fri 29/03/2024

New Music CDs Round-Up 13 | reviews, news & interviews

New Music CDs Round-Up 13

New Music CDs Round-Up 13

The latest releases from Ninja Tune to Robert Plant. Plus a stinker from Phil Collins

This month's extraordinary, rich and strange releases are led by Ninja Tune's 20th-anniversary album of new tunes and remixes ("hard to know when to stop throwing the compliments"), Robert Plant's new band ("puts most vintage rockers to shame") and the new one from fellow veteran and "louche Lothario" Bryan Ferry. There's electronica from Magnetic Man and theartsdesk writer Joe Muggs's new Dubstep Compilation, cyber-pop from Tinie Tempah and a terrific new project featuring musicians from Eritrea. Stinker of the Month is the Motown covers record from Phil Collins. Reviewers this month are Joe Muggs, Thomas H Green, David Cheal, Kieron Tyler, Russ Coffey, Graeme Thomson, Adam Sweeting, Marcus O'Dair, Howard Male and Peter Culshaw.

CD of the Month

ninjaNinja Tune XX: 20 Years of Beats and Pieces, Ninja Tune

By Thomas H Green

When Coldcut remixed Eric B & Rakim's "Paid in Full" in 1987 it sounded as if it had popped in from another universe. Taking their blueprint from New York innovator Steinski's jokey cut-ups, London's DJ duo Matt Black and Jonathan More turned the hip-hop classic into a surrealist funk-fest that sampled the vocalising of Israeli singer Ofra Haza and hinted at the rave revolution that was just around the corner. It hit No 15 in the UK charts and in a fallow era where T'Pau, Bros and Rick Astley held sway it offered hope for a maverick future. And so it proved - the next year the summer of Acid House opened the floodgates and kick-started a mass culture of electronic dance music that lasts to this day. Coldcut themselves briefly became pop stars, discovering Lisa Stansfield along the way, but really they were musical vanguardists and became uncomfortable with the obligation to dream up hits. By 1990 they'd retreated to their Wood Green lair and, under a variety of pseudonyms, were constructing all manner of offbeat musical projects for which they needed an outlet. Thus was Ninja Tune Records born.

Ninja Tune's 20th-anniversary collection features many, many names alongside Coldcut and comes in a variety of different formats. There are two double CD packages sold separately with a downloadable alternative or, for the uber-fan, there is the box set which contains six CDs, six 7" singles, a poster, stickers, a Ninja Tune family tree and a coffee-table book history of the label. This, however, is not a retrospective chronicling the label's most well-loved tunes; instead, it's a collection of all-new material spiced with contemporary remixes of Ninja Tune classics. Nor is it made up of cast-off second-rate numbers, as so often happens when artists are asked to contribute to a project that doesn't directly represent them. Clearly everyone wants to give the label their best, resulting in a massive showcase of artists, old and new, who've made Ninja Tune (along with Warp Records) the longest-standing bastion of forward-thinking electronica: Roots Manuva, Diplo, Spank Rock, The Bug, Amon Tobin, The Deathset, DJ Vadim, Diplo, Bonobo and Jaga Jazzist, to name but a fraction of those involved.

Drop into any of the discs at any point and it's hard to know where to start throwing the compliments around. The Tunng edit of Quincy & Xen Cuts Allstars' "I Hear The Drummer" seems as good a place as any to start, combining, as it does, oriental-sounding instrumentation with spooked vocal samples, glitching and orchestral electro. Then again, what about the megaton crunch of Two Fingers' industrial "Fools"? Or Diplo's dustep assault on his own 2003 tune "Summer's Gonna Hurt You"? Or the visceral techno breakbeat explosion of Dan Le Sac's remix of "Metropolis" by PRDCTV? And on and on. The raison d'être for Ninja Tune's A&R appears to be, "Does it sound startling?", and most of this does, even more conventionally sung numbers such as Lou Rhodes & The Cinematic Orchestra's soulful "One Good Thing" or the Mala mix of Andreya Triana's "A Town Called Obsolete".

XX jumps from demented ragga to avant-garde jazz to alternative hip hop to lush downtempo to music that dares genre-bound music journos to try and name it. Ninja Tune has had its ups and downs. There was a point around a decade ago when they got stuck in a rut turning out endless and rather boring jazz-tinted downtempo, the very 'trip hop' they always claimed to be avoiding. This collection, however, reminds that in recent times Ninja Tune have been at the top of their game. It hints as loudly and excitingly at what comes next as Coldcut did back in 1987. This is music whose ideas will be pilfered, purloined and assimilated to create the hits of 2011, 2012, 2013 and onwards. For those who like electronic music that really pushes the envelope, there is little doubt it's the compilation of the year.

Watch Ninja Tune XX Video Mix by Mox:

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Other New Releases


Percy_Plant
Robert Plant, Band of Joy (Decca/Esparanza)

by Adam Sweeting

The original Band of Joy was a mid-Sixties blues and soul outfit featuring Robert Plant and Led Zep drummer John Bonham, and perhaps Plant associates the name with what he might have become if Zeppelin had never happened. This 21st-century Band of Joy is an ensemble of bluegrass and country musicians with whom Plant sort of picks up where he left off with Alison Krauss on 2007's Raising Sand, though this time the music feels a little rougher and more spontaneous than his set of feathery duets with Krauss. Patty Griffin has inherited the role of female sidekick, but she's used more as a conventional backing singer than as a partner in a Gram-and-Emmylou style double act. Plant's right-hand man here is Buddy Miller, who shares production, writing and arranging credits with ol' Percy as well as contributing virtuoso fretmanship on an assortment of guitars and other stringed instruments.

Most of the songs are covers or traditional tunes rearranged, though Plant and Miller get writers' credits on the acoustic stomp of "Central Two-O-Nine". The Los Lobos tune "Angel Dance" (see video, below) opens the album with a whomping, distorted groove tickled up with a splatter of hillbilly mandolin, while Richard Thompson's "House of Cards" has been equipped with a primitive backbeat and a beefy chain-gang swing, deftly tailored to the apocalyptic threat of the lyrics. The screeching vocal hysterics with which Plant was once associated have seemingly been banished forever, and he sings with a measured expressiveness which allows him to stamp his personality on the songs without ever overpowering them with superstar attitude. His command of the material is consistently convincing, whether he's tapping into the stark holy dread of "Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down" or letting his hair - there's still plenty of it - down on the bluegrass knees-up of "Cindy, I'll Marry You Someday". Most awesome of all is "Silver Rider", a sprawling six-minute epic evocative of endless space and distance, where Buddy Miller's storm-tossed guitar recalls Neil Young when he's going off on one with his black Les Paul. All told, Plant continues to demonstrate an enthusiasm for growth and change which puts most other vintage rockers to shame.

adventures_in_dubstep

Adventures in Dubstep And Beyond, Various (Ministry of Sound)
and
Magnetic Man, Magnetic Man, (Columbia)

By Thomas H Green

Anyone who attended festivals over the summer will attest to the fact that dubstep is now the UK's core dance sound. More than that, it has infiltrated the mainstream and some of the biggest names in American pop have been looking to the British underground for tips and inspiration. Names such as Chase & Status, Caspa, Rusko and, to a rather different audience, Burial, are red hot while elsewhere vocoder-addled electro-pop appropriations of dubstep riddle the charts. It is a good time, then, to take stock of what this music actually is, where it came from and where it might be going.

Few are better placed to do this than Joe Muggs, a writer for theartsdesk and others whose work can be read on this page. Muggs - along with Mary Anne Hobbs - has become one of the world's foremost authorities on dubstep, having followed its many strands from their roots a decade ago. A while back, Ministry asked him for assistance with their Sound of Dubstep compilation and, possibly due to its success, they've rewarded him with his own collection. Muggs enthusiastically embraces the opportunity and over two CDs dismantles the idea of dubstep as simply a cartoon wob-wob-wob of cataclysmic basslines. Instead, he paints a picture of the music as a broad and fascinating church. Thus dubstep's earliest origins in the garage and grime scenes are touched on and he's unafraid of soulful diva vocals, as on the almost chilled out "Without You" by Dom Hz. Elsewhere Detroit techno, breakbeat rave and bleepy electronica join the party via artists Egyptrixx, Gelom & Applebim and Sines respectively, but it isn't until CD two that things really get gritty. Here the tone is ruder with an invigoratingly harsh punk-industrial edge on the likes of  the horror filmic "Nightmare" by Badness featuring Lil Nasty and Skepta, or Rude Kid's "Electric".

If Adventures in Dubstep And Beyond is a credit to dubstep's eclecticism and Muggs's ability to recognise it, Magnetic Man's debut album is an enjoyable amalgamation of dubstep's sonic potential with its commercial clout. The group is a trio made up of three significant producers in their own right - Benga, Skream and Artwork. It veers between tough bangers and more melodically inclined pieces such as the recent No 10 hit "I Need Air", which features an autotuned female vocal and a synthesizer top-line redolent of Dutch trance. While some tunes are occasionally epic and obvious, there is a real sense that Magnetic Man are fusing styles rather than kowtowing to pop, thus "The Bug" recalls the German robot electro of Anthony Rother a great deal more than, say, Kei$ha. In fact, take a step back and it's just wonderful that this outrageously futuristic electronic music is currently considered commercial at all. Long may it be so.


HarlemRiverBluesJustin Townes Earle Harlem River Blues (Bloodshot Records)

By Graeme Thomson

As the son of Texan troubadour Steve Earle and with a middle name bequeathed by Earle’s friend and mentor Townes Van Zandt, Justin Townes Earle has a lot to live up – and down – to. Given his father’s grievous exploits with crack, smack and women (is it seven or eight wives, I forget?) and Van Zandt’s sad decline and early death, the expectations heaped on any man who bears both their names is two-fold. One, that he has a better than average chance of being a gifted, soulful songwriter. Two, that he’ll have a whole lot of devil lurking in him.

Regarding the latter, at 28 Earle has already fought several bruising bouts with various debilitating substances. The fact that he was fired from his father’s backing band, The Dukes, for problems with hard drugs suggests a certain dedication to debauchery, and although it seemed those trials were behind him these days, the news broke earlier this week that he had cancelled his forthcoming UK tour to enter rehab and confront his "ongoing" struggle with addiction.

He has at least started delivering on the other side of the bargain. Harlem River Blues is his fourth album and by far his best. As you might expect given Earle’s pedigree, this isn’t a foray into happy House or jazz balladry. Harlem River Blues is a relaxed, highly assured and at times masterful stroll around the four pillars of Americana - rock and roll, country, folk and blues - and is often very fine indeed. With a nimble band including Bryn Davies on stand-up bass, Drive-By Truckers’ Jason Isbell on guitar and Calexico's Paul Niehaus on pedal steel, Earle succeeds in absorbing the dusty old ghosts of times past and channelling their spirits into something fresh and unaffected.

Wanderin' sounds like the kind of timeless anthem that might have fallen out of Woody Guthrie’s pocket somewhere between Oklahoma and Brooklyn.

Combining simple guitar picking with a down-home blend of fiddle and harmonica, "Wanderin’" salutes the hard charms of America’s endless open road and sounds like the kind of timeless anthem that might have fallen out of Woody Guthrie’s pocket somewhere between Oklahoma and Brooklyn. The old-fashioned train song, “Working for the MTA”, is cut from the same cloth, but Earle also squares up to more contemporary standard-bearers. He sounds a lot like Ryan Adams on the murmuring, melancholic “Christchurch Woman”, while “Rogers Park” recalls Springsteen at his most epically downbeat.

There are a few echoes of his old man, too, particularly on the sweet, steady skank of “One More Night in Brooklyn”, but if there’s a certain shared sensibility in some of these songs, any direct family comparisons are rendered obsolete by the fact that their voices are such entirely different instruments: where Earle Snr twangs like a perpetually agitated rubber band, Earle Jnr possesses a deeper, warmer, more expansive tone. He kicks it into top gear on “Move Over Mama”, an old-school jive drenched in thuggish Fifties slap back with a nasty streak a mile wide, and elsewhere proves more than capable of handling the woozy southern soul of “Slippin’ and Slidin’”. Mix it all together and you're left with the sound of a man stepping beyond his lineage and striking out impressively on his own.

lloyd_cole

Lloyd Cole, Broken Record (Tapete)

by Russ Coffey

You could be mistaken for assuming that Lloyd Cole’s new album was just for the money. After all, what has he done since his Eighties hits? Developed a drug habit? Become a hermit? Blown all his royalties? In fact none of the above. He never did leave music, he simply relocated to the States and quietly built up a back catalogue of low-key, subtle and lyrically sophisticated music.

Gone are the big melodies and infectious arrangements, but yet it all seems appropriate for a man of his age. On this, his ninth solo studio album he affects a kind of understated Americana that frequently sits improbably somewhere between Jacob Dylan's and Bonnie Prince Billy’s recent excursions. Cole’s sure got the voice for this kind of mournful reflective country, but it’s really the words that make this album live. One problem with the Cole of old was that his lyrics often tried too hard. He would try to impress you with his learning. But songs like “Broken Record” are just full of simple, accurate observations of little moments that illuminate the complexity of love and life. He has a great ear for detail, the private monologues, and the important conversations. In the pretty “Why in the World?” Cole talks to a girlfriend about lost optimism and vitality: “Maybe I’m all dried up inside/ Maybe I’m not built for these times/ Maybe I don’t know how to live”. And in another musical highlight, “The Flipside” he describes a moment of unexpected contentedness: “And in the last remaining moments/ Before the sunlight sends us home/ We’ll hear the flipside of That Gentle Melancholy Feeling.” There’s upbeat too. "Westchester County Jail" swaggers with a country swing, and "Rhinestones", with its “wasn’t looking for troubles/ Just a lazy eye”, is pure Johnny Cash.

The presence of a full band on this album, the first time in over a decade, breathes life into the songs. The production on Cole’s last outing, 2006’s Antidepressant, sounded thin and incomplete. But here, Cole has not only assembled a very effective group of collaborators (including Joan Wasser aka Joan as Police Woman) but also found a sound that is perfectly matched to his voice and ideas. Harmonies counterbalance Cole's lugubrious baritone, banjos usher in sunshine, and the rhythm section gives everything a sense of purpose. And although the record is still mainly ruminative, it’s good to hear Cole the optimist get the last word: “How am I going to deal with double despair/ Double happiness!”

Listen to "Writers Retreat" below:

51dArN8xxL._SL500_AA300__ferryBryan Ferry Olympia (Virgin)

By Peter Culshaw

What are we to make of Bryan Ferry? A lounge lizard (a sofa serpent?) par excellence, of course, a reptilian crooner at home in the drawing rooms of the aristocracy and the après-ski haunts of Eurotrash. A pop art construct. A refugee from Newcastle. An acquaintance of mine used to play tennis with him. Afterwards they used to complain to each other how pointless and boring life is: ennui of a kind only the rich can afford. And yet the first two Roxy Music albums in the early Seventies were a stylish, needed jolt of energy in a cultural desert and there is a questing intelligence about him, which having been often buried under an avalanche of over-production, is once more glimmering here.

The album starts with musings at dawn in the disco in “You Can Dance”. The video has a tousled Ferry surrounded as ever by gorgeous creatures of the night (see video, below). Alibis, erotic whispers, heartaches in an eternal nightclub, somewhere, possibly somewhere in the South of France. Somewhere prohibitively expensive anyway. And the album carries on more or less in the same vain vein. Ferry was perhaps born to be ageing Lothario. He’s the closest thing we have to Sinatra’s melancholic musings on the search for love. Heroic, but achingly lonely.

Bleeps and dirt get in the way like the aching of a body that can’t quite cope with all those late nights

There’s getting to be something almost poignant, even reckless, about his songs of chasing women – he, or at least the Ferry construct, the louche lizard - can’t help himself, even if he knows it will end in tears and is probably pointless and he should know better by now. Love, as Roxy sang, is the Drug. But unlike the slick, cocaine confidence of that era’s Ferry productions, here there’s a vulnerability in the voice, which makes it more human, more engaging.

The production has a wide-screen glossiness as you’d expect, but there’s cracks in that armour too. Bleeps and dirt get in the way like the aching of a body that can’t quite cope with all those late nights. There are little sampled radio voices that can’t be silenced. It’s the first album since 1973’s For Your Pleasure to feature Phil Manzanera, Andy Mackay and Brian Eno (responsible one imagines for the production dirt and curious whooshes) and this may well be his most consistently interesting and realised album since then. Even if the melodies are only semi-memorable and his take on Tim Buckley’s "Song to the Siren" isn’t a patch on the Cocteau Twins or even Susheela Raman’s versions. If escapism does well in recessionary times, this should be a smash. High-profile guests include disco guru Nile Rogers from Chic, Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead and the Floyd’s David Gilmour. All of them in different ways add some welcome breathing space to the airless claustrophobic sound world Ferry often inhabits.

The first Roxy albums had, shockingly for that era, credits to his tailor. The covers were as iconic as the record, each cover girl seemingly a new plaything for Ferry (the real reason Eno left the band, informed gossip has it, was because Eno was getting more girls). This one has Kate Moss, who Ferry compares to Marilyn Monroe. Ferry lovingly describes the cover shoot, which “ took place at Sunbeam Studios in London, and the designer Gideon Ponte built a fantastic set - with the finest linen... the perfect bed... Shoes and dresses were flown in from Paris, jewellery escorted by security guards, flowers everywhere, a supporting cast of thousands... and everyone involved worked really hard to get the right shot, especially our photographer Adam Whitehead."  There it is – the perfect bed, thousands of lackeys, shoes flown in. But the loud thudding music in the disco, the French champagne and the girls can’t entirely drown out the faint sounds of the flapping of the black wings of mortality somewhere just out of sight.


TINIE_TEMPAHTinie Tempah, Disc-Overy (Parlophone)

by Joe Muggs

The moment you stick this record on, it sounds like victory. Its “Intro” comes crashing in like Daft Punk in jackboots dancing to Jamaican dancehall, its cyber-pop swagger daring you to stand in its way, building huge tension before Tinie Tempah's infinitely assured first line: “I'm extra-terrestrial, came up out the fuckin' dirt like a vegetable”. And that seeming non-sequitur, ridiculous as it may look written down, is as good a demonstration as you could ask for that in Tinie aka Patrick Okogwu Jr we finally have a British rapper who can stand up alongside Dizzee Rascal as a bona-fide superstar. With all due respect to Tinchy Stryder, Skepta, Jammer, the mercurial genius Wiley and all the rest, it is Tinie who has vaulted over the heirarchies of the grime scene to a position where he is not just an “urban” star, rap star or grime star, but a star full stop.

The line is a demonstration of his idiosyncratic writing style. At his best, he spits an unending stream of semi-rhymes, kind of like a south London version of golden age US rap legend Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest (admittedly not close to being in Tip's league – but then who is?). These not-quite-repetitions which are somehow forced to work by the sheer confidence of delivery, and which bathetically blur the fantastical and the everyday, the vainglorious and the self-effacing until it begins to feel like neither the in-your-face ego of standard rap, nor the self-undermining kitchen sink tendency of UK hip hop but a strange deconstruction of both. It's at its absolute best in “Pass Out”, still one of the best pop singles of the modern age, and its joyously unforgettable line “I've got so many clothes I keep some at my aunt's house,” expressing so much about the collision of celebrity and normality in just a few words.

I wish I could say that the whole album is as triumphant as its beginning and “Pass Out”, but inevitably it isn't: like so many rap records, it's too long, it tries to cover too many bases, and also unfortunately slips too easily into taking itself much too seriously. It has enough really great moments to be absolutely worth trying out, though: “Illusion” and “Snap” are really good-natured old-school rap given a high-definition 21st-century electronic sheen, while “Simply Unstoppable”, “Just A Little” and “Miami 2 Ibiza” slyly remind how much US rap/R&B styles owe to British/European club music, and are delivered with real laser-zapping, strobelight-flashing, dancing-on-the-podiums oomph. But then there's the sub-Coldplay portentousness of “Written in the Stars”, and far, far too many moments of the kind of self-justification and pressures-of-fame navel-gazing into which all modern rap seems prone to sink. But that doesn't detract from detract from the achievement of this album and Tinie's steady rise to the top; this is a whole new model for a young black British performer, and though its victory might not be 100 per cent satisfactory, it is a victory to be celebrated nevertheless.

saturn_singsMary Halvorson Quintet, Saturn Sings (Firehouse 12)

by Marcus O'Dair


At the risk of sounding like – spit – a purist, jazz guitar can be a dubious prospect. Even aside from smooth jazz and jazz-rock, crime scenes at which guitars are all too frequently found, there’s something slightly too comfy about what might be considered the classic jazz guitar sound. You know the tone: warm in the wrong way, like a seat too recently vacated by a stranger’s bottom.

All of which helps explain why New Yorker Mary Halvorson is such a breath of fresh air. Her meek – alright, geek – appearance and seated, poised performance style should fool no-one: Halvorson’s is a devastatingly original voice. Performing a couple of years ago with the avant garde maestro Anthony Braxton, she all but stole the show; the next time I saw her, as leader of her own trio, was no less impressive despite the fact that she no longer had the benefit of surprise.

This disc, the follow-up to superb solo debut Dragon’s Head, sees Halvorson running the stylistic gamut from deft and subtle to mildly unhinged. Yet in all its 66 minutes, she is never once lazy or generic – a claim that could be made for precious few of her contemporaries. As a result, it’s not easy to find direct comparisons for Halvorson’s sound. The best reference points, perhaps, are those who have previously taken the instrument into uncharted territory: Fred Frith, Derek Bailey, Sonny Sharrock, Marc Ribot. At times, there’s even a hint of Sonic Youth’s chugging art-rock.

Saturn Sings also sees Halvorson developing as a writer, each track numbered as well as titled as part of her desire to map the maturing of her compositional voice. The fact that these numbers do not extend beyond 20 shows just how new she is to the process: for the moment, she remains first and foremost very much a player. Still, she’s not short on ambition, on this album adding trumpet and alto sax to leap from the trio format of Dragon’s Head to a full quintet. In truth, the new line-up is neither more or less successful than the trio record: Halvorson’s playing is a little more assured, but on the other hand the extra voices leave her slightly less space. Buy both.


Black_CountryBlack Country Communion,
Black Country (Mascot)

by Russ Coffey

Just when the rehabilitation of the rock genre seems complete, a band comes along that makes you question what rock really is? That band is Black Country Communion. Black Country makes you remember real rock, heavy rock anyway, was something that came from the West Midlands during the seventies, forged in the imagination of young men growing up in quietly desperate suburbs, amongst the car plant workers, curry house waiters and weekend Satanists. And that gave it a unique lager and leather charm and an authenticity that turned fans into disciples.

Black Country Communion refer to themselves as a supergroup. Certainly aficionados will recognise an impeccable line up. Glenn Hughes was variously lead singer of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. Fellow Brummie Jason Bonham is the son of the late John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. And strangely the most seventies English influence comes from 33-year-old New York blues rocker, Joe Bonamassa. But this isn’t a supergroup. This is just a seventies rock band, and those groups always did swap members like football teams.

Back when Hughes was pioneering the heavy sound there was a way of doing it that had nothing to do with speed or even necessarily volume. It was to do with certain chords and scales. And that’s what these guys have nailed here. On songs like "Down Again" and "Beggarman", we hear the same kind of sinister riffs that Black Sabbath invented thirty five years ago to recreate the experience of operating a large steel hammer with a hangover. These were just the kind of musical phrases that bands like Metallica would go on to turbo charge in the late eighties. But Black Country is a reminder of how much better they sound played at mid tempo. There can’t be many guitarists around as tasteful as Joe Bonamassa. Since the birth of guitar shredding, the lightening licks peddled by the likes of Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen , there has been an obsession with clinical speed. Bonamassa on the other hand, who variously sounds like Ritchie Blackmore, Tony Iommi and Jimmy Page, plays with such emotion that you can almost the smell the sweat on his fretboard.

And Hughes' voice is nothing short of a miracle. A miracle that after everything else he has put himself through, it is still intact. He calls himself the “voice of rock”, and a “true original”. Well that’s a little bit of an exaggeration; he’s not that far off Paul Rogers or Graham Bonnet. But he sure has one hell of a voice, ranging on this record from Ronnie James Dio on "Great Divide" to David Coverdale on the sublime eight minute epic, "Songs of Yesterday".

Listening to Black Country is like thumbing through an aging rocker friend’s old vinyl collection. Of course the lyrics are pure Spinal Tap (“I’m a messenger/This is my prophecy/ I’m going back/to the Black Country”), but this is a serious band who, much more than acts like Them Crooked Vultures, really make the past live again.

Self_DecapitationDelaney Davidson, Self Decapitation (Voodoo Rhythm)

By Howard Male

The first time I came across Delaney Davidson was at the Windmill pub in Brixton only a couple of weeks ago. Sadly, as it was a rainy Monday night, only about thirty people were there to see this one-man-band from New Zealand’s captivating performance. Using similar effects-pedal technology as Son of Dave (while having more in common stylistically with Waits, Cave, and Dylan), Davidson layers up his songs from loops of guitar chords and riffs until an impressive reverb-swamped wall of dirty sound is conjured.

That night at the Windmill he brought the loping waltz-from-hell “Tonight” to life with his foot-pedal wizardry, before he stepping down from the stage and coercing a woman into dancing with him. A moment later he passed her on to a guy in the audience. Within a couple of minutes there were at least half a dozen couples waltzing to the potentially eternally circling introduction of the song, including the most reluctant dancer in the world; myself (the sweet girl who got lumbered with me was kind enough to put me slightly at ease by saying how nice I smelt.) After such a discombobulating yet magical moment how could I not grab a copy of the man’s tastefully digipacked album?

Unlike Son of Dave’s recordings, Self Decapitation is not a faithful reproduction of the live act with overdubs kept to the minimal. Davidson has gone the more interesting route of embellishing his haunting, cinematically vivid material with swaggering New Orleans-style brass, barroom piano, strings live drums and other instruments (most of which he plays himself.)  The end result is as steeped in the atmosphere of the carnival and the fish-stink of distant ports as Tom Waits at his whisky-fuelled best.

At one end of the spectrum there’s a full-on rock n roll cover of the bawdy traditional “Dirty Dozen” (previously covered by the likes of Jelly Roll Morton and Lightnin’ Hopkins) which includes the deeply touching verse “You fucked a sheep and you fucked a goat, ya even stuck yer cock down an old man’s throat, I fuck your pussy you fuck anything, Ya mammy don’t wear no drawers.” And at the other end there’s Davidson’s own chamber string-swathed ballad “Little Heart” with it’s time-stopping lyrics “Winter comes around, The heart gets slow, the senses all shutdown, Resistance in the coil, The tea cup waits, as the water starts to boil.”

Davidson employs similar production techniques to Waits, scuffing up songs, smeared them in motor oil, or kicked them around the yard for a bit – presumably to try to end up with something as far removed from the context of over-compressed generic pop, rock and blues as possible. Yet these songs still brim over with a rolling, tumbling exuberance which prevents them from being merely preserved-in-aspic vehicles for nostalgia. My only criticism would be that his love of studio reverberation occasionally becomes a little oppressive – setting the whole sonic picture too far back, and therefore preventing the ear from grasping the tactile quality and timbre of the traditional instruments he clearly loves.

One track on which this isn’t actually an issue is “I Slept Late” (see the haunting silent movie-style video below) in which the guitar does have the same physical presence as it had at the Windmill gig - and the delayed appearance of the brass band increases their atmospheric impact when they do arrive. In the deceptively simple lyrics of   “I Slept Late,” Davidson recalls a dream in which he was living an alternative life in which he didn’t bunk off from school and therefore became a successful man with a proper career, rather than a struggling, constantly touring musician wondering when he’ll next eat, sleep, or shower.  But the corporate world’s loss is our gain, so let’s hope that this hauntingly memorable album reaches enough people to guarantee that the next time he lands in London they’ll be hundreds of couples clumsily attempting to waltz to “Tonight” and other warped tunes for lost souls.

Watch the "I Slept Late" video below:

psychic_chasmsNeon Indian, Psychic Chasms, Static Tongues

by Thomas H Green

Music journalists generally salivate at the possibility of a new micro-genre to poke around in. Thus upon hearing blogland babble about 'chillwave' I pursued the matter but the more I heard the less it seemed chilled or, indeed, even a wave. Chillwave turned out to be a handful of American bands who'd been lumped together due to their use of electronics. Truth to tell these weren't even bands but young men making warped computer pop in their bedrooms. However, their sound turned out not to be the space cadet music I was hoping for. Instead, acts such as Toro Y Moi and Memory Tapes create intriguing, squelchy, lo-fi funk-pop that owes a large debt to the 1980s. All the chillwavers, that is, except for Neon Indian. 21-year-old Alan Palomo - the son of a Seventies Mexican pop star - created the delightfully named Psychic Chasms in his bedroom in Austin, Texas, and it's a wonderfully off-kilter outing that first saw the light of day in the US last year. It now receives an overdue European release on Palomo's own Static Tongues label, replete with a passable if slightly unnecessary second CD of remixes by Bibio, Yacht, DNTEL and others.

The whole album is suffused with sunny psychedelia, not in the hackneyed sense that it sounds like 1960s LSD music, but in the sense that it's very much 2010 LSD music. There's even a track called "Should Have Taken Acid With You" which was originally written as an apology to Palomo's girlfriend for not being around for a tripping session.

There is not nearly enough ostentatiously druggy music around at the moment.

At the core of Palomo's work are his songs, usually cheerful and often rather childlike. These owe a debt to the Beach Boys and Todd Rundgren as they're sweet, stoned and laid back with a melodic joyfulness at their heart (Rundgren's song "Izzat Love" is even sampled extensively on the song "Deadbeat Summer"). These tunes could just as easily be played on an acoustic guitar but that's not the point. Instead Palomo sinks them deep in a stew of synthesized pulsing that's wilfully disorientating. Indeed, every song is overlaid with brain-scrambling wave-like sonics that are redolent of listening to music under the influence of nitrous oxide. Given that one song is called "Laughing Gas", this was perhaps intentional. There is not nearly enough ostentatiously druggy music around at the moment - everyone acts as if music made in a haze of drugs is some kind of old-fashioned cliché to be avoided. Nonsense, the best recreational drug use takes one to a euphoric altered state and the best druggy music does a good job of imitating that. Such is the case with Neon Indian's debut. "Terminally Chill" sounds like Stevie Wonder's early Seventies work with Tonto's Expanding Headband heard through some sort of sonic kaleidoscope, the aforementioned "Should Have Taken Acid With You" recalls the narco-stupefaction of very early Primal Scream but with bleeping instead if guitars, and the title track is a throbbing head-trip of the finest sort. At only a half hour long Psychic Chasms never has time to wear out its welcome, indeed, the immediate reaction when it finishes is to stick it on again. It's an album that takes simple jovial pop and runs joyfully off-piste with it in a way that's both goofily cosmic and thoroughly original. (Watch video of "6669 (I Don't KNow If You Know)", below):



Our_Broken_GardenOur Broken Garden, Golden Sea (Bella Union)

By Kieron Tyler

It opens with ripples of grand piano, then the spectral voice of Anna Bronsted wafts in as though heard across a fog-shrouded landscape. The melody she carries is repetitive, rolling, hypnotic. She appears to be singing about departing on some portent-filled voyage. “Pack your bags” she intones. The atmosphere is intense, but Our Broken Garden’s second album is hardly a turn off. Instead, it’s compelling, surrounding like – depending on your preference – a narcotic fug or heavily-turned-up deep-winter central heating.

Denmark’s Bronsted first cropped up as one of the many floating members of Copenhagen’s Efterklang. Stepping from behind the keyboards, she assumed the Our Broken Garden persona in 2008 for an EP and debut album When Your Blackening Shows. At that time, both on record and live, Our Broken Garden were a denser, snail’s pace Mazzy Star but infused with Neil Young guitars. Although sounding aged and ageless, the lineage was clear. Golden Sea is an extraordinary leap forward. Sure, there’s a momentary Julee Cruise drift and “The Burial” sports some choppy strings that hint towards “Hounds Of Love” Kate Bush, but these fleeting references soon vanish beneath the singular vision conjured on Golden Sea.

Golden Sea is the story of a journey: opening cut “The Departure” leads to “The Lowlands”, after which, during “The Feral”, Bronsted is “all on fire, bones and blood.” Then, in “Garden Grow”, she declares “rip out my heart if you have to…let the bindweed grow in my bones high above my head” – now dead, she’s fertilizer. Taken with songs like “The Burial”, Bronsted’s concerns are sober but arresting. She has said Lars von Trier’s disturbing Antichrist was an influence It fits. Even more glacially seductive than Swedish neighbour Fever Ray, Golden Sea sets a new benchmark for a particularly Nordic poignancy.


AMIINAAmiina, Puzzle (Amiinamuzik)

by Joe Muggs

Icelandic four-girl-one-boy group – formerly the string section for Sigur Rós – make a uniquely poised and gorgeous kind of twinkling organic-electronic soundscape. The antidote to a dark and sarcastic culture, this is open-hearted and very, very pretty music.


BILALBilal, Airtight's Revenge (Plug Research)

by Joe Muggs

America's “nu soul” seems as strong as ever with Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae and Cee-Lo Green (his current single notwithstanding) all on more-or-less marvellous form, and now the return of Philadelphia's astounding talent Bilal. Heavily Prince-influenced with healthy genre agnosticism, lyrically terrifically multi-layered and with a voice to die for, he's made an album to immerse yourself in.

BLAKULABlakula, Permanent Midnight (Bear Funk)

by Joe Muggs

This is a tribute by Italian duo Andrea Bellentani and Marco Maccari to the New York of the late 1970s – taking in new wave, no wave, electro and especially disco, it creates a gloriously sleazy sense of nightlife prowling and cracked creativity in its itchy grooves.


RAUDIVERaudive, Chamber Music (Macro)

by Joe Muggs

The name is right in two senses: this is techno music as a small ensemble of delicately arranged sound-sources, but also its spaciousness creates chambers and corridors within its sound. Astoundingly sophisticated, this is haunting and strange listening even if you have never set foot in a Berlin basement club. Also features two deliciously unsettling ambient tracks, which evoke abandoned ballrooms with billowing tattered curtains.


GONJASUFIGonjasufi, The Caliph's Tea Party (WARP)

by Joe Muggs

A dreadlocked desert mystic now resident in Los Angeles, Gonjasufi has rounded up an array of remixing talent to rework his gnomic musings, and in the process created a mainly brilliant snapshot of modern psychedelia. As strange and opulent as the title suggests.


OVALOval, O (Thrill Jockey) by Joe Muggs

Former entirely electronic laptop artist picks up acoustic guitar and drums to create something that blurs the boundaries between abstract improv and studio creation; like Derek Bailey at his most rareified taken into virtual reality, this double CD is a tricky, awkward but often dazzling bit of sound-art.



'Project' of the Month

tad_asmara_all_starsAsmara All Stars, Eritrea’s Got Soul (Out Here Records)

by Howard Male

Bands and groups were once simply called bands and groups. Then we went through a phase when the label ‘collective’ was fashionable. And now here is Eritrea’s Asmara All Stars who call themselves a project. What the implication of this is I’m not sure, but it hardly need concern us as the debut album from this project is on the whole a resounding success. There’s a strong possibility that you may be a fan of Eritrean music without even knowing it, as there were many Eritrean musicians involved in the 70s Ethio-Jazz sound of neighbouring Ethiopia, much admired by the likes of Elvis Costello and Robert Plant and revived by the wonderful and still-ongoing Ethiopiques series (now up to Volume 26.)

French producer Bruno Blum has done an excellent job of achieving a unified sound for a diverse thirteen tracks which each feature different musicians and vocalists from both the contemporary Eritrean scene and the golden age of big band music. The album opens with the roots reggae influenced “Amajo” featuring vocalist Taytinga. Reggae is one of the few foreign musical forms to have penetrated the closed world of Eritrean music, and its influence is felt on a number of songs here. In fact one or two of the weaker tracks, such as “Haki,” suffer from the fact that despite being nicely arranged they could have been produced by any one of the thousands of bands around the planet who have fallen under the spell of this Jamaican form in the last forty years.

The other jarring moment is when the banal spectre of hip-hop makes an embarrassing appearance during “Adunia”. The song is mostly sung in the Soho language  of central Eritrea, but then suddenly there’s a semi-rapped interjection of English in the form of a plea for us to, “listen to the drummer, man, play his funky beat.” This is followed by a potted history of either Eritrean music, or the music of the Asmara All Stars in particular, which exclaims, “We’ve come a long way now, all the way to the dance floor.” Indeed.

But these are minor flaws in an otherwise highly accomplished and seductive record. The playing is flawless, the grooves immersive and sensual, and Blum has wisely decided to do little more than be a sensitive and keen-eared engineer, recording these musicians at their best and letting this simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar mix of soul, jazz, reggae and funk speak for itself.  One of my favourite tracks, “Wushate,” sounds like it was built on the chord and melody template of Etta James’ “I Would Rather Go Blind” but is none the worse for it. Clear-toned guitar and softly blown sax lead the laidback groove over which guest vocalist Brki Weldeslassi heroically sings of the heavy weaponry on her back, and the battle for female equality in the context of fighting for her country: a far cry from Etta’s confession of how devastated she'd be if she lost her unfaithful, waste-of-space of a man. (Watch soundcheck of Asmara All-Stars, below):

Stinker of the Month

tad_phil_collinsPhil Collins Going Back (Warner Brothers)

by Graeme Thomson

Listen, I don’t really mind Phil Collins. I’m not as big a fan of his oeuvre as, say, Sean Coombes and the many other rap demagogues who hold him in unlikely esteem, but neither do I break out in a rash every time I hear his name and start muttering about his fondness for tax exile, dumping his wife by fax and writing hypocritical songs about the homeless. I suspect I’m something of an anomaly among music critics, but I’m generally prepared to cut him a little slack. He has written some fine songs; he was mates with John Martyn; and he is, according to people who know about these things, a very good drummer indeed.

But this is a terrible album. It’s not terrible in a half-hearted, "Oh, this isn’t very good" kind of way. It’s not even terrible in an off-the-wall, "What on earth was this mad, deluded fool thinking?" sense. It’s just objectively, unequivocally, depressingly terrible in the most obvious possible regard, in that it sounds exactly like you’d imagine an album of Motown covers would sound were it performed by a semi-retired millionaire domiciled in Switzerland.

Yes, it really does have all the charm and verve of yesterday's cold tea.

Its very predictability lures the critic into perilous waters, because Going Back practically demands that you throw weary old stereotypes at it. Yes, this album really does sound like a kind of music scientifically designed to provide an unobtrusive soundtrack for an accountants’ annual AGM . Yes, it really does have all the charm and verve of yesterday's cold tea. The songs, naturally, are great. They include such deathless mini-dramas as “Standing in the Shadows of Love”, “Uptight”, “Jimmy Mack”, “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” and a couple of Goffin and King standards, including the exquisitely regretful title track, reduced here to an exercise in ersatz nostalgia.

Of course, virtually any artist is going to come off second best when tackling originals of this calibre unless they can sing up a storm or have some very nifty reinterpretations stashed up their sleeve. Collins, sadly, has the kind of voice you can see daylight through and respects the material so much that he’s content merely to trot out faithful facsimiles - a little like he did with “You Can’t Hurry Love” way back in 1982, come to think of it.

The result is an album that swiftly descends into a yawning chasm of almost existential pointlessness. It truly is – and forgive me if this appears to be a lazily selected phrase, but it's by far the most accurate description – karaoke soul at its most insipid. I can understand Collins revering these songs; I can even understand him wanting to record them. I just can’t see what purpose there is in releasing them into a world where other people could potentially have to hear them. There’s no question that he loves Motown. If only he loved it enough to leave it alone.

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