After four years of silence, Carl McCoy of The Fields of the Nephilim returns, sans band and with a new collection of ideas and visions. Right from the opening, 'Still Life', it's obvious that some sort of dark imagery is meant to be induced. This melts smoothly into a 'heads down and thrash' track, 'Exodus'. From here on in it's like listening to the Radio1 Rock Show circa Tommy Vance, as track after track attempts to paint your room black, whilst McCoy goes for the thrash metal sing-and-cough-at-the- same-time effect. It's all been done before and better, and whilst there are good bits they're not worth the wait. My CD player refuses to play it any more and that's probably for the best.
Various
Welcome to the Transworld
Transworld
What a blinding moment - a debut album from the Transworld label (which frankly, I hadn't heard of) and guess what?It's brilliant.
This album deserves to more than break into the dog-eat-dog world of dance label compilations, with an unusual diversity of tunes that gives it universal appeal. Transworld have avoided the mainstream tricks of getting a big 'name' to mix a largely mediocre set with the occasional well known club classic. Instead we get Craig Brown, a resident at Platinum (and mate of the producer) on the decks, steering clear of the pretentious and making a fine job of his set.
This album compiles the label's massive first releases and pretty much sums up the "House is a feeling" vibe that began about a decade ago. There's floor fillers like Justine's 'Want Me Love Me' and l.W.S's 'Gosp', alongside classic housey tunes from Eskubar and 3D. Transworld must be chuffed with themselves for producing a playlist that's loved at Trade , The Ministry Of Sound and Vague (to name but a few)!
Oh, and for all you trainspotters out there remember 'Let's Get Down', remixed by Aquarius? Well even if you don't (it was a massive club hit but the Chic sample Aquarius used prevented its official release) 'Welcome to the Transworld' is the only compilation in the world to feature it. if that doesn't wake you up a bit, then don't bother. This album isn't for punters obsessed with the mainstream, it's about going back to the old skool, and living through the time when "house music was born"...
This Is Easy' is yet another two CD various artists compilation obviously designed to cash in on the recent rebirth of Easy Listening. However, it is a compilation with a difference. Each CD helpfully has its own title and colour indicating the general mood of the songs, the first being the supposedly 'swinging' pink 'Wingding Party' and the second a more relaxed, lounging around, blue 'Apres Ski'. The CD box even has its own backgammon board with playing pieces to cut out in the inlay book. Yes, this album has style.
Ok, so that's a lie, but it is extremely cool and probably the most amusing collection of songs you're likely to find around at the moment. Imagine Tesco's cheese counter...well, this is cheesier. There's classics like 'Walk On By' by Dionne Warwick, 'Always Something There To Remind Me' (Sandie Shaw), and 'Summer Breeze' (Ray Conniff and the Singers) for all you gooey Camembert fans out there.
However, if hardcore cheese is more your style there's a healthy dose of Burt Bacharach along with such favourite TV themes as 'Man in a Suitcase', 'Crossroads'(yes, Crossroads), 'The New Avengers', and, of course, 'The Pink Panther'.There's even a ten minute long version of 'The Look of Love' by Isaac Hayes, guaranteed to make all you 'Shaft' fans go weak at the knees.
Basically, whatever your taste in music this album is certain to put a smile on your face and maybe occasionally, dare I say it, a nostalgic lump in your throat. You may not recognise many of the song titles but you'll probably recognise loads of the tunes, after all, they're probably amongst your parents' record collections! So, anyway, 'This Is Easy' gets Mr.Greedy for a highly calorific cheese intake with every listen. Bon Appetit.
Cocteau Twins
Milk & Kisses
Fontana
Apparently, it's like illegal or something to review the Cocteau twins without mentioning the words 'haunting', 'ethereal' and 'heavenly'. However, the Baggage being the top quality example of incisive music journalism it is, you'll find no such clichés here. My old junior school teacher used to regularly threaten us with all manner of scary punishments if we used 'nice' as an adjective instead of something more interesting. well, I'm sorry Mrs Stacey, but that's the perfect word to describe this album, nothing more or less than 'nice'. The ten songs glide into each other with no one track really standing out, with the possible exception of the heavenly (doh!) last single 'Tishbite'.
I know the Cocteaus never have and never will deal in perky three minute pop tunes, but at times the album just sounds a little hollow, lacking that certain spine-tingling something. Having said that, it's not that bad, and provides a mellow background ambience type thing. Anyway, the music to those adverts for Fruitopia with the kaleidoscopic fruit was written by Cocteau Twins, and that stuff tastes well nice, so they're all right by me. Also, whilst on the subject of adverts, I suppose this album could be summed up by the words of the new cheesy Quavers commercial where the little plasticine bloke that looks like 'top' footballer and professional hamster impersonator Dennis Wise goes "Mmm... Floaty Light!". Like Quavers, this album lacks a bit of substance, but at least it won't make your breath stink of cheese.
Ben Folds Five
Ben Folds Five
Caroline
This one coulda bin a contender. A pretty cool sounding name, a good cover shot. The band consist of only piano, bass and drums. Great, I thought, Morphine with an extra couple of bass strings and piano instead of sax. I could imagine the sound. Sparse. Seedy. All filtered through a smoky room and seen through the bottom of a glass. As I said, it boded well. Imagine my disappointment to find instead a kind of Squeeze telling jokes to They Might Be Giants, while Supertramp, Weezer, and the guy who wrote the Cheers theme look on. Yes kids, that's how much I (and therefore you) should hate this record. Rolling Stone called it the debut of the year. Those American journalists, eh? What kidders.
Call me a cynic, but there is no place in either my life or my record collection. I do like upbeat music, honest, but not something as inanely cheery as this.
Not good, all in all.
The Best Rap Album In The World...Ever!
The Best... Album In The World Ever! (vol 3)
The Best Punk Album In The World...Ever 2!
Virgin
This 'Best (insert genre) Album In The World...Ever' series has always confused me. Surely, the Best (insert genre) album should contain as many of the best (insert genre) tracks as you can fit on a double CD, but that isn't always the case. Here we have the first Best Rap Album, the second Best Punk Album and the third Best ... (read Indie) Album.
Where these collections fall down is that they aren't really sure which market to pitch themselves at. The Hardcore Fan? No, because they'll already have all the tracks, probably a few times over. The Casual Observer? Again no, because they'd probably only be interested in the chart-friendly tracks, which they've already got, on one of their 'Now' compilations. So you aim for The Interested Punter Who Doesn't Really Know Any Better. In doing this, you get to put on classic, seminal stuff (Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy; Underworld and the Mondays; Richard Hell and The Jam) and, where applicable, contemporary stuff that will become classic (Warren G and Coolio; Prodigy and Radiohead), giving the album some credibility. But because they Don't Know Any Better, you can get away with including stuff like MC Hammer and Apache Indian; The Teardrop Explodes and Joy Division (on a PUNK album???); Cast and 60ft Dolls, whilst making glaring omissions, which will presumably be included on the sequel.
Basically, the Indie and Rap compilations aren't too bad, containing as they do some tracks that it might be hard to find nowadays, whereas the number of tracks on the Punk album that would more readily be classed as New Wave, Goth or Shite seems to confirm the rumour that punk died due to a lack of decent tunes.
June
I Am Beautiful
Beggar's Banquet
This modestly lengthed,12-track CD is verging on being, excuse the expression, the tits. It is indeed a tip-top combination of sparse guitar indie rock jangle, jazz influenced fucked-up time signatures, breathy female vocals, discordant noise and tingle- inducing melodies. It's one of those albums that just go down perfectly on a summer evening. It gives me the same contented, thoughtful, chilled out feeling as Sebadoh's 'Bakesale' gave me a couple of years ago: summertime melancholia. Ace.
It is a bit confused in places and seems to lose direction, but I'm sure that those bits, after repeat listenings, will end up being my favourite moments as they always are on Sonic Youth albums.
A bit like Veruca Salt without the Transvision Vamp-esque rock cheesiness, a bit like The Breeders, but with a glockenspiel and, most importantly, nothing like the Cranberries (apart from one La La La interlude when singer Kat Cook conjures up Gaelic roots from nowhere). They're from the same place as The Archers Of Loaf, which is reason enough to buy this album. They rhyme "Molasses" with "Onassis". They even pull off a Patsy Cline style country and western ballad superbly with 'I'll Pick Up My Heart (And Go Home)' with slide guitars and everything.
'I Am Beautiful' is hard to classify. It's not really like anything else, as it is so diverse. It's just cool. Buy it, play it to death and enjoy it while sipping a cold alcoholic beverage and watching the world go by and the sun retreat. Marvellous.
Rage Against The Machine
Evil Empire
Epic
Hark!! What is this a-rumbling towards me from afar? There is an angry man screaming into a microphone in a fashion more staccato than a machine-gun. I wish he would shut up so that I could listen to the funky, but heavy, angry music he's shouting over.
Yes, they're back. Rage Against The Machine are funkier, looser, less likely to rely on the bass mimicking the guitar line, and full of rock and roll weird noises. Opener 'People Of The Sun' has a brilliant drum pattern, amazing guitar sound and texture, groovy bass hook, and Zack annoying the hell out of me. The chorus begs to be played as loud as my stereo will go, but I have neighbours. The tone is set, and after five songs I'm thinking of switching off because, quite frankly, this DeLa Rocha individual is giving me a headache, but then he comes up with the (less shouty) chorus, 'I wanna be Jackie Onassis, I wanna wear a pair of dark sunglasses, I wanna be Jackie O, Oh oh oh please don't die..." and (ludicrous though it may seem) I am persuaded to persevere. There are good bits, there are bad bits... further completely good songs are 'Wind Below'. I note that 'Year Of The Boomerang' has the best vocal style on the whole disc, and that was first released about two years ago. Also, most of the better songs are seem to be the older ones they played live before disappearing for a couple of years.
Basically, this album is neither pants nor stormer - it rests firmly in Not Bad Land. They're still angry, inspiration still runs through the studio with it's mac open, and Zack still rubs me up the wrong way unless I'm sixteen years old, drunk and trying to kill someone on a dancefloor.
The Cranberries
To The Faithful Departed
Island
After being consumed with sardonic laughter on seeing whose hands this band's efforts had fallen into for review, I was threatened by my friends to open my mind, crucify my eardrums and appreciate those dulcet tones - yeah right!
The general consensus of a less biased sample than myself is that this album is 'lovely', in the most soppy, misty-eyed of all senses. I beg to differ, being a self proclaimed Cranberry head hunter, and driven to distraction by the most stressful vocals in the history of modern music.
The title says it all, morbid, self-indulgent, restrained PANTS. It's cute, acoustic, cultured and honed beyond the realms of tasteful. It escapes utter pretension by incorporating a few rowdy guitar bits, but it's a close call. Unsurprising, inoffensive trash. The album oscillates between two distinctly 'Cranberry' styles, Zombie-esque loud bits and sweet, nostalgic politically motivated waily bits. These 'bits' collide happily in the alternate dimension of crapdom and hey presto, you have a commercially successful band.
My verdict; this album is regurgitated, miserable and utterly memorable for all the wrong reasons. The Cranberries truly are the band we should all love to hate, or should that be slate, (boy am I making myself popular). Honestly it's shite, but if you drooled for the last album, this one sadly could do the trick. Is there a little Miss Appalling?
Mark Eitzel
60 Watt Silver Lining
Virgin
So, the pub is nearly empty. The people are quiet. The atmosphere is muted. She looks at me with those eyes. That smile. That tear. I'm not sure I can take this. I think this was a bad move. Too many memories in that look, too many good times. Too much of my life wrapped up in that sorrowful smile.
There is no easy way down. Mark Eitzel, Charles Bukowski, relationships and post-relationships. So, alchohol seems like the best idea. Let's blunt some of these sharp edges. Take the bite off some of these bitter remarks.
It's so easy to sink, to let yourself go, wallow; "and there is no safety in this world / and I have no time for good luck charms / but I still long for your touch / because I know I'm saved in your arms."
This is an album searching for a context. Something in your life that will kick it off, make it sink in, make it matter. For so long Mark Eitzel has been asking for redemption, looking for a way out, fighting but this is when he bows out. Love might be the great saviour but he has given up on it; 'Everything is beautiful but not you or me."
"It's sad when you try and manipulate me / it's sad because I don't love you that way any more." These songs are specific instances, recorded moments, but put together the atmosphere is universal. The "blue-blue sky" may darken like an "inhalation over the graveyard of ships" but the thing that hits you is that "there's always more ties you can sever / while nothing changes."
It's a beautiful album. An album for a certain mood that you'll listen to all the time. All you need is pain.
Meat Beat Manifesto
Subliminal Sandwich
Play It Again Sam
Listening to this album is bloody disorientating. Meat Beat Manifesto were one of the great sound-innovating bands of the eighties and early nineties: they mixed dub, hip-hop, industrial, techno, and television together and made a music that deliberately disorientated you, sent you reeling into information overload, and turned dancing into a political act. But what's really disorientating about this album is that it's come out of the blue: it's been four years since 'Satyricon', and a fuck of a lot has happened.
You can still get lost in a MBM album: the pathways aren't any more documented than they were, it's just that a lot of different people have enjoyed getting us lost since. If dance purists' ramblings had any currency outside their cloistered, often paradoxically insular world, MBM would be a thing of the past.
Unfortunately, no-one has yet figured out quite how to do what Jack Dangers and chums are still capable of doing, and making new. Dangers can play with sequencers, and through them, with all the sounds of urban life and information technology, like everything was just one great instrument of paranoia, isolation, resilient hedonism, humour and subversion. One aspect of the subversion particularly noticeable on this album is an acceptance of the underground, 'faceless' identity accorded him by the still dance-suspicious media, and the consequent retreat to the background of the vocal element. But this album assembles a far from faceless, in fact multi-faceted, demon identity. Don't let it escape your attention.
Idaho
Three Sheets To The Wind
Caroline
So, the pub is nearly empty. The people are quiet. The atmosphere is muted. She looks at me with those eyes. That smile. That tear. I'm not sure I can ...erm, wait there, I'm sure I've been here before. Too many depressing albums this month. Too many people dragging up memories, evoking stuff and generally being melancholy. But I'm strong. I can take it.
Idaho aren't blessed with the sublime lyrical skill of Mark Eitzel and rather than play 'mock jazz' piano tinged blues, rely on atmospheric guitar and fuzzy feedback to create their cool melancholic sound. Jeff Martin's voice is very similar to Mark's but has a deeper, more drunken drawl that works the blue moods of the songs perfectly.
This is their third album and is slightly, note; only slightly, more upbeat than its predecessors, yet still succeeds in creating the right atmosphere.
This album is never going to change the world. It's not going to particularly change you but it is a good album. So, when you are having one of those slow afternoons when nothing is going particularly well, your life is directionless and the sky is grey then Idaho will take care of the soundtrack.
Mark Stewart
Control Data
Mute
The press release describes this latest effort from ex-Pop Group singer and recent house-sharer with Tricky, Mark Stewart as "the sound of rock that has finally crumbled, dub that's been buried alive". Certainly, Stewart's subject matter of governmental and societal oppression also translates into the general oppression feel of this record: electronic dub echoes and effects combine with Nine Inch Nails-like noise to make you feel battered and bruised. the involvement of Adrian Sherwood and the Sugarhill Gang results in tracks like 'Scorpio', which expand on 1970's dub production techniques, while managing to remain fairly true to the spirit of people like Lee 'Scratch' Perry.
Too often, though, this sonic collage, presumably designed to reflect society's rapid descent into confusion, merely sounds confused. It reminds me of how I'd imagine Killing Joke sound, if I'd ever felt inclined to discover what Killing Joke sound like. From what I've read, they never appealed. Nor does this.
The closing track, 'Blood Money', aptly illustrates Mark Stewart's problem. He seems to think that a few tired clichés like "The government lie" and an assertion that the working class are "working for blood money" shouted at the listener through layers of noise and distortion will sound perceptive and profound. It doesn't. It just sounds pompous and patronising.
This might sound obvious, but 'Control Data' is depressing. Where people like Lee Perry and Prince Far-I offered some sort of salvation from the shit the world threw at them, this album merely sounds like a lecture. Mark down as a wasted opportunity.
Almighty
Just Add Life
Chrysalis
Pity the Almighty. Just three to four years ago, they were heirs apparent to the British rock crown. Since then we've had The Wildhearts and several guitar to the fore indie combos, all of which have forced a change of direction (not to mention label and haircut). So this album is full of half-hearted concessions, such as the almost inaudible Hammond organ on 'Feed the Need' and '8 Day Depression' and the horn parts on the single. Apart from this, it's basically business as usual, which unfortunately means a few total stormers like 'Coalition Star' (based on a demo by The Ruts), 'How Real is Real for You', and the Wildheartsesque 'Do You Understand' at the beginning, followed by a slow decline to the pointless 'Afraid of Flying'.
Toenut
Information
Mute America
'Information' is a hungry beast with a staple diet of broken rhythms and wildly veering, discordant guitars, which although initially repulsing are, at the same time, sublime enough to enthral. It has a discerning and eclectic palate; gnawing the still fleshy bones of the Pixies in 'Jesus Finger' or chewing contemplatively, in 'Hookworm', on morsels of Jane's Addiction. Then there's a cocktail of samples and a large slug of feedback to wash it down. Katie's voice, the liqueur in the coffee, I suppose, completes the banquet.
So there you have it; with a cool blend of jazz lounge smoke, metal riffs, Spanish guitars (yes, really) and a hint of wry humour we have Toenut- the band you can listen to between meals without ruining your appetite.