Portishead
Portishead
Go! Beat
Musically, this is a far more impressive album than ‘Dummy’. It has far more scope, bringing in far more instruments and techniques to the mix and aiming far higher. It’s a far more difficult album than ‘Dummy’ as well. The broken-up beat of ‘Only You’, the white noise and distortion of ‘Half Day Closing’ and ‘Humming’ and the scratchy beats etched all the way through the album make it a far deeper, more brooding record than ‘Dummy’. However, is it any better?
Well, listen to ‘Undenied’ and see if it doesn’t make you sink into Beth Gibbons voice as she sings “So there is my heart / I can’t hide / And so where does my heart / Belong”. Listen to ‘Half Day Closing’ and see if doesn’t send shivers up your spine as Beth’s voice is distorted and twisted into the pitch of the song. Listen to ‘Only You’ and see if your mouth doesn’t drop open, agape as Geoff Barrow introduces a sample from ‘Inspector Clouseau’ that seems to go on for ever before the beat hits and the track returns to its sparse hip hop beginning.
Of course it’s better. It’s not that different. It’s just wider, deeper and bigger. So much more has been used but in truth the focus has become more concentrated and the effect more brutal. To say that Portishead are one trick ponies is to not understand the whole point of modern music. In reappropriating music from the past the only way to make it interesting is to create something new that you can identify as yours. Portishead do this by taking influences from hip hop, blues, film soundtracks and all the rest and then forcing them into a sound that is utterly theirs. It is the strength of this album, and it’s predecessor, that after being imitated so often they still sound utterly unique.
So, what does listening to Portishead do to you? Well, first you just can’t help but be impressed by all the bits. All the musical skills that have been brought to bear on the album, the huge scope of the sounds and all the little details perfectly worked into the album. However, once you get to know it these component parts merge into the songs as a whole and you start to connect with it. You start to love how all the inflections in Beth’s voice perfectly match the breaks in the songs and the sounds behind them. You start to love the way it has been put together so that in the end you can’t notice the seams. One hook leads straight into the next and you’re left at the end of ‘Western Eyes’ wondering where that fifty minutes went. When I first heard it all the tracks seemed quite long. Now they’re all far too short.
The man who singlehandedly both defined and revolutionised The Scene Formerly Known As Trance is back. ‘Ima’, one of the best albums of 1995, pulled off the impossible by cross-pollinating those dodgy whale-noise tapes you get in what can only be called ‘Hippy Shops’ with maddeningly addictive keyboard things and atmospherics beyond the call of duty. So how, in cynical old 1997, has Brian Transeau managed to follow it?
It must be damn hard for an artist whose first album breaks serious new ground - one can imagine Portishead scratching their heads for hours, and their resultant eponymous second album, though stunning, lacks the freshness that made ‘Dummy’ so fascinating. So, to overcome this, BT has backtracked to the start of his music and, from the same roots, taken a different course. The sense of grandeur is still here, but now there are as many links with ‘Leftism’ as with ‘Ima’, and the added variety takes ‘ESCM’ that vital stage further. Previous single ‘Flaming June’ still sounds a tad too Robert Miles for my liking, and ‘Remember’ is blatant single fodder, but ‘Orbitus Teranium’ - unable to decide whether it’s a bass-heavy slow acid wigout or even more whale noises, and cut up by snippets of some other song entirely - is welcome to a few more listens yet. With the rest of the album varying from spaced-out drum & bass on ‘The Road to Lostwithiel’ to guitar-heavy rock thing on ‘Solar Plexus’, the only thing missing is a version of ‘Blue Skies’, the Tori Amos collaboration. Pretty much anything else you might want is in there somewhere.
Call me cynical, and it might be because I love ‘Ima’ so much, but I can’t quite lose myself in this album....yet. Ask me again in a year, maybe. In the meantime, for God’s sake, buy it and make your own mind up.
ESCM - it’s what you get when you take the trance out of Transeau. Thank you.
Stereolab
Dots And Loops
Duophonic
I have just been informed, by a friend who has been following Stereolab for a while now, that ‘Ping-Pong’, their best known little ditty, chronicles the stages leading to a Marxist revolution. Didn’t know that, just thought it sounded cool. The ten tracks on this new album don’t exactly sound packed with Marxist theory, but then you never can tell. That’s the wonderful thing about Stereolab - they could be delivering a critique of commodity fetishism and still sound as if they are singing about European cities looking fabulous in the rain.
And so the surprises on this album are all delivered with a discreet charm and are nicely underplayed, Granted, ‘Refractions In The Plastic Pulse’ may sound like typical Sterolab initially, but by the time the song has gone through various permutations from stripped-down disco to string-assisted balladry (with a little help from the masterful Sean O’Hagan), you realise it’s something else altogether. That this epic, seventeen-minute shapeshifter is simply nestling quietly in the middle of the album makes it all the more striking for not having been rammed down the listeners’ throats as the grand finale.
Certainly, while tracks such as the poppy single ‘Miss Modular’ seem like invitations to go and smoke in some Left Bank café circa 1960, most of ‘Dots And Loops’ displays a band thoroughly rooted in the present. The most seamless and sublime blend on offer is the wonderfully-titled ‘Ticker-tape Of The Unconsciousness’, in which an unremitting drum and bass beat is welded to some equally insistent organ playing which would go down a storm in cabaret. Ditto ‘Contronatura’ which, after five minutes of wistful French harmonising and electronic doodling, transforms into a Daft Punk-esque disco-funk foot stomper.
If this all sounds too cleverly detached to stir the emotions, then be warned that the sparseness of ‘Prisoner Of Mars’ makes it truly affecting. So, ‘Dots And Loops’ is an album that softly whispers its excellence in your ear. What makes the experience all the more pleasing is that it whispers in French.
First things first: this is not the coffee-table drum’n’bass album for the winter. The beautiful people should be warned that extended exposure to this album may cause their Dolce and Gabbana gear to become ruffled, torn, and in extreme cases, burned. Alex Reece is dead, and techstep has left the field wide open again.
Photek has been a consistently impressive underground producer, a dyed-in-the-wool Junglist bringing back the cut-up beats other Djs keep forgetting about in the general quest to make Jungle the new techno. His sharp melodies, deep shadowy basslines, and trademark washboard snare sound all resist the flattening-out process currently set to bring electronic music into the fully automated homogenised consumer nightmare that is 90s music marketing.
‘Modus Operandi’ is a landscape album: it seems to chart nocturnal urban spaces, most obviously on ‘Hidden Camera,’ which sets a tone only partially disturbed by the laid-back, graceful guitar harmonics of ‘KJZ.’ Most Photek tracks will meet you half-way, the melody guiding you through the beats, but on ‘Smoke Rings,’ ‘Axiom,’ and ‘Trans 7,’ the melody has been submerged and the music seems defiantly minimal and elusive, which makes for difficult but eventually rewarding listening. As befits an album concerning a way of working, ‘Modus Operandi’ is woven through with leitmotifs which seem to act as signposts, part of a manifesto which is already looking to the next release. There is a sense in which the album remains incomplete, as though artistic drive and sheer time-stretching momentum have moved Photek along just slightly ahead of himself. What you do get for your money is a fascinating set of directions - and they all point away from the coffee table.
Sleater-Kinney
Dig Me Out
Matador
Sleater-Kinney are an all girl three-piece guitar based outfit. ‘Dig Me Out’ is their third album and it’s a spritely affair. Rocking tunes nestle beside slower rock dirges with wailing and guitar riffs endlessly repeating. The album’s not bad. It sounds a bit like earlier Cure stuff without the 1980s production job and with a girl singing instead of Fat Bob Smith mumbling atonally. Suitably off-beat and lo-fi, Sleater-Kinney are obviously going for the unproduced sound that is reminicent of punk. The best songs present are ‘Heart Factory’, because it uses more than one dynamic (giving it an epic element), and ‘Little Babies’ for its dual vocal and its dum-dum-ditty line.
Not a fine album, but enjoyable and listenable. I hate the lead singer’s grating whiny, trembly voice and the lyrics suck too, but somewhere in here there is the potential for Sleater-Kinney being the female Sebadoh, just change the singer and get them to all swap instruments a lot and they may find the magic that this album lacks.
Pooka
Spinning
Trade2 / Island
This is all a bit weird. Crap, but weird. Imagine a miserable female duo, wailing folk songs about butterflies and daisy chains and sunny days one minute and crawling insects and pain and having no boyfriend the next. Alisha’s Gothic? Fleetwood Goth? Simon and Gothfunkel? Whatever, from a musical point of view this is just boring. Pooka have nice enough voices but this just doesn’t have the substance to really grab you and match the obvious emotion of the words.
Noticeably, the only two vaguely memorable moments on the album come with ‘Rubber Arms’ and ‘The Insect’ when PJ Harvey drummer Rob Ellis turns up to put a bit of a rocket up proceedings. Even then, this rarely rises above the ordinary. Maybe Pooka should spend more time rocking out and less time writing poetry, then they may be worth another look. After all, you know what they say, too many books spoil the goth. Oh God I’m so sorry.
So finally, after months of speculation and half-heard rumours, The Verve’s ‘Urban Hymns’ is released. It is an exorcising of The Verve’s soul, a cathartic rebirth, where the band go through a sublime process of purging their sins and claiming redemption through the 13 tracks from their beautiful hymnbook. Listening to this album is like being a priest in a confessional booth - the words are whispered to you through the shrouded, half-ripped curtain, so that you glimpse hints of the faces, people and ideas underpinning the sound.
After the self-immolation following the release of the band’s last album, ‘A Northern Soul’, this is the album that very nearly never happened. The first album, ‘A Storm in Heaven’ drew a blurred picture, where Richard Ashcroft explored a sleepy, lucid dreaming state, but ‘A Northern Soul’ touched on a gritty, helpless birth into an indifferent world. It was a band literally coming apart at the seams before our very eyes. But for the grace of God, we may never have had the pleasure (and pain) of hearing this third epochal work.
The first five songs capture a slow, contemplative mood, with the rockier ‘The Rolling People’ nestling uncomfortably in the centre. The first track, ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’, is a familiar and, let’s face it, fantastic way to open an album, with sweeping strings and echoing percussion and ‘The Drugs Don’t Work’, the second single released off the album (and the most exciting number one of the year) is representative of the heights the newly re-formed Verve can reach following their separation after the release of ‘History’ two years ago.
In a poignant and revealing moment about the state of the band in track ten - ‘One Day’ - Richard Ashcroft sings: “Tie yourself to the mast my friend and the storm will end...one day maybe I will dance again”. This line reiterates the recurring theme that maybe, just maybe ‘Urban Hymns’ is the beginning of a new, less-tormented era for the band. This new spiritually cleansed state finds The Verve returning to a simple, basic sound underlining a complexity of emotion and indescribable love that leads, in a strange way, to the celebration of a new hope and optimism.
Hole
My Body The Hand Grenade
City Slang
Hurray for City Slang! ‘My Body The Hand Grenade’ is what die-hard Hole fans have been waiting for for years- a collection of some of their finest songs on an audible recording instead of a shitty bootleg. The majority of the songs on the album are deleted or previously unreleased, such as their first ever recording ‘Turpentine’. However, intermingled with these are several live recordings from their past two albums, including old favourites like ‘Old Age’ and ‘Miss World’, and a couple of cover versions of songs by Carole King and Donovan which have only been heard before on MTV Unplugged and Jools Holland.
For those of you who prefer the wild, fucked-up, no-knickers Courtney to the new sleek Versace model, this is the album for you. With a raw, unpolished punk feel which has been somewhat lacking since ‘Pretty On The Inside’ combined with the usual catchy vocal melodies, it’s the perfect screamalong album, especially since it’s pretty emotionally charged due toCourtney’s soul baring lyrics; “See the retard girl standing in the courtyard looking for the friend she made” (from ‘Retard Girl’, a song about Courtney’s childhood).
In an era when grunge has more or less died out and the only current female pop icons sing perky little pop tunes with meaningless lyrics, it’s good to let nostalgia kick in. Forget the Spice Girls, this is REAL girl power, even if there is a token bloke in the band.
The Pixies
Death To The Pixies
4AD
It is actually impossible to make a fully successful Pixies compilation, without simply releasing a box-set of all the albums. Trying to sum them up in the space of one CD smacks of harshly reductive, over-simplifying, ‘Best Album In The World... Ever’ commercial disaster. My personal gripe with this compilation is the absence of ‘Hey’, which better illustrates the range of style of Pixies than ‘Wave of Mutilation’ or ‘Gouge Away.’
However, this album is saved by three things: one, it’s got Pixies on it; two, it’ll hopefully redeem the current absence of Pixies on jukeboxes in pubs all over this benighted island; and three, it is clearly a labour of love compiled by the label we have to thank for bringing us this music in the first place. The liner notes are good on alternative music as it was in 1987 versus what its embalmed corpse represents now, and tell the story of how Pixies started out, after Charles Thompson and Joey Santiago advertised for a bassist and drummer to make up a ‘Husker Du / Peter, Paul, and Mary band,’ a description of their sound which remains unsurpassed not only because it illustrates the extreme collision-of-sounds characteristic of all Pixies material, but also because it shows the futility of trying to sum them up. You can name the parts (surf music, Puerto Rican folk, thrash) but the only name for the sum is Pixies. This is music teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown, occasionally making raids across the border into insanity, but always coming back with another melody as cruelly beautiful as the last. No matter how many bands do the quiet-bit loud-bit thing pioneered by Black Francis on tracks like ‘Tame,’ no-one will ever sound like this again.
Authenticity has always been central to hip hop. Where you’re from, not where you end up is what counts. If you lose touch with your roots, then you don’t matter anymore. In short, it’s all about keeping it real. Hurricane makes a big deal about his credible credentials- straight outta Queens, bouncer for Run DMC in the early days, DJ for the Beastie Boys, his CV reads like a rap history book. ‘Severe Damage’ proves that no amount of authenticity can make up for a lack of imagination.
His solo debut, ‘The Hurra’, was an irritating album. Produced by Beasties knob-twiddler Mario Caldato, with guest appearances from percussionist Eric Bobo, Keyboard Money Mark and the B-boys themselves, it had some of the coolest music the Beasties never recorded, completely ruined by Hurricane’s unimaginative and clichéd rhymes.
Two years later, and ‘Severe Damage’ follows in the same vein, only without the power of Grand Royal. Hurricane takes on the majority of the production and vocal duties, meaning that all the redeeming features of the first album are lost, replaced with limp, heard-it-before G-Funk grooves which belie Hurra’s East Coast background. If anything, the lyrics are worse than before, full of unconvincing crimelord bragging and rhymes purloined from much cooler outfits.
Maybe if no-one buys it, he’ll go back to his day job and the new Beasties album might see the light of day . It’s up to you.
Finley Quaye
Maverick A Strike
Virgin
“This is the future / Hey / I ain’t gonna shoot ya” he sings. Cheers Finley. Appreciate it. It takes a lot of strength of character to tread the thin line between making a modern reggae album that doesn’t pay too much homage to the original stepping razors but doesn’t sound insipid and vacuous - UB40 have been around for years, and the film director that succeeds in keeping them at the bottom of the ocean gets a pint and the collective thanks of a nation - and unfortunately Finley Quaye is not that man. Worse, his idea of experimentalism is dangerously similar to U2’s, which couldn’t be less radical if it tried.
Essentially, this album is a generic, safe seventies reggae album with a few shiny bits of nineties technological savvy glued to its belly. Most of the tracks drift past in a haze of sunshine and love, but, like chinese food, the whole thing is faintly dissatisfying only a few minutes after it’s over. ‘Maverick A Strike’ (huh?) has its moments - the recent ‘Even After All’ is blissfully untroubled, a true summer record, and ‘Supreme I Preme’ sounds unerringly like Leftfield, but here and elsewhere style beats substance into a bloody pulp every time. Finley’s endless optimism makes you want to punch old ladies in the face, and his lyrics make you want to punch him in the face. Apparently, Kevin Bacon co-produced most of the tracks on the album, and let’s face it, the last good thing he did was ‘Footloose,’ and even that wasn’t much good. The most depressing thing of all is that it’s easy to ignore the album, to pretend it doesn’t exist. The fact that it’s inspired second rate gags throughout this review is testament to its mighty anonymity.
Sixteen Horsepower
Low Estate
Paradox
Country music has been watered down to a particularly pissy extreme over the last few years. Time was when it wasn’t about not telling my heart, my achy breaky heart and how I just don’t think he’ll understand, but rather had a much darker side; beaten wives, murder, vengeance, the lot. Sixteen Horsepower’s last album ‘Sackloth And Ashes’ was true to this lost blueprint, with songs like ‘Heel On The Shovel’ creating a vision of a world tainted by sin and corruption. ‘Low Estate’ still sounds like it was written in purgatory, but now David Eugene Edwards sounds as if he’s shifting towards the door marked ‘redemption’.
But don’t get any ideas that this is some kind of God-rock gospel effort. The God that Sixteen Horsepower have to deal with is the rock ‘n’ roll Old Testament one, the one that turned people into salt and flooded the world, killing millions of people just for a laugh, and the world they live in is the same one as us, an imperfect world where we all give in to temptation daily and there’s bugger all we can do about it. It’s real preacher-at-the-crossroads stuff, but this preacher is as sinful as the rest of us and knows it. “I beseech thee Lord,” he sings, “Clear my head / Before once again I scar the soul of that girl in my bed”.
Musically, it mixes classic country sounds- violin, steel guitar, concertina, double bass- with a healthy dose of distortion and feedback. David Eugene Edwards’ vocals are powerful, heartfelt and have such conviction that they are never cringeworthy, even when he’s yodelling or shouting “Yeehaa”.
That said, there are a couple of tracks that have me scrabbling for the ‘skip’ button before the local line-dancing group descends on my bedroom for an impromptu session, a shame because they let down an album which could have otherwise been truly great. But, in spite of this, the album is still proof that the devil doesn’t have ALL the best tunes.
A quick teaser, just for fun. If you were to hold a sexiest voice in pop competition who would you invite? Marjine Van Der Vlugt? Probably. Kim Gordon? Definitely. Michael Bolton? Unfortunately (for the ladies, of course). Top of the list though would have to be Helium’s Mary Timony, a woman with a voice so husky Sir Ranulph Fiennes will be using it on his next polar expedition. She is just one reason why Helium deserve to be made a part of your life.
Another reason stems from the fact that ‘The Magic City’ is yet another quality release from Matador in a year which has already seen top stuff from Fuck and Spoon nuzzling its way into our affections. Helium though, are possibly one of Matador’s brightest, most alluring stars, whose previous efforts ‘The Dirt of Luck’ and ‘Pirate Prude’ cut sublimely through the US alt rock scene, each a barrage of searing pop attacks. Nevertheless, whereas Helium had never really succeeded in fully milking their spectral, yet edgy, sound, ‘The Magic City’ achieves all we could have ever hoped for. Gone is the driving yet sometimes uninspired distortion, and in are the intelligent, layered, multi-faceted melodies. Helium have clearly felt, along with many of their guitar wielding contemporaries, that musical laziness is no longer acceptable (unless you are a certain band beginning with Ooooooh dear) and that the boundaries of rock are there to be given a sharp heave-ho. Indeed, this sense of progression is often reflected in Timony’s lyrics, as in ‘Leon’s Space Song’ which features the cosmic request “Shoot me into the 23rd Century with you”.
As a whole then, ‘The Magic City’ displays a penchant for moogy keyboards and space-pop (‘The Revolution of the Hearts’), eastern mysticism (‘Lady Of The Fire’) and medieval techno folk ambient (‘Medieval People’). Indeed, often on this record, Helium sound like a yank Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci and if that isn’t a good enough reason to investigate then you can ram this publication where the sun don’t shine. After you’ve read it of course.
Superchunk
Indoor Living
City Slang
I hate it when this happens. An album comes out, and you’re really excited because you know exactly what it will sound like, and then when you put it on, it sounds nothing like it’s supposed to. Hardly fair, is it?
I suppose I should’ve seen it coming. Their last album was called ‘Here’s Where The Strings Come In’, and rather than being a pisstake title as I originally expected, it was indeed the point in their career where the strings came in. This album is just the logical step on from where that album left off. Gone are the trademark jumpy-up-and-down shouty songs like ‘Skip Steps One And Three’ and ‘Hyper Enough’ that last exactly three minutes and make you feel all stupid and grinny, to be replaced by songs that hover around the five minute mark, with tunes and everything. Mac McCaughan has discovered singing, and it even appears that the album has been ‘produced’, so you can hear all the different instruments.
Mind you, ‘matured’ doesn’t always mean ‘blanded out’, and although this album isn’t anywhere near as immediate as its predecessors, it’s still a cracking piece of guitar pop. Mac’s new-found vocal talents mean that for the first time you can actually appreciate his lyrics properly, and they still have a great grasp of melody. ‘Song For Marion Brown’ is a nostalgic tribute to the 70s saxophonist (“They’re charging admission now,” complains Mac), new single ‘Watery Hands’ is a love song with strange watersports implications and ‘Martinis On The Roof’ is as cool as the name suggests. Should you hanker after the Superchunk of yore, then ‘Nu Bruises’ and ‘European Medicine’ do that job nicely. The only problem is, if eternal teenagers Superchunk are all growed up now, does this mean I have to?
Tha Alkaholiks
Likwidation
Loud
The demon drink has been heinously ignored in the world of pop of late. What with the hip-hop, rock and dance communities both caught up in their own drug trends, we haven’t had a memorable song about booze since, erm, ‘Red Red Wine’ by UB40. So cartoony Californians Tha Alkaholiks stagger up to the mic to put alcohol back in its rightful place as the king of intoxicants.
‘Likwidation’ is of the quality that we’ve come to expect from the Loud stable, with a funkier West Coast edge, but without the patented G-Funk whistly noise or annoying singing woman that lets down so much of the hip-hop from the sunnier side of the States. Surprisingly, the obsession with drink isn’t as wearing as you might first expect, making a change from the constant weed and gun talk of most of their contemporaries.
There is the now ubiquitous guest appearance from a member of the almighty Wu-Tang, in this case Ol’ Dirty Bastard who continues to frustrate me- his track, ‘Hip Hop Drunkies’, is the only time that Tha ‘Liks wander onto thematically dodgy ground.
Elsewhere, there is an interesting take on gangsta posturing, making this album a near-perfect balance of dumb and intelligent . Sure, the between-song skits quickly get irritating, but they account for less than 5 of a 76 minute album and you’ve always got the ‘skip’ button. Oh, and mine’s a pint.
Bowery Electric
Vertigo
Beggars Banquet
An EP the dimensions of which recall the late great Leigh Bowery, who may or may not have inspired this band’s name, this is a generously proportioned set of re-mixes taken from Bowery’s second album ‘Beat’. Music like this always reminds me of a story John Cale told about a concert he once participated in where three musicians held a steady note for several hours. At the end of the concert, one dazed listener came up and asked who had been playing flute. No-one had: the drone had simply brought into focus all the overtones lurking about in the tuning.
Not that Bowery Electric are simply a drone band. They have the taste to combine the occasionally testing blood-from-a-stone post-MBV wall of sound thing with hazy low-end beats, and this is undoubtedly what attracted a host of producers to their material. The result is a quite wonderful album-length trawl through the deep-sea whalesong ambiences suggested by the originals, mixed up with plenty of sonic trickery, knob-twiddling, and drums that sound like they’ve been dragged backwards down a glacier. The Twisted Science version of ‘Empty Words’ is a particularly enthralling slab of processed-to-fuck noise, while the Witchman take on ‘Without Stopping’ provides top scram for the beat-hungry. Third Eye Foundation and Main also contribute in ghostly fashion. Music for the fuller figure.
Suitably chastened after reading a damning article in The Idler, bible of all things slack, in which architects are heavily criticised for, well, being architects, two American architecture students and their less musically astute friends said to themselves “Let’s post-ROCK! And sign to Too Pure after touring extensively in the US. And make an average album called ‘Seconds’”. Seely’s collective fetish for dubby bass, girly girl vocals, fuzzy guitars and warm moogs has already invited inevitable Stereolab comparisons. Anchoring themselves firmly to the less-is-more/quiet-is-loud aesthetic hasn’t done them any favours, but ‘Seconds’ is a collection of finely honed, off-kilter pop tunes.
However, by concentrating on structure and stripping out the non-essential, Seely have tried to create a more open and honest emotional space, but in doing so they’ve succeeded in robbing the album of much of its colour. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with ‘Seconds’, it’s just there’s nothing much right with it. Listening to it is like watching generic motorway scenery from a speeding car - superficial and ephemeral, vital detail lost in a blur. Seely lack the je ne sais quoi (Look mummy, that man’s being pretentious) that personalises Broadcast or Stereolab. Until Seely manage to show a little less respect for their elders, this is just music by architects for architects.
David Holmes
Let's Get Killed
Go! Beat
Hot on the tails of Lalo Schiffrin, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones comes the cheeky little mucker David Holmes with his soundtrack-inspired ‘Lets Get Killed’. So when exactly did the bleached haired Belfast boy’s monogamous relationship with hard techno show signs of dwindling? Was it when Holmes received the Muzik SAS award for best Essential Mix? A fine selection of Northern Soul, funk, soundtracks stretching from the likes of Jimmy Smith to Jimi Hendrix without a 4/4 beat in sight. Maybe it was when young David starting mixing Hammond organ fuelled sets down at the Heavenly Social? Or was it when Holmes released his debut long player ‘This Film’s Crap - Let’s Slash the Seats’, nine epic tracks of which Lynda La Plante pilfered ‘No Man’s Land’ for TV. In truth David Holmes was born and bred a soul-boy who along the way just happened to immerse himself in punk, mod, rare groove and techno as he scootered along through life.
Which brings us to the nothing less than outstanding ‘Lets Get Killed’ - an album so intricate, unique and diverse yet straight forward and unassuming that it could only have been crafted by Holmes. It takes Holmes’ diversity of taste, his DJing experience, his willingness to challenge the new to create this 59 minutes of uniqueness. From the Northern Soul of ‘My Mate Paul’ with its climbing and tumbling bass-line and the jarring piano chords to the drum and bongo backing of ‘Head Rush on LaFayette’, every track is a winner. The lazy jazz vibes and sweeping strings of ‘Rodney Yates’ contrast yet fits perfectly with tracks like the radical breakbeat reworking of the James Bond theme (‘Radio 7’) or the low key dub-reggae of ‘Slashers Revenge’. Thrown into this aural cacophony of sounds are the ramblings of the freaks, weirdos and crackheads that frequent New York’s Washington Square. Surprisingly these voices seem as at home on ‘Lets Get Killed’ as in their natural habitat. From the bitter slatings of unsuccessful band members to self-disclosing drug users, they are all here. If one track were to summarise the album it would be ‘Don’t Die Yet’; a last minute reprieve in which wah-wah guitar, chopped beats and 70’s prog-rock sound effects are backed by an orchestra with complete string section and choir. It shouldn’t work. It does.
The Orange Peels
Square
Minty Fresh / Pinnacle
Wouldn’t it have been great to have been a Californian surfin’ dude back in the early sixties? Waxin’ down your board, wipin’ out and buffin’ up your hot rod to the sounds of the Beach Boys. Aaaah, the Beach Boys. The definitive blueprint of classic summer pop. Everybody loved the Beach Boys, hell, even the bad guys knew them and they left them alone.
However, maybe just maybe those same bad guys wouldn’t have been quite so lenient if they could have glimpsed the Boys’ terrifying legacy some thirty five years later. Weezer. The Rembrandts. The Fountains of Wayne. The Supernaturals. Silver Sun. A roll call of shame indeed, and the new kid in the class is the Orange Peels. I’m sure you know the score already. Close harmonies. Plink plonk jingle jangle. I’m such a loser lyrics. Corny horn section. Oh so geeky glasses. Jangly rinky plink. Hip to be ‘Square’? Bollocks.
Garageland
Welcome To Garageland
Discordant
OK, here’s the angle. Someone out of Garageland used to be in Crowded House. However, I can’t remember who, I can’t remember what he plays and to put it bluntly I really couldn’t give a flying fuck. If anything was likely to put me off a record, it would be the fact that one of those turgid antipodean arses had stuck their oily mitts in somewhere. A far more burning issue concerns the question of why bands like Garageland still insist on churning out old Nirvana / Pixies riffs which only serve to prove how much better the original acts were. In this context, Garageland’s claim that they scoff at the “current vogue of traditionalism” almost beggars belief.
Nevertheless, at the risk of sounding contrary, I don’t particularly dislike ‘Welcome to Garageland’. In fact, if it was five years ago I’d probably love it, but five years can seem an eternity in the world of pop and as the old adage goes, time and grunge wait for no man.