their self-admitted love of the Cure and Strokes and weave it all into something floor-fillingly magical. While you can tell they're from the same ballpark as Suburban Kids With Biblical Names, Shout Out Louds, I'm From Barcelona and other Swedish bretheren, their opening UK shot 7" on Wichita, Those Dancing Days/1000 Words, has a confidence and a hip-swinging louche greatness that belies their age and experience, and going on their recent domestic EP they've got even better to come. That they're actually named in honour of Dancing Days from Led Zeppelin's Houses Of The Holy makes them even more inscrutable. Another seventeen year old in a different milieu is Laura Marling, an inhabitant of Eversley, a village situated just about where Berkshire becomes Hampshire, who started playing live at the start of last year and quickly picked up a following, to the extent that she was barred from one of her own gigs last week because it was an 18+ venue. More Laura Nyro than Joni or Sandy, coming from a parental upbringing of the blues, she's already been labelled a New Lily, but only in the way KT Tunstall was originally the New Dido; the My Manic And I EP is far more well heeled late night introspection and promises much. Montreal's New Metric - nobody's really termed them that, but it's never too early to give a band a crutch - Land Of Talk finally release their acclaimed Applause Cheer Boo Hiss EP in the UK in a couple of weeks on the back of their Decemberists support dates, preceded by the not exactly widely approved these days move of releasing an entirely different track as a single, Young Bridge. Does knowing exactly what you're getting from a band make them any less easy to promote? The Hives will never have the weight of commercial tailwind they had between Hate To Say I Told You So and the end of the following festival season again but they're still doing what is very much their thing on Tick Tick Boom. As Klaxons are to nu-rave Maps are to nu-gaze in that we're not entirely sure what it means but we know what it's supposed to indicate in that context. we weren't as taken by James Chapman's album as many but To The Sky is a highlight.
Digital EPs
It's the future! Two of high quality deserves a mini-section, we feel. British Sea Power seem to have been about to release a new album all year, having gone to ingest some of that Hotel2Tango immutable magic at the start of the year. The result, sadly, isn't called Now That's What I Call A First World War Joy Division, as suggested by one of their ever quotable if the writer is in a rush Newsboosts, but Do You Like Rock Music?, and it's out two Mondays into 2008. In the meantime comes Krankenhaus?, a five track EP described as "a pre-school understanding of atomic theory with ancient wisdom in amplified rock music" which basically means it sounds much like their usual Psychedelic Furs/Bunnymen/Pixies/Cold War meld, featuring two re-edited tracks from the album, three fresh songs, a live Spirit Of St Louis video ("filmed at London Forum in November 2005 and is the work of five camera operatives. See it and wonder why") and Water Tower, a short experimental film made at a derelict Suffolk tower near their recording base for part of the album; "it features compelling footage of BSP sweeping up, cleaning their teeth and walking around. The soundtrack is a mesmeric agro-ambient instrumental composed of traditional Fenland drumming and guitar styled after a drunk eel who's lost his ticket to the Sargasso Sea." One more? "The title of the EP is Krankenhaus?, which is German for hospital. This could equally allude to the healing and/or life-saving qualities of indie rock music, or perhaps the vast quantities of pharmaceuticals associated with both of these. The green cross adorning the front could be the one used to locate a chemist's, or maybe a symbol of a new ecological religion. The answer is up to you." Less agragarian but no less conceptual are the Decemberists, who've stuck together a The Perfect Crime EP featuring a single edit of the album track (The Perfect Crime #2.51? What happened to 2.5?) and remixes by Junior Boys, Diplo and A Touch Of Class.
Albums
Every time Stereogum refer to Jens Lekman, which given his blog popularity is quite often, someone in the comments box always responds "isn't he the Arsenal goalkeeper?", never caring that the target audience probably have no idea of the concepts of Arsenal Football Club or goalkeeping. While the Swedish pop writing genius will probably never see the end of that one, more widespread recognition on his own terms is deserved on the back of Night Falls Over Kortedala (Kortedala being a district of Gothenburg), only his second proper album (Oh You're So Silent Jens was a compilation of early EPs) and one that nearly didn't happen after, feeling the pressure and with his personal life in turmoil, he scrapped an album's worth of songs in 2005 and briefly went to work in a bingo hall. Out of it has come a collection of songs more openly personally rooted than before and not so reliant on samples but still with expansive chamber ambition, deadpan cleverness out of circumstance and the ordinary and ability to make something melodically special out of base indiepop materials, following in the footsteps of obvious influences Morrissey and Stephin Merritt. If it's the little things that matter, this album will change musical lives. We don't know whether Oxford's Jonquil are still just Hugo Manuel in the studio or the fruition of the live six-piece version, but Lions is a step on from their chamber folk origins, aiming towards Montreal-style chorality and widescreen dynamics. Back to Scandinavians influenced by proper indie, except this time it's Finland's Cats On Fire pulling directly from the Mozza'n'Murdoch source, but obviously with an organ, for the enjoyable The Province Complains. Busiest man in the American obtusely detailed alternative scene Spencer Krug has found time for a new Sunset Rubdown record, Random Spirit Lover; Levy made a small splash a couple of years ago and return with the bitter theatrics of Glorious; and Celebration's broken kaleidoscope of David Sitek-produced pulsing psychedelics are refined on The Modern Tribe. The latest in the well on form All Back To Mine series lands with Guillemots, currently on a writing break, which being Guillemots means Fyfe's on a commission to pen a piece for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra which is being performed at Thursday's reopening of the Birmingham Town Hall. As for this compilation it's as eclectic and magnificent as expected, including Sonic Youth, Bjork, the Supremes, Daniel Johnston, Sandy Denny, Liars, Joan As Police Woman, Roots Manuva, Four Tet, Amon Tobin, Charles Mingus and Buffalo Springfield. Oh, and according to the press release "Lauren Laverne even makes an appearance under her Kenickie guise". Her guise? Did Marie and Emmy-Kate die for this? It's I Would Fix You, as you need to know. It's taken a while for the entire recorded output of the Fire Engines to make it to one CD for the first time, Hungry Beat showcasing the Franz-namechecked Sound Of Young Scotland key workers' dissonant Velvetsisms and help in inventing angular punk-funk. Nobody has ever named Stump as an influence, landing as it does somewhere in the not exactly Gary Davies-charming field between the Cardiacs and Beefheart. A Fierce Pancake And Before is a reissue of their key work and assorted add-ons.
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