Reverend And The Makers - Grinderman - The Hoosiers - Yacht -
Low - Kanye West - Ian Brown - Burial - Stereophonics
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THE STATE OF THINGS - Reverend And The Makers
An indie-techno blast combining sonic storm synths and foot stomping bludgeoning beats. At last Ladles and Gentlespoons, we present Reverend And The Makers.
It's a feisty uplifting record set to send perplexed skinny-tied kids into a ferocious swing across the country. The Reverend, Jon McClure, has waited for the correct moment amongst a busy local scene to unleash this menace of a debut album - binding his time as the Monkeys phenomena settled down.
Like most music from the Steel City these days, we can't escape the Arctic Monkeys link. Jon has previously been in two other bands, the first named Judan Suki along with Alex Turner. The second - 1984, is referred to in the famous Monkeys lyrics "dancing to electro-pop like a robot from 1984". But despite these strong connections, this album is evidence of an added independent dimension to the Sheffield sound.
It's dripping with potential anthems such as 'The State Of Things' and 'Heavyweight Champion Of The World'. Whilst 'The Machine' is one of many tunes that'll send you fidgeting like a futuristic automaton android to every beat. Performing live, Jon can't help himself as his lanky awkward posture shifts like a certain Peter Crouch.
Then there's 'Sex With The Ex' which nicely divides the album up with a slower, reflective track about the most difficult of situations. "Although you left him bitter/he still fancies you/although he's been round a bit since/no-one does it like you do." So poetic, so beautiful. Well not quite, but the crude cunning statement sums up the Reverends' craft of putting things in a way we can all relate.
The vocals of Jon's girlfriend, Laura Manuel, provide occasional balanced purity to the main mans harsh constructive verbal rants. This particularly applies to latest single 'He Said He Loved Me' with a shimmering duet telling the story of a heartbroken teenager who's been dumped by an older man. It works well, even if it's a bit Essex-girl in parts.
The most pleasing element of the album is that those earlier demos floating around the internet, have for once been well produced. Songs such as 'Bandits' now have an added edge with more strength, depth and substance to the original foundations.
As an updated take on the Specials' equal disgust and infatuation with urban life, it's impressive. "I am the Reverend/I'll tell you about the state of things." This is the word according to Jon.
Download: Reverend And The Makers - THE STATE OF THINGS
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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GRINDERMAN - Grinderman
For decades, Nick Cave, ringmaster of his own rock'n'roll circus, has been an unlikely paragon of routine. Not routine music, per se, but music made as part of a routine. Check in to the office, check out of the office. Repeat. Don't wait for your muse to come to you. Go to her first and demand she appear. Contrary to his reputation as a bit of a wild man, by his own account Cave's spent the past several years a man of discipline, with rules right down to what rules need be discarded, and when.
Grinderman, then, is Cave's considered decision to set aside those rules and make a sideways move into the realm of stripped down (but far from mellow) rock. Inspired by the creation of the most recent Bad Seeds release, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus, Cave took his cohorts Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey, and Jim Sclavunos into the studio to slash and burn their way through new ideas until they'd amassed enough for an album. Unlike Abattoir/Lyre however, Cave kept the remaining Bad Seeds on the sidelines and, rather than flesh out the results, left them raw and stinging, setting aside his piano in favor of guitar.
By doing so Cave has predictably invited comparisons to his first claim to fame, the Birthday Party - and not without reason. Grinderman reveals Cave has rediscovered (or at least re-embraced) the possibilities of the theatrical punk dirge, with arrangements that threaten to fly right off the rails.
But the Cave of the Birthday Party and the Cave of Grinderman are totally different beasts, and for that we can thank Cave's (yes) discipline - as a writer, singer and as a bandleader. Grinderman are an indulgent study in excess, sure, but the twist is that at every turn Cave keeps the chaos carefully in check, emphasizing messiness when need be, but also showcasing the deceptively precise playing of his band as well as his loose, and at times, gloriously silly lyrics.
Grinderman may be intended as a somewhat goofy reassertion of punk vigor and virility, but the disc is no laughing matter. "Get It On" starts the album in tease-mode, all build-up and no pay-off that nonetheless introduces the arsenal at hand: fuzzed out guitar, insistent rhythms, warts and all takes, oozing with animalistic sex and sleaze.
The many pleasures of "No Pussy Blues" have been praised for months, and rightly so: The song is hilarious, with Cave's pleas for sex growing stronger and stronger until he practically creams himself with indignation when his increasingly desperate romantic overtures go roundly rebuffed. It flirts with camp, especially with its typewriter intro, but who can complain when Cave and crew are clearly having so much fun?
Songs like this show why Grinderman probably wouldn't have worked as a full-fledged Bad Seeds project. It's just too concertedly unhinged, and despite the modest ranks of the reduced band there's hardly any room for anything else. The title track is a thick slab of Gothic VU blues, as perverse and insidious as any of Cave's other character pieces, its tortured guitar coda like twisting metal. "Go Tell the Women" proudly takes the piss as it revels in its own primitive stupidity - it's self-parody and salacious blues tribute all in one. "Honey Bee (Let's Fly to Mars)" is Cave and crew's stab at a woozy, wobbly garage stomper, like many of the other Grinderman songs both a call to arms and a come-on. "Won't somebody touch me?" Cave demands as the world falls apart around him.
The exceptions serve as little breathers, breaks from the onslaught. "Electric Alice" is unlucky enough to follow "No Pussy Blues", so it would probably sound like a throw-away experiment in psychedelic loops and textures even it weren't a throw-away experiment in psychedelic loops and textures. The measured soul of "(I Don't Need You to) Set Me Free" and the familiar melodrama of "Man in the Moon" and "When My Love Comes Down" are prime Cave, but each marks a slight deviation from the Grinderman aesthetic. They're just a little too classy, too neat, despite the roaring undercurrent of musical violence in the last, which picks up right before the song cuts off.
That leaves the somewhat anticlimactic "Love Bomb", nonetheless a much better approximation of the death of the 60s fin de siecle vibe than anything on the embarrassing Stooges reunion disc. Yes, the lyrics split the difference between 21st century Doors portent and Iggy's own current pop-culture citing missteps. The difference is that Cave's winking delivery implies he recognizes that dumb is just a state of mind, and he's more than willing to subsume his smarts for the sake of the music. By taking one for the team and donning a Stooge-worthy dunce cap, Cave in turn gives us so much more, and frees up his Id to wreak glorious havoc.
Download: Grinderman - GRINDERMAN
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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TRICK TO LIFE - Hoosiers
It is the truly wonderful and uplifting ‘Goodbye Mr A’ - their second single that made up my mind about taking a chance on this cd. I say chance, because these types of albums are very hit and miss. This comes in four different coloured artwork covers. I got the yellow one.
On first play, I was very pleasantly surprised. It was instant enjoyment - and hit home straight away. Their sound is like a cross between the Feeling and the Kooks or ELO and 10cc (depending on the decade) and has a lot of bouncy keyboard and bass playing on it, with plenty of hooks and melodies to enjoy. There are also more quirky influences on this, such as: The Cure and Sparks. So far, apart from the two earliest singles (including ‘Worried About Ray’), I’m really enjoying ‘Worst Case Scenario’, ‘Run Rabbit Run’ and ‘Cops And Robbers’, but no doubt over time I’ll have more favourites.
So to sum up, this is utterly charming stuff, that does exactly what it says on the tin, and judging by this album’s healthy dose of infectious pop, there’s definitely no need to worry about Ray anymore.
Download: Hoosiers - TRICK TO LIFE
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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I BELIEVE IN YOU, YOUR MAGIC IS REAL - Yacht
It's hard to believe in this age of exhaustive and exhausting music coverage, but there are still times when albums that could someday be hugely important slip through the cracks and all too quickly out of people's minds. The most glaring example of this injustice I can think of is Max Tundra's 2002 record Mastered by Guy at the Exchange, an album me and a small pocket of the Pitchfork hivemind are viciously in support of, even half a decade later. An absurdly inventive and manic piece of computerized composition, MBGATE seemed to be fanfare for the future of pop music, or at least the indie-prefixed strain thereof, where modern technology met playfully skewed catchiness. Yet the sound of lap-pop veered instead towards recapitulating synth-pop tropes and rutting in melancholy, and nobody seemed to notice Max Tundra's valiant efforts.
Jona Bechtolt, who records as all-caps YACHT when he's not half of the Blow, appears to have noticed, even if it took him until his third recording under the moniker to let it show. YACHT's first two albums, MEGA and Super Warren MMIV, were both middling endeavors of laptop navel-gazing, the kind of home-beat experimentation that has glutted the market for much of the mid-aughts. But on I Believe in You, Your Magic Is Real, Bechtolt appears to have remembered the MBGATE lesson that home computer music and poppy fun need not be mutually exclusive entities, freeing himself to produce an album that strives for, and fleetingly reaches, the unpredictable yet lovable heights of its ancestor.
Bechtolt isn't totally unfamiliar with the concept of injecting some computer embellishment into indie-ish songwriting, having performed similar duties as IT Guy for the Blow. But I Believe in You is another step beyond merely adding programming to Khaela Maricich's relatively straightforward tunes, occupying the same beat-prankster territory as Tundra while not drifting too far into the abrasiveness of breakcore. "We're Always Waiting" is a prime example, first toying with an 8-bit version of the "Time Is Tight" vamp, pausing mid-song for a tongue-in-cheek materialist cheerleader chant, and climaxing with a proggy astral synth being henpecked by ringtones and presets. "It's Coming to Get You" runs a similar path with a primal-punk drum foundation and cutesy woah-oh-oh backing vocals, while "See a Penny (Pick It Up)" puts Jamie Lidell-style falsetto faux-soul singing and a chugging guitar riff against a musical backdrop that changes every 30 seconds, finally exploding in a skittering-beat orgy.
All these experiments could easily sink under heavy pretensions (as one might argue the instrumental "If Music Could Cure All That Ails You" does), but Bechtolt lightens his ballast with a sense of humor throughout. It doesn't always work; introducing fellow laptoppers Eats Tapes for a "solo" halfway through "It's All the Same Price" is pretty funny, the chopped-and-screwed outro to "Drawing in the Dark" not so much. Occasionally Bechtolt's jokes don't just fizzle, they cross the line into outright annoyance, like the meta-aware "The Magic Beat" (basically Bechtolt singing about how awesome he is over a loop too busy to claim perfection) or the Kanye-esque shout-out speech of "Your Magic Is Real". But even the missteps are indicative of a playfulness lacking on previous YACHT efforts, a charismatic goofiness that pervades the music as well as the lyrics and interjections.
While I Believe in You, Your Magic Is Real doesn't approach the future-thrill that MBGATE gave a small portion of us five years back, it does at least thrive in its shadow, bursting with unique and catchy lap-pop with the best of intentions. Even its merely above-average success rate draws renewed attention to the promise of a true indie-pop/electronic hybrid, presenting both a rock-based sound with deemphasized guitar and fewer tired post-punk influences, and an electronic adventurism that doesn't come too unmoored from conventional song structure while retaining a playful unpredictability. YACHT may not be the innovative and distinctive force that Max Tundra proved himself to be, but as a willing disciple, he's wise enough to harvest in Tundra's fertile territory.
Download: Yacht - I BELIEVE IN YOU, YOUR MAGIC IS REAL
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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THE WORLD IS YOURS - Ian Brown
Ian Brown is now nearly 10 years into his post-Stone Roses solo career, and he is borrowing emotional audio signifiers from his proto-Britpop and placing them alongside lyrics that balance arrogance and politics. On this, his fifth solo outing (apart from a remix disc and a "best of"), he's stuck with the previous formula of tracks soaked in strings.
He's titled the album The World Is Yours, by which he really means "the world is mine," as related on the opening title track. The song begins with some noodling strings and Brown enters with the lines, "As a young boy/Daddy used to tell me stories," the payoff being that his father always told him, "the world is yours," and that he came to believe it. Ahh, nice.
"Sweet Children" centers on Brown's wish that he had a house with 10million rooms that he could open to the "street children" before going all Vivaldi with fluttering strings in the middle. It's great that Brown wants to save the children, but the sophomoric lyrics read like the diary entry of an 8th grade girl the night after her social studies class discussed Darfur. Is this the same Ian Brown we all know and love. Hmmm, I know he's better than this.
On "Illegal Attacks," Brown addresses Iraq and Afghanistan, but he diminishes the impact of what he's saying by using oversimplifications like, "These are commercial crusades/They used a terror charade to get paid," and pleading for "soldiers [to] come home." The song does have the most interesting string part on the album, though, using the cellos to good rhythmic effect.
The album sounds good, but Brown's a little detached at times. To put it another way, this is an album I wouldn't feel compelled to turn off if it was playing, but it's also not the first one of his I'd reach for.
Download: Ian Brown - THE WORLD IS YOURS
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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GRADUATION - Kanye West
For all the pageantry of the 50 Cent vs Kanye media hype, the most substantial takeaway from Kanye's new album is the realization that he might actually deserve the legendary status he constantly ascribes to himself. Though it doesn't quite match College Dropout or Late Registration in pleasure-center overload, West's third album in four years is both his most consistent and most enterprising yet. It also caps off an incredible (maybe even unprecedented) run: In terms of consistency, prolificness, and general all-around ability, it's hard to find anyone in mainstream rap who can touch what he's achieved within the same timeframe.
Graduation finds him settling into the pocket; instead of looking inside for answers, he's looking out to the world. When he raps "I shop so much I can speak Italian" on "Champion", it's obvious he's holding up worldliness as a point of pride. His production choices reinforce that belief: Here, Kanye splices his well-articulated production style with a brand new set of influences - most of them European. What he ends up with is a record that splits the difference between two distinctive styles: his familiar strings and brass, helium vocal samples, and warm soul samples on one side; corroded rave stabs, vinegary synth patches, and weirdly modulated electronic noises on the other.
While Graduation is far from the electro-house record some fans predicted when the Daft Punk-sampling "Stronger" first leaked, Kanye's interest in French house and rave extend beyond that one track. The stunning "I Wonder" combines a gentlemanly, piano-led sample (courtesy of 70s folk/jazz artist Labi Siffre) with a frizzy synth lead and alien-sounding keys, only to drown it all out with a massive swoop of strings; the weirdly dystopian club track "Drunk and Hot Girls" lurches along at a snail's pace, mixing Can's "Sing Swan Song" with a blend of gypsy music and detuned electronics for maximum queasiness; and the string-led "Flashing Lights" marries a Bond-worthy coda to staccato sounds and cut-up vocal samples. Where lesser producers have tried to bridge this gap only to wind up with beats that sound like bad mashups, West and co-producer DJ Toomp (T.I., "What You Know") make the juxapositions feel utterly natural. Combined with some other familiar source material ("Champion", for example, nicks from Steely Dan), that undercurrent of experimentation puts Kanye's talents to good use.
And that's barely scratching the surface. Aside from the patchy "Barry Bonds" (on which an inspired West confounds the odds by drastically outsmarting an uncharacteristically lazy Lil Wayne on the mic), nearly everything here feels tight and inventive. The aforementioned "I Wonder" and "Flashing Lights" are immediate highlights, as is the old-school gospel rave-up of "The Glory" and future smash "Good Life", which features T-Pain pitting his autotuned hooks against a bed of summery, squealing synths. Previous singles "Can't Tell Me Nothing" and "Stronger" somehow take on new life in context of the record, and even the Chris Martin-aided "Homecoming" feels like it hits the right notes.
Lyrically, West is magnanimous, corny, self-aggrandizing, and likeable in the all the usual ways. The difference here is that he's dialed down his inner conflict. The neurotic inner monologues of his most engaging verses are virtually absent here. If there's one criticism to be made of Graduation, it's that in striving for universality, he's sacrificed a more personal dimension of himself. The only time we even really get close to the mental hand-wringing of his early albums is on the closing "Big Brother", where he details his lifelong admiration for Jay-Z and hints at the post-Dropout turbulence between the two, before riffing on his own chorus to conclude: "My big brother was Big's brother/So here's a few words from ya kid brother/If you admire somebody you should go head and tell 'em/People never get the flowers while they can still smell 'em".
Of course, West's true genius has always come out in his production work, and hearing him find natural ways of fitting these disparate elements together is worth the increased number of Louis Vee brags. While it might not be as substantial a record as we're used to hearing from him, it is his greatest leap forward, and further proof that few are as skilled at tracing out the complicated contours of pride, success and ambition as he is.
Download: Kanye West - GRADUATION
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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DRUMS AND GUNS - Low
Many bands maintain longevity through versatility-- shifting, maturing, or updating their sounds as years and trends pass. Low couldn't have been more unlikely candidates for a lengthy career when they appeared in 1993, but several years of their single-minded adherence to patience and grace was a welcome reaction to the louder, heavier music dominating the early 90s rock charts and airwaves. It's understandable if that sound defines the group for its dedicated fans; aside from personal attachment, it recalls a time when mediocre rock radio was all we had to rebel against.
But for Low, in 2007, there's so much more at stake. The title itself sounds like a call to arms, but the band has skirted the idea that Drums and Guns is a political record; most of its key lyrics are ambiguous enough to stand in for personal torment as well as social unrest. It's a little easier to assign the former to Drums and Guns, knowing that since The Great Destroyer (a critically divisive and uncharacteristic record for the band in its own right), Low lost their longtime bassist Zak Sally, and their frontman, Alan Sparhawk, has had a nervous breakdown, recorded a vocal-less solo record that's wildly experimental compared to Low, and spent a goodly chunk of time fronting the far more rock-oriented Retribution Gospel Choir (sometimes partnered with Red House Painters' Mark Kozelek).
Considering the mixed reception to the rocking The Great Destroyer, you'd think the band would return to their signature sound. You'd be wrong. Hardcore fans have heard more than half of Drums and Guns' songs played in Retribution Gospel Choir's guitar-driven context (as well as the understated "Dragonfly" in the band's recent live sets, and "Murderer" from a rare 10" single), and would assume these songs lean further in the direction of that side project and Great Destroyer; they'd be wrong as well. Drums and Guns tears at these already road-tested songs, leaving them as nothing but spine and sinew, with only the barest traces of what made them Low in the first place-- namely, the fragile and beautiful two-part harmonies. A promo sticker came with this record, saying, "I'm sick to death of LOW." It's easy to picture those words coming directly from Sparhawk.
But there's more career summation here than you'd think, from the nihilism and legacy-toying of Great Destroyer, to the brave production on their Songs for a Dead Pilot EP, to even weirder corners of the catalog: "Belarus" sounds like something from Low's oft-ignored remix record, with a lovely harmony that highlights Mimi Parker's vocals while simple bells, chimes and sampled strings burrow in the background-- enchanting, but about as far from Low as you can imagine. Drums and Guns even bears influence from Sparhawk's recent Solo Guitar record: "Pretty People" buzzes ominously, as Sparhawk wails some fairly obvious warnings before ending abruptly once a drum hits and a guitar chord sounds. "Dragonfly" has barely any instrumentation, just a clanging feedback loop; with its slow-burning swooning vocals about pills and shortened life cycles, it'd be a difficult song to tarnish in any cast. The track brings the same brutal chills of the highlights from Trust, but gets there only on the drama from Sparhawk's sour vocal turn and Parker's gentle accompaniment, and without the band's trademark perpetual reverb.
Mostly, the record is marked by a preponderance of basic, almost flimsy drum loops. Oh my, are there loops on this record. Songs like "Breaker" build from a basic beat to nothing more than handclaps and a one-finger organ drones, with a pinched multi-tracked harmony from Sparhawk who laments "our bodies break/ And the blood just spills and spills," and "there's gotta be an end to that." It's one of the most glaring examples on Drums and Guns of hard-panned vocals located almost entirely in the right channel, but after hearing the track enough times, it ceases to be a distraction, and it ends up one of the most striking examples of their stripped-down approach.
I doubt Low fans who've held on this long will rebel against these new textures, more the way they're employed-- the band has added an almost disconcerting levity, and subtracted the gentleness. The less said about the jaunty funk bass and busier loops of "Always Fade" and "Hatchet" the better; the latter is at least a mid-record palette-cleanser. It's this mode of Low that's the hardest to get used to; they sounding less sparse and more glib and underdeveloped, lost in uncharted territory. Parker, thankfully more present here than on recent records, gets "Dust on the Window" to herself, and its dusky balladry is a high point in a difficult middle section. Sequencing does threaten to kill this record, though there's ropes to old fans and frustrated listeners later in the album. "Take Your Time" is a dip into the pathos of previous Low records, even using church bells to further dampen the dirge. Should this not be enough for alienated fans, try to take comfort in the seven other albums that came before. There's a point at which a consistent sound is no longer a virtue. "Your Poison" shows us what Low would sound like as Guided By Voices; we don't need it. Once you're approaching double digits in album output, your records should actually do something to change status quo and justify their release, or at the very least spark some shred of interest in new listeners with the band's back catalog.
Should those listeners make it to the re-recorded "Murderer", then Drums and Guns will have accomplished both. The original EP from which "Murderer" was taken was Low at their most stark and dramatic; this version stands up ably to the first (as opposed to the unfortunate recut of "Silver Rider" from Great Destroyer), adding an insistent 4/4 bass pulse as well as a subtle guitar loop that works as an effective earworm, and a martial drumbeat that underlines the lyrics and serves the album's theme. The same goosebumps arise as the lyrics move from creepy insinuation to a protagonist's sneering confrontation with his maker ("Don't act so innocent/ I've seen you pound your fist into the Earth/ And I've read your books"), though this time with a new, understated urgency instead of just straining melodrama.
Drums and Guns ends on "Violent Past", beginning with another particularly ambiguous lyric: "All I can do is fight, even if I know you're right." It could be a call to arms or a mantra for struggling with personal demons-- either way, it sounds almost futile among the organs that bleed distortion and clamoring percussion, with the lyrics pondering how we've come this far before deciding with a shrug, "maybe it's your violent past." You could call the whole of the album resigned, but it still sounds determinedly so, the voice of one band against the world-- not too far off from where Low started.
Download: Low - DRUMS AND GUNS
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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UNTRUE - Burial
If you know the true identity of London dubstep artist Burial, consider yourself a member of a very exclusive circle. Steve Goodman, who runs London's Hyperdub label, knows-- he cuts Burial's royalty cheques, after all-- but if anyone else does, no one has yet had the temerity to out Burial's inner Peter Parker. Read an interview or two with the artist himself, and you'll quickly figure out why he's chosen to remain anonymous. Burial's decision not to let a backstory be a part of the music doesn't come across as a strategy calculated to maximize hype, but just the opposite: a means of keeping the music pure, faceless, answerable only to itself-- a closed system.
The critical success of Burial's self-titled first album threatened to derail the project's mystery, however. A collection of tunes recorded at home on a low-tech setup over the course of many years, Burial-- moody, brooding, by turns supple and sullen-- shot to the top of many critics' best-of lists last year. To judge from a recent interview with Burial posted on the Hyperdub website, the attention was more distracting than gratifying. "The first [album] got slightly out of where it belonged," he says, "and I found it a bit difficult to just block things out and make tunes in a low key way again, and it took time to just get back to doing that, and liking it, and doing it fast, and not trying to be a perfectionist. Just trying to dream up tunes again without worrying what people were going to think."
But if it's the reclusive life that Burial seeks, he might just be his own worst enemy, because his new album, Untrue, bests Burial's fans' wildest hopes for the followup. Burial was a worthy, sometimes thrilling record-- an impressive debut-- but it sometimes lost focus, particularly when it attempted to carve out something closer to "proper," clubwise dubstep. But Untrue maintains the style and the vibe of the first album and yet does it better. It's a deeper album-- richer, more complex, more enveloping. The irony is that almost nothing has changed. Burial still makes his beats (at least, so he claims) with relatively lo-fi audio editing software, eschewing the comfort of sequencers and MIDI clocks. His string sounds, which on Burial let many a critic to call his music "cinematic," sound as unabashedly canned as they did last time, and his manipulated vocals-- warped, time-stretched, pitch-corrected-- are just as unabashedly emotive.
Like Burial, Untrue is a homage to UK garage, or two-step-- a short-lived, oft-mourned fusion of breakbeats and house music that peaked in the late 90s before morphing into offshoots dubstep, grime, and bassline house. Thus Burial's beats swing wildly, as though flitting between two tempos in the space of a single bar; jittery hi-hat patterns flash like knives being sharpened, and tooth-cracking rimshots invariably fall on the third beat, dividing time in odd ways. His beats seem to rush, trying to catch up with their own out-of-control forward motion, and then-- crack!-- having caught up, they simply hang there, as though unsure what to do with the remaining time left in the measure. It's a relay race marked not by starter's pistols, but stopper's pistols, leaving an impression at once rigid and woozy.
But what Burial gets wrong is at least as interesting as what he gets right. Where two-step was marked by its precision-- staccato sub-bass, nimble cadences, rapid-fire vocal shots-- Burial smears everything until the songs' moving parts are all but indistinguishable. In "Ghost Hardware", what sounds like the creaking of a swingset grates in the background, as if attempting to tug the music out of its planned arc. On "Shell of Light", piano and strings eddy to a crawl as rain drizzles over muted, multi-tracked vocals. There's nothing on Untrue that's likely to work in the dance club, but that's beside the point. Top-heavy with sad string passages and mournful vocal loops, Untrue is an album meant to be heard at home, in the car, on headphones-- his songs feel almost like beautiful secrets being whispered to a listener.
Thanks to Burial's use of vocals, Untrue is overflowing with earworms, its spongy terrain pocked and pitted until the ground threatens to give way with every step. It's not a pop album, at least not by Top 40 standards, but his voices-- male, female, and ambiguous-- wriggle deep into the listener's consciousness. They're just intelligible enough to stick-- I'm pretty sure that the refrain to "Near Dark" runs, "I can see why I love you"-- and unintelligible enough to resist dislodging. Occasionally paired with scraps of what might be movie dialogue, they recall the haunted intimacy of Luomo's Vocalcity; like that record, they toy with r&b's conventions, heavy with breath and rippling with trills and melisma, some of it digitally imposed.
Like everything in Burial's music, the vocals are supercharged with emotion: Loaded with distance, they often sound like they've been recorded several rooms away from their source. Burial isn't afraid of sidling up next to cheesiness, practically flirting with bathos-- his string sounds are uniformly synthetic and his voices seem expressed in miniature; like Thom Yorke, he raises affect almost to the level of fetish. Burial's all-permeating use of reverb could be a crutch if it didn't work so well. The haze works in his favor, leaving a level of plausible deniability-- you can never be entirely sure that what you're hearing is really there in the track, creating a wonderfully unfinished feeling to the record.
"Sometimes you just want music to stay where it is from," says Burial in his Hyperdub interview. "I love drum & bass, jungle, hardcore, garage, dubstep, and always will till I die, and I don't want the music I love to be a global samplepack music. I like underground tunes that are true and mongrel and you see people trying to break that down, alter its nature. Underground music should have its back turned, it needs to be gone, untrackable, unreadable, just a distant light." Untrue is just that. It quivers like a hissing lightbulb, one that illuminates the tracks scattered around it-- garage, dubstep, soul-- and in doing so smears them into unique shapes. Untrue shows the hunched, unreadable form of Burial's refusenik stance-- back turned, hands shoved in pockets-- and practically commands you to follow.
Download: Burial - UNTRUE
(available for 7 days from date of post)
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PULL THE PIN - Stereophonics
The Stereophonics' decade-long music career has been somewhat of a rollercoaster ride, going from being hailed as one of Britain's premier rock bands to be critically mauled for the acoustic flavour of 2001's "Just Enough Education to Perform" album. However, this turned out to be their biggest selling record and while 2005's "Language. Sex. Violence. Other?" was met with positive reviews; it didn't match up it turns of sales figures, just going to show how strange the music business is. Having previewed new material back in spring, this is their sixth studio release and was supported with a UK arena tour in November.
The sound of a news report and wailing siren begins "Soldiers Make Good Targets" before a monstrous metal riff comes rolling in, swiftly followed Javier Weyler's pounding drums. A mid-paced number, it gets cranked up at the chorus and is aided by a twisted solo, all of which firmly announces the band's return. With a bouncier vibe is "Pass The Buck", destined to become a live favourite with its killer hook and featuring a big Kelly Jones rant. Lead single "It Means Nothing" drops the tempo for a ballad inspired by the London underground bombings, as the band take a philosophical look at what really matters in life. It is saved from being drippy by a crescendo of guitars, before the trio again up the tempo for the previously available download taster "Bank Holiday Monday". With shades of Oasis' "Bring It On Down", the frenetic pace and spiralling guitars has already seen it become a favourite with fans.
It is often claimed that Stereophonics' success meant that Kelly Jones was no longer able to draw inspiration from the 'small town life' that coloured much of their debut, "Word Gets Around". Perhaps for the first time since that era, he has penned a narrative number that is precise in detail and utterly engaging. "Daisy Lane" is the tender tale of a schoolboy who was stabbed for his mobile phone on the street on which Jones lives. The gentle acoustic backing gives his voice prominence on what is a standout moment of the record. The brooding "Stone" follows it up, lit by a chorus of epic proportions, before the mood is lightened by the upbeat and poppy tones of "My Friends". Describing how he'd like a "girl down on me in the theatre", "I Could Lose Ya" is a sleazy track of simple, choppy guitars that and the type of chorus that quickly gets in your mind.
More fitting of Jones recent solo record, "Bright Red Star" simply features the vocalist and an acoustic guitar for a sweet ditty that proves a respite until the crunching distorted chords that introduce "Lady Luck". Darker in mood than previous tracks, the verses are rhythm based before the guitars kick in again for a mammoth chorus. "Crush" is a stomping track that should delight audiences as a pulsating sing-along and the album is ended with the climatic "Drowning", which wouldn't have felt out of place on the previous 'phonics record. Slow and patiently developed, it is a satisfying conclusion to the record and thankfully isn't overblown or overdrawn. It also provides balance to a collection of songs which sees the band take the best parts of their previous work and bring them together for a record that is consistently pleasing.
Download: Stereophonics -PULL THE PIN
(available for 7 days from date of post)
