Broon's Tunes (and other stories)

A Missive from Thailand: Everything's Going Swimmingly!

2011-12-03T04:01:00.000Z

I wrote about learning how to swim in Chiang Mai, Thailand. You can read it here.

The Very, Very Big Match

2011-12-02T03:41:00.004Z

Racism at the highest level, countless corruption allegations, match-fixing enquiries worldwide, disrespect for our sacred poppy, the never-ending demands for video technology; FIFA is under pressure from every angle and now faces a new controversy following last Sunday's big Blues v Purples match in Surin, eastern Thailand. The Purples' tricky No.7 was both the star of the show and the centre of the controversy - let's call him, for no special reason, Luis - for three times he raced through the heavy footed Blues' defence with the ball tucked under his trunk. Twice Luis uncurled shots at goal from close range only for them to be blocked by the Blues' massive No.2, and the other time he was foiled by his own last-minute miscontrol, but the Purples' goal was scored with a similar maneuvre by the gigantic No.9 who was clearly inspired by Luis's display. Oh, this was an elephant football match, by the way. The players were all elephants. Literally elephants, Jamie. Elephants.

I made a 22 hour round trip from Bangkok to watch this match, and it was barely worth it, for it's not often you get to see a match featuring players of such phenomenal natural strength, grey leathery skin and big flappy ears; neither is it common (at least in the SPL; I don't watch English football) to see a defender caught out by a through ball because he is too busy defecating on the pitch. Fortunately for the huge centre-back, this piece of sloppy defending went unpunished.

The match finished 1-1 after a sclaffed goal-kick by the Purples' goalkeeper landed right at the toes of the Blues' really very large No.9 who, showing good feet for a five tonne septegenarian, turned and sclaffed a shot straight back to the goalkeeper, who in turn sclaffed the ball backwards and between his own posts. The goalscorer - who we'll call Zlatan, in preference to Peter, so as to not confuse readers of my next giraffe match report - celebrated by reaching his nose-arm into the crotch of a surprised team-mate, who was then lucky not to see red for a Rooney-like kick out at the offender. Direct nasal-genital groping or not, provocation is not an excuse.

At full-time the match went to penalties, which were won 1-0 by the Blues, who thereby displayed more accuracy from the spot than the Brazil national human male squad did at the Copa America. Despite their triumph, the Blues trudged off the pitch as if they had no idea what their victory truly meant. I'm glad I'm not a fan.

Back to the main controversy: does the definition of handball include the trunk-dribble? Elephants already have four limbs which are uncontroversially feet, because they are required for the elephant to stand, walk and run. The trunk is like a nose on the end of an arm, it's not very much like a foot at all. Let's ditch the legal mumbo-jumbo ("definition" etc.): it looks like handball. In fact, an elephant running at a line of other elephants with a ball wrapped in its trunk looks near-identical to a game of rugby, which would certainly not be worth travelling halfway across the world to report on. Elephant rugby? That's just stupid.

10 of the best pubs in Edinburgh

2011-10-14T12:24:00.003+01:00

I wrote an article for Guardian Travel about Edinburgh. It's pretty self-explanatory.

10 of the best pubs in Edinburgh

Detour presents: Meursault / Happy Particles @ Glasgow Science Centre (Planetarium)

2011-10-14T12:13:00.002+01:00

Meursault / Happy Particles at Glasgow Science Centre Planetarium (****)
Sunday October 9
live review for the skinny

The planetarium isn't just a novel location for the sake of gimmickry, since a certain brand of rock music routinely provokes descriptions like "star-gazing" or "cosmic" and can feel emotionally profound in the same vague, mindclutter-emptying way as staring at the stars.

Sunday's first band Happy Particles fit the bill perfectly: even without a domed ceiling of stars and planets above them, they might fairly be described as a space-rock band. Before they start, the seated crowd is treated to a brief introduction to astronomy by planetarium staff member Simon, who amusingly talks to all us trendy music types like we're six years old again. "Look out for Geoff the Whale!" he tells us, before the stars above start to orbit the room, and Happy Particles slowly shift between chords.

Theirs is not a clean or intricate game, preferring to play in the mud of indistinct guitar noise and heavily processed vocals, but it’s perfect for right now, gazing at flickering stars, what looks like Mars, and some dubiously drawn constellations (how can you get a dog from two dots?). Happy Particles should never perform in a wee bar again; please, talk to Simon about a residency.

Meursault, perennial kings of Edinburgh’s gentle acoustic scene, could be a less appropriate choice for a setting that encourages us to consider infinite size, and the closer, a sparse take on ‘...Fields’ familiar to any fan, is somewhat swallowed by the "endless canopy" above it. But the new songs that dominate tonight's set reveal a heavier sound than ever before, which fills the room, if not the universe. Neil Pennycook’s songwriting has taken an angry turn, so his bandmates wallop the drums and strangle the guitars, but Pennycook’s voice is still a versatile emotional tool, and some of the new piano melodies are startlingly pretty. Meursault may benefit from more intimate venues, but Detour deserve a lot of credit for thinking outside the pub.

TV On The Radio @ ABC, Glasgow, 28 June

2011-07-02T12:19:00.000+01:00

When TV On The Radio last played at the ABC, they were cheered by a packed and passionate crowd still enthralled with Dear Science, the band’s hugely successful third album which had come out two months prior. Almost three years on their return to this venue is met by a half-full hall, and the suspicion that new record Nine Types Of Light has underwhelmed fans, despite more glowing praise from critics, seems confirmed as the gig struggles to get going.

Six of the first seven songs, all new, elicit little more than polite applause; the oldie, an exuberant performance of Return To Cookie Mountain’s Blues From Down Here, also flounders, such is the crowd's skepticism. Somehow, the band turn it round: Province and Red Dress set up a loose and lively Staring At The Sun, and then Repetition – a Nine Types album track – is a sensation, Tunde Adebimpe’s fiery rambling vocals juxtaposing with Kyp Malone’s falsetto, while the band rushes headfirst into a cacophonous climax. However the dust settles on Nine Types, in Repetition they've an instant fillip for any awkward moment.

Hard Up Down Under

2011-06-30T15:18:00.006+01:00

Travel feature for The Skinny

My bags are packed, I’m ready to leave. Australia, I’m done. You’re turning me into a Scottish stereotype. Friends warned me that 23 days here – 10 in Melbourne and Sydney, and 13 backpacking on the east coast above – would be woefully insufficient. It was plenty. Backpacking isn’t really possible here at the moment. Let me clarify – it’s entirely possible to trudge about with an overstuffed backpack on, sleep in fusty dorms of twelve and live off a relentless diet of pasta with tomato sauce every night. But it’s futile. You may be living like a tramp, but you’ll be spending like a king.

“The economy’s too bloody strong,” was the frustrated explanation of Roger, a hostel owner who was taking me and only me to his empty accommodation one night. Well, it was low season, and other hostels were busier, but it’s true to observe that Australia has never been more expensive for a visitor than it is now. A pound used to buy two-and-a-half Australian dollars, now only one-and-a-half. So a low-range hostel dorm bed, $30, used to be a reasonable £12, but is now £20. That’s only the start. If you like to travel with a guidebook, bring one with you and guard it like a second passport: they’re $40 to $75 here. A sandwich, wee bottle of coke and pack of crisps will cost $15 (£10). It’s the same for a pack of cigarettes, and if you can find a pint for less than five quid, you’ve chanced upon happy hour. Prepare to go hungry, sober, or insolvent.

It’s fine if you work here. Many of the travellers I’ve met here have been working, too. The minimum wage is $15 (£10), but bar staff can expect at least $20, and one former barman told me he earned $57 per hour on Easter Sunday. That’s forty bloody quid!

The main attractions on Australia’s east coast are, I should say, free. Beaches are free. Swimming is free. Surfing is free (if you have a board). I saw a lot of beaches. I lay under the sun. The sun is free. Queensland is “The Sunshine State” (disclaimer: sunshine may also be received or distributed in other states). Also free and occasionally available: rain. One tourist brochure gave me inspiration for how to enjoy Queensland’s beaches: “Build an old-fashioned sand castle, creating priceless memories to share with loved ones”. So I’ll build a castle with turrets and a moat, I thought, and take pictures and post them to Facebook or something? But I didn’t want to shell out for a bucket and spade. I wavered, and chose lunch instead.

I spent money to see other beaches. I paid over $300 – that’s the going rate – for two days and a night on Fraser Island (coastline, above), the world’s biggest sand island. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site – like the Grand Canyon and Angkor and Stonehenge and central Edinburgh – which means the UN guarantees it’s cool. I won’t disagree with the UN. The main highway on Fraser Island is 75 Mile Highway; it’s also called 75 Mile Beach. It runs the entire length of the island. Depending on the Pacific tide, 75 Mile Beach is up to 100m deep (or “wide”, if you’re driving along it) with another 100m of chaotic, shark-infested surf, and a 20-50m wide mirror in-between, constantly shrinking and being refreshed by the sea, reflecting the sky and clouds above. I called it 75 Mile Mirror. Contrary to bible advice, some wise men have built hotels upon the sand; they’re perfectly stable. Three buffet meals were included in the deal, so my new friends and I stocked up on nutrients, eager to improve our calories-to-dollars ratios. At night, groaning, we trundled back to 75 Mile Beach. Twenty miles away from the nearest settlement, the sky was as clear as I’d ever seen. While on the lookout for wild dingoes, we stood on the highway and watched shooting stars slice the Southern Cross. Stars are free. Meteors are free.

75 Mile Beach is not the best beach on Fraser Island, certainly. For a start, it’s a highway: all the tourist traffic uses it to get anywhere. One destination requiring most of its length is the Champagne Pools, a gathering of smooth rocks which form four or five perfect little swimming pools of frothy sea water, not champagne. While most tourists were distracted by the pools, repeatedly topped-up by the gracious sea, there were two idyllic golden sand beaches just metres away, uninhabited even while tour buses were parked nearby. Inland, a hundred metres high and through miles of rainforest, is Lake McKenzie (below), a freshwater lake of deep blue with immaculately white sand verges. Such a beautiful spot could never be a secret, so there were dozens of other people around, even in low season. But it’s easy to walk a little and find space. We were there for about an hour.

I paid to visit another beach too, for about an hour. Among the Whitsunday Islands, a thousand bus minutes up the coast, is Whitehaven Beach (below), famous for having 99% silica sand. Every travel agent in town referred to it as one of the top five or ten or three beaches in the world. CNN voted it the No.1 eco-friendly beach in the world. OK, let’s disagree with CNN. Every day, dozens of ferries make four-hour round trips shuttling tourists to this beach, bypassing many other lovely-looking and empty beaches on the way. In what way is that eco-friendly? Being a practiced skinflint by now, I bought the cheapest ticket to the island I could find. I paid sixty quid ($89) for a choppy two-hour ferry ride, on which a young boy was thrown against a bannister and lost a tooth, and lots of people vomited, to spend one hour on this beach. It was indeed a very beautiful beach, impossibly fine white sand and gently turquoise waters. I was just dozing, when a boat landed not twenty feet in front of me. “Right guys, everybody off, here it is, the number one beach in the world! I’ve got footies and frisbees, who wants one?" But Whitehaven cannot be the number one, ten or fifty beach in the world, because it is publicised as such. It is immodest. The best beaches don’t gloat about themselves. The best beaches keep mum. And the best beaches don’t eject you back onto a ferry after a quid-a-minute stay. Whitehaven isn’t even the best beach in Queensland – I may, or may not, have already referred to that already; not telling.

Millions of beaches, beaches for free. What else is there to the east coast of Australia? The Great Barrier Reef – which also has the UN’s stamp of approval – is a huge attraction for scuba divers. I can’t dive, so I can’t comment. It’s probably amazing. You can snorkel too, and kayak with dolphins, and skydive. You can eat steak pies or fish and chips or pasta. You can watch the royal wedding in a pub among Union flag-waving oi-boys and tiara’d daddy’s princesses from the home counties. You can watch a bloke with a guitar setting up and predict, correctly, that he’ll kick off with Wonderwall. I am aware which Queen’s land this is and so on; but it’s still a little disappointing to be 10,000 miles from home and have days which could have been had in Margate. Sydney’s exciting. Melbourne’s really cool. I hear the west coast is wonderful.

Best of all? New Zealand is only a thousand miles away.

Trainhopping In Japan

2011-06-13T17:54:00.008+01:00

Travel feature for The Skinny

I could wait tables on this train, I thought. I could serve drinks, heavy drinks in tall glasses, on a tray held on one hand, using only one leg, while drunk, I thought. It’s so smooth! Sitting on a British train is like hatching a nest of pneumatic drills, I thought, compared to the flat-bottomed glide of this gleaming white shinkansen. How can I ever go back? And it’s going so fast, according to the blur of scenery in the window. I stood up, holding my water bottle in my left hand, and scouted. No-one was looking: one suit was transfixed by his laptop, a suit in front was concentrating hard on his bento lunchbox, and the suit at the back was asleep. I lifted my left leg off the ground, crouched, and hopped across a river, three kayaks and a houseboat, without spilling a drop. Take that Jonathan Edwards – you, actually, very nice man – take that jump and stick it!

I exaggerate a little: British trains are okay; what really feels like you're hatching a nest of pneumatic drills is when you're sitting on the bog when a massive earthquake strikes 450 miles away. First thought: am I ill? I can’t sit still, my head is spinning; how much did I drink last night? Then: maybe this is what a faraway earthquake feels like. It wasn't my gut or my head, it was exactly what a faraway earthquake feels like.

Although the calamities in the north-eastern part of Honshu have knocked it off any tourist’s schedule for the foreseeable future, most of Japan is continuing with life as normal. The Japanese are legendarily stoic and hard-working – Hiroshima’s tram system was up-and-running just three days after the city was wiped flat by the A-bomb – they’ll bounce back as quickly as is humanly possible. Japan itself is a beautiful country with a singular culture, more resistant to globalisation than most, and so endlessly fascinating to Western eyes. Ordinarily, this is where I'd say, "There's never a bad time to visit Japan", but the Foreign Office might disagree, so check online for the latest advice.

If you want to get the most out of a trip to Japan, you have to get a Japan Rail Pass. It’s a piece of folded card you show to barrier staff to get on any JR train – including most bullet trains and all local trains – whenever you want. So you can wake up anywhere in Japan and go anywhere in Japan that day, on a whim if you prefer, for the duration of your pass. Presently, the pass unfortunately features on its cover a cartoon representation of a tsunami, towering over Mount Fuji – two images iconic of Japan; one with a painful new association.

On my first morning in Tokyo, I handed my JR Pass receipt to Aika at Ueno station, to receive the pass itself. “Oh no!” she said, her face pained with regret. “Your train will be a Kodama, it’s the slow one.” Sadly, I would not be breaking any land speed records on my first day in her country. The sluggish Kodama is the most common shinkansen between Tokyo and Kansai (Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe). It took 50 minutes to carry me 70 miles to Mishima, where I was to base myself at a friend’s for ten days; that’s 19 miles further than the Glasgow-Edinburgh train travels in the same time. The Hikari stops less, so is faster: it takes 44 minutes to cover 70 miles. But even the Hikari is an apathetic snail compared to the Nozomi (32 minutes), or the brand new Hayabusa (30 minutes), neither of which are covered by the JR pass.

But merely rattling off numbers can’t effectively convey the speed at which a shinkansen travels. Only one word bullets to mind to perfectly describe the bulleting speed of the Japanese bullet trains: “projectilish”.

Tokyo is the biggest and quite possibly best city in the world. There are 35 million people in Greater Tokyo: that’s seven times the population of Scotland; about the same population as Canada, the word’s second largest country; and almost half the number of Celtic fans who say they were in Seville. But it suffers none of the problems that too-many-people seems to cause other megacities: it’s incredibly clean, tidy and ordered, there’s no air pollution, it’s shockingly safe, and public transport is efficient and usually comfortable. It could so easily be overwhelming, but it feels less crowded than London, which has a quarter Tokyo’s people. I went to Shinjuku station, the busiest in the world, to catch an evening rush hour train to Tokyo station, expecting to see the famous pusher-oners – employees whose task it is to push as many commuters on to each train as possible – and perhaps be pushed on by a pusher-oner. Instead, I got a seat.

While Tokyo functions impeccably, its character remains eccentric. I took a stroll through Yoyogi Park on a Sunday and saw normal park activities – badminton, frisbee, picnics, couples hand-in-hand – and less expected sights: an old woman practising keepie-uppies; young girls dressed as Manga characters; groups of competitive rock’n’roll dancers, all dressed like Happy Days characters (mostly The Fonz); an old man with live fish in goldfish bowls hanging from each ear; red-favouring goths; apocalyptic preachers; karate bouts. Around every other corner in central Tokyo is a bewildering and delightful variety of bars, shops and blazing nighttime lights, using inscrutable symbols to make unknown promises. All you can do is wander, wide-eyed, and wonder; and wish to be able to sample it all. But you could live in Tokyo all your life and never sample it all.

With a rail pass in hand, you’re discouraged from trying: it’s time to move on. There are plenty of getaways outside of Tokyo, mostly in the surrounding Japanese Alps. Pelting snow greeted me at the mountainous area of Hakone, so I stripped to the nip and walked outside, into an onsen, a hot bath filled with volcanic water. Back inside the traditional B&B, known as a ryokan, I dressed in a yukata gown, drank green tea, ate a pack of delicious convenience store sushi, and slept on a tatami mat. You could say I spent that evening turning Japanese. Further north – but not within range of the tsunami – is Nikko, another wondrous mountain retreat with beautiful lakes and waterfalls, onsens and elaborate old shrines. Some people use a JR pass to cover as much ground in Japan as possible, but I wanted the pass to serve my holiday, not the other way around. I spent ten days in and around Tokyo, never further north than Nikko, before hopping on a shinkansen to Kyoto.

Kyoto is very different from Tokyo: it’s not a ridiculous size, so it’s less intense, unless you’re a serious scholar of Japanese history, in which case you’d have to spend every waking minute exploring its 2,000 (two thousand) temples and shrines. For the rest of us, we fit in what we can: a golden Buddhist temple here, a zen rock garden there, torii gates and geisha girls almost everywhere. Downtown Kyoto is as clean and modern as any Japanese city, but down its side-streets and alleys you can find flashes of old Japan, as evocative of the area’s history as the Old Town is of Edinburgh’s. Osaka, a convenient half-an-hour westward, is conveniently comparable to Glasgow: twice the size of its ancient neighbour, more commercial and industrial, and with better nightlife. This area, Kansai, also boasts the beautiful former capital of Nara, and Kobe, which you can hop between as you please with a JR pass.

In the days following the disaster, I continued trainhopping around Japan as planned. On the ground, nothing was different; it's odd to see life continuing as normal when the television shows such devastation to fellow citizens; but continue it does. Despite what some media outlets portrayed, Japan wasn't on its knees, and it isn't on its knees now. Don't write Japan off: the shinkansen must go on.

Cheerio!

2011-01-11T13:33:00.003Z

In 90 minutes I'm going to Glasgow Airport to fly to London Heathrow and then on to Hong Kong. I won't be back in Scotland until June.

I'm not doing any more music writing, because I'm travelling the world. In fact, I'm quite looking forward to not feeling the pressure to listen to new music for the next few months.

I will hopefully write a couple of travel articles, probably for The Skinny, probably about Japan and Australia. I also might update this blog with what I'm doing. Maybe might perhaps.

Right, I guess I better start packing...

The Skinny's Favourite LP of 2010: Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me

2010-12-03T14:16:00.001Z

Top 10 of 2010
No.1 Joanna Newsom - Have One On Me
feature for the skinny

Pay attention: it's hard – when there are photos, graphics, animations, videos and flashing coloured boxes, links to definitions and further reading and green cards and prizes, pages left and right and a billion others nearby, comments to make and songs to hear, hot new bands and unknown cult heroes and trends and friends and not enough time – to focus.

On one thing.

Until its end.

Without jumping away.

We apparently have to hand more information about the last eight years than about the preceding fourteen billion, because every new second spawns gigabytes of data: every sparing thought is a status, comment or tweet, every idea a blog post, every sight a photo, every sound a song, every song a dozen videos and on it goes. It's impossible to keep up with all this... everything, but we try. Multi-tasking is the new relaxing. We’re over-stimulated by unlimited content from an over-populated planet. Nothing sustains; it’s next, next, next, next.

At no point in the history of recorded music has a triple-album been a good idea, but especially not this point in history. It's just too long. Less is more, Joanna. Doubles are already pushing the limits. It just shows you don't know how to edit yourself, Joanna. To an iPod shuffler, filler is the biggest crime of all, and triple albums are serial offenders. To a multi-tasker, patience is an anachronism and subtlety a hindrance. A triple album by Joanna Newsom!? Next!

Have One On Me, astonishingly, wouldn’t be improved by editing. It's truly a first: a triple album that justifies its entire length. With Joanna Newsom, more is more.

After the elaborate fantasia of Ys, Have One On Me is comparatively straight-forward: instead of sinister pacts between runaway animals, here we have songs about the familiar twenty-something concerns of love and relationships, beginning with a blissful announcement of new love and ending with a sorrowful admittance of loves failure. But it's not an easy listen: her voice, modified after a throat injury, is still to newcomers thin and affected; her arrangements are sparse and delicate, her melodies subtle to tease out; her lyrics, more direct than before, are still shrouded by erudite poetry. And – did I mention? – it's more than two hours long. Have One On Me is not casual listening. It pays to pay attention to it.

Joanna Newsom is a dazzling lyricist, in both the positive and negative senses of "dazzling", but now almost wholly in the positive. On her first album, she sang "never get so attached to a poem you forget the truth lacks lyricism" and duly remained so attached. The Milk-Eyed Mender and Ys were full of beautiful lines, but lots of them were impossible to parse; Have One On Me is full of beautiful lines, but few are pure show, and many more lay their truths bare. In Good Intentions Paving Company she develops the story with wonderful phrases like “It had a nice a ring to it, when the old opera house rang, so with a solemn Auld Lang Syne, sealed, delivered I sang"; then she delivers a sucker punch at the end with the plain appeal “I only want for you to pull over and hold me 'til I can’t remember my own name.” Those moments hit right in the gut, because they're a reminder that emotions don't wait for the mind to articulate them. Joanna Newsom is meticulous, but her heart is not.

As carefully as she places each syllable, she places each note. There's not a gramme of fat on Have One On Me. Esme, 81 and On A Good Day are entirely solo, just Newsom and her harp. Baby Birch and Go Long feel just as sparse, every slow string twang allowed to live its full life to create an incredible intimacy. Then jaggedy guitar slaps burst through the former, a heavenly kora rains down in the latter, and they both very gradually build to stirring conclusions. In California, one of the album’s most beautifully frail songs, has 14 credited performers, unbelievably, as does the title track, which develops over its eleven minutes with quite staggering dexterity. Some players shuffle in for a brief flourish and then vanish; it's sufficient. No silence is filled without reason, no solo supported without cause.

Have One On Me stands out in 2010 because it's stimulating art, not just stimulation. Music and technology are moving towards convenience as a common goal, but Have One On Me is not convenient, it’s a challenge. The vast availability of music to the modern listener promotes a box-of-chocolates approach – many flavours, tasted briefly – but Have One On Me defies brief sampling, requiring many listens to reveal all its charms. Scenes and fashions can often be relied upon to flesh out a musician’s image or ideas, but there's no scene or fashion supporting Have One On Me. It’s a unique and uncompromising album, and in the age of tl;dr, that makes it a totem for the independent artistic ideal.

The Skinny's 3rd Favourite LP of 2010: Caribou - Swim

2010-12-02T20:47:00.004Z

Top 10 of 2010
No.3 Caribou - Swim
interview for the skinny

Canadian Dan Snaith has been making good records for over a decade now, but in 2010 he made a great one. After years of dipping his toes into dance music, for Swim he dived right in. The Skinny met Caribou backstage at Glasgow’s ABC to talk about his greatest album yet and the year that surrounded its release.

“I've been pretty lucky generally. I’ve had some bad reviews but the majority of them have been nice. I actually like reading negative reviews, I have agreed with people who've criticised certain aspects of my music. With Andorra, everyone was like: ‘here's this guy who really likes 60s psychedelia, he's a retro kinda guy’, and I was like: ‘fuck, that wasn't the point!’”

Andorra won the Polaris Prize in 2008 – Canada’s Mercury Prize-equivalent – but Snaith was determined to move on to new things. He’s open about the inspiration for the direction he took: it’s one of the guys sitting in the next room, preparing to play before him tonight.

“The last track on Andorra was me trying to figure out how James [Holden] makes music” he says. “The last track, Niobe, was me trying to figure out how to get that dynamic of his, of something growing and falling apart simultaneously. And even though there was over a year in-between making the records, that was the starting point for this record. I went back to it and thought: ‘there's just so many different ways this track could go.’

“I was so happy with [Swim] when I finished it, but I also thought it might confuse people. It seemed to me that Andorra was a much more straightforward record, it was more concise pop songs. It really stuns me that Swim seems to have captured people's imaginations in some way that previous albums I've made haven't. I’m so happy because this is my favourite one, but I really didn't think it was going to be everybody else’s favourite one.

“Thinking about the situation in which it was made and then fast-forwarding to now, it's totally mind-boggling. I'd love to say I make music because I want to share it with people, but I make music for entirely selfish reasons, I just love doing it so much, and the thrill of when things go right in the studio or at home, that's the most amazing thing. But then this is just... we've always had good shows, but it's never been the party atmosphere it is now.

“Swim feels like the beginning of something rather than the end, even though the end of Andorra was kinda the beginning of this one, it was also the end of making psychedelic poppy records, I feel like I've done what I wanted to do with that. I don’t want to make the same record again, but it feels like there's lots of points I can shoot off from on Swim.”

The Skinny's 6th Favourite LP of 2010: Beach House - Teen Dream

2010-11-30T21:42:00.004Z

Top 10 of 2010:
No. 6 Beach House - Teen Dream
interview for the skinny

Beach House were fully aware of the majesty of third album Teen Dream as they were preparing it this time last year. “At one point I was more excited about every single song [on Teen Dream] that I had ever been before,” guitarist Alex Scally tells The Skinny, “even songs where I don’t really do anything, like Real Love. There was a recording of that we made and I was trying to figure out how to make this thing hold and I probably listened to it fifty times, every time enjoying every single second of it.”

Teen Dream has been a breakthrough for Beach House, who are now touring with some of the biggest bands in indie music, but they say nothing’s changed since their self-titled debut and its acclaimed follow-up Devotion. “Every record is a different world,” singer Victoria Legrand says, “but the attention on us now I feel is the result of our steady and persistent working. It doesn’t feel that different from what we were doing before but people are now noticing more.”

It’s not glamorous, they insist, and work it certainly is: “I think we’re at the 150 [shows] mark right now for the year, which is pretty crazy”, Alex says. But now that they’ve got here, he doesn’t see the band getting any bigger.

“We make music that’s all about intimacy, I don’t think that would translate to an arena. We played at a 1,500 person place and that blew our mind, it felt great, but I think that might be the limit. We just did a tour with Vampire Weekend and 14,000 people were at the Hollywood Bowl, I think it really taught us where we think the upper extent of our music is. Even if we could sell a show of 2,000 people, it might not work.” Such music-over-money ideals are admirable, and they’re surely about to be tested.

Caribou @ ABC, Glasgow

2010-11-25T21:51:00.003Z

Caribou, Four Tet, James Holden @ ABC, Glasgow, November 21
live review for the skinny

With a line-up of James Holden, Rocketnumbernine, Nathan Fake, Holden again and Four Tet before Caribou, Sunday evening’s ABC lineup has a mini-festival feel to it. James Holden's mercurial dinner time techno slot tricks this sell-out crowd into thinking it’s 2am Saturday night, partly because we've been dancing for a couple hours already. He slides between bass-heavy bangers, slivery grooves and laser-driven mechanical shuffles until we’re all just about ready to spill out home to bed.

But it’s still only 10:15, and time for Four Tet to take over. Despite his albums’ more delicate style, now is definitely not the time for Kieran Hebden to slow down. So Holden's huge 4/4 kick drum remains, but louder now, so that its low frequencies grind all over the more fragile sounds of his new album. Everyone keeps dancing, of course, but there’s a feeling that Hebden might’ve been able to exercise a little more subtlety had he played earlier in the night.

After five hours of continuous beats, the 15 minute break for Caribou to set up as a four-piece band is a bit of a mood-killer. For their first few songs the crowd seems tired, and faced with Caribou’s more complex rhythms it takes some cajoling to get everyone moving again. That we would could never have been in doubt: a spectacular Niobe, propelled by clattering cymbal fills on every eighth bar, sets it up; more terrific drumming and scintillating noise for Melody Day ratchets the energy levels up again, and we’re not even on to the Swim stand-outs yet.

Jamelia, sung well by an unwell bass player in the absence of Born Ruffians’ singer Luke, swings cutely over a clickety woodblock rhythm before exploding in shimmering squall; Odessa's deep parping bassline and clattering rhythms sound profoundly weird and utterly compelling on this huge scale; and trippy encore Sun is stretched and pulled and pressed and dropped and revived til it’s mesmerised us all three times over. It’s a huge end to a night that seemed to have peaked too early, before Caribou proved it had never peaked at all.

Beach House @ Oran Mor, Glasgow

2010-11-25T21:46:00.003Z

Beach House @ Oran Mor, Glasgow, November 20 (****)
live review for the skinny

Dream pop duo Beach House are a band whose live reputation is always going to be closely tethered to that of their albums; they’re perfectionists in the studio, so there isn’t much space for reinterpretation, and they’re permanently bereft, so they’re not much in a mood for energy. But in the darkness of Òran Mór, with a golden light fading in and out with singer Victoria Legrand’s breathy intros, fairy lights behind them twinkling like stars, and the aural haze enveloping each lovelorn song, they create a dramatic and intimate atmosphere.

There’s a stream of highlights from 2008s Devotion and this year’s Teen Dream, but the biggest moments come towards the end of the set. Heart of Chambers allows Legrand to really open up, roaring the melancholic chorus like it still hurts two years later, and mighty kick drums lend encore pair Real Love and Ten Mile Stereo an explosive edge. At the end of an evening of melancholy, the mimicking of Alex Scally’s skyscraping guitar line by the shimmering stars behind him makes for a stunning finale.

The Last Battle - Heart of the Land, Soul of the Sea

2010-11-09T14:16:00.000Z

The Last Battle - Heart of the Land, Soul of the Sea (**)
album review for the skinny

For a band of six, Edinburgh’s The Last Battle sport a frail, minimal sound on debut album Heart of the Land, Soul of the Sea, based almost entirely on singer Scott Longmuir’s acoustic guitar. Tasteful cello flourishes and wispy female backing vocals don’t do much to fill out the palette, so The Last Battle ensure there’s some variation by, for example, splitting the short record with a monologue from a deep-voiced bandmate, and introducing a shuffling squeezebox to Cutlass.

Despite the stylistic difference, it’s that monologue, Photographic Memory, which encapsulates the album’s main problems: it’s sorely earnest and full of lyrical clichés. Heart of the Land's relentless sincerity becomes difficult to stomach if you’re not in a teary mood, and lines like "I'd like to sail away with you forever in a heartbeat" would surely earn derision were they to come from a soppy pop star, however melodiously they're delivered.

Brian Eno - Small Craft On A Milk Sea

2010-11-08T21:11:00.002Z

Brian Eno - Small Craft on a Milk Sea (**)
album review for the skinny

Warp’s signing of Brian Eno was a symbolic coup for the label, the spiritual homecoming of a common ancestor to their entire roster’s two-decade output. But Small Craft On A Milk Sea does not indicate a return to the cutting-edge for Eno, who’s been wallowing in abstract ambient sound design for longer than Warp’s lifetime.

When Small Craft summons some energy, as in early tracks Horse and 2 Forms of Anger, racing drums, buzzing insects and squawking mechanical birds form a frightening scene, before the latter track’s guitars explode and enflame for a full minute.

But for the most part, Small Craft drifts aimlessly in featureless ambience. For all that he achieved in his first decade-or-so as a musician and producer – and his legacy of innovation in rock and electronic music is peerless – it’s difficult to detect anything of genius or inspiration in his 2010 output.

John Legend & The Roots - Wake Up!

2010-10-05T21:36:00.003+01:00

John Legend & The Roots - Wake Up! (****)
album review for the skinny

Few musicians seem to make overtly political records these days: the Iraq war moved few songwriters to sing out, and despite its catastrophic effects, there’s not much rhymes with “credit crunch”. John Legend and The Roots’ Wake Up! is a covers record featuring new versions of old soul classics like Donny Hathaway’s Little Ghetto Boy and Mike James Kirkland’s Hang On In There, among others, updated with Black Thought verses, though these songs’ themes of faraway wars and local poverty need no updating. It’s beautifully produced, so when those two songs and sole original Shine develop into galas of piano, organ, strings and bass, it’s like listening to peak-era Stevie or Curtis. A lethargic Wholy Holy can't compare to Marvin Gaye's original, and a 12-minute take of Bill Withers' I Can't Write Left-Handed is a good three minutes over-wrought; but Wake Up!’s lush recordings make it a treat for any soul fan.

Belle & Sebastian - Write About Love

2010-09-28T20:37:00.004+01:00

Belle and Sebastian - Write About Love (****)
album review for the skinny

If the near-five year wait since The Life Pursuit and last year’s brilliant brace of albums from Camera Obscura and Butcher Boy led you to question Belle & Sebastian’s standing as indie-pop kings of Glasgow, wait until you hear Write About Love.

While arguably not as consistent as either of those disciples’ recent triumphs, there are parts of Belle & Seb’s eighth studio album as great as anything they’ve done before: When the light and lilting I Didn’t See It Coming is resurrected, after dissolving into space, by the late arrival of starry synths and Stuart pleading “make me dance, I want to surrender!”; when a fragile, metallic shimmer subtly emerges from Come On Sister, and ecstatic male backing vocals less subtly burst from it later; pretty much the entirety of Northern Soul stomper I Want The World To Stop, and the surreally hilarious I’m Not Living In The Real World, a coming-of-age caper inspired by early The Who and Beach Boys.

But perhaps the best moment of all is the final line of closer Sunday's Pretty Icons: a simple, undramatic remark of devastating kindness that’ll leave you choking over the glistening organ outro. Wonderful.

This song really reminded me of Frankie Valli's The Night, even before it got to the "the night, the night!" bit. So, for comparison's sake (and because this is an amazing song that you should listen to right now anyway):

Andrew O'Neill @ The Tron

2010-09-02T21:30:00.004+01:00

Andrew O'Neill (***)

comedy review for the list

If Andrew O'Neill's poster description "occult comedian" suggests an evening of witty witchcraft, that's not what he's serving at this year's Fringe. He's a metalhead, and wears all black clothing (and owns a black beach towel), but he's a long way from turning any unfortunate front-row volunteer into a newt.

He's actually very normal, towel tastes aside. In mocking religion, racism and homophobia he wrings laughs out of well-worn and worthy comedic subjects, and a long story about his first ever fight provides an impressive variety of angles. Metal music and culture is another deep well for comedy, one which O'Neill could probably explore further.

Unfortunately almost all of O'Neill's short scripted skits fall flat, both punctuating and puncturing his set. Surely every good David Dickinson joke has long ago been told, so there's not much to gain from two more attempts; and providing a melodramatic power ballad with a mundane answer is a schoolboy's game.

Saturday @ T in the Park 2010

2010-07-26T22:16:00.005+01:00

blurbs on bands at T in the Park on Saturday

for the skinny

Saturday lunchtime’s persistent drizzle sends most casual fans under canvas, so bands like the T Break tent-bound Astral Planes can benefit from a larger audience. But beyond the friends in the front row, the casual outliers never really take to them. Doris Day’s (the song, obvs) weighty riffs momentarily stop the crowd chatting and even inspire a little air guitar; but the Glasgow band’s similarities to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Blondie suggest a personality received, not conceived.

“The new Frightened Rabbit?” a friend jokes as we head to the BBC Introducing stage for Admiral Fallow, formerly Brother Louis Collective. A reductive, throwaway comment; sadly impossible to shrug off. In a 20 minute set, three songs feel like shadows of specific FRabbit tunes. Their best moment comes when they step out of that shadow: an emotional clarinet burst at the end of final song Subbuteo provides a welcome Roxy Music-style release.

Unfortunately for the newly Guardian-profiled Kid Adrift, the rain has stopped before he takes the stage, and fans seem determined to enjoy the skies while they’re dry. So only a wee group is present to gawp at his bombastic synth-rock, and despite the volume and scope, somehow even they don’t seem to be paying attention. He’s not helped by poor sound, specifically an underpowered mic that leaves his vocals clouded out by the bass and drums, but predictable quiet/loud shifts in his music don’t help either.

Vampire Weekend are astonishingly popular. For a group with only two Top 40 hits to attract a miles-deep crowd at the Main Stage is remarkable, and for miles around we can see fans dancing, not just to those minor hits, but to album tracks too. “Cousins” is the highlight, the off-kilter scratch guitar intro immediately drawing waves of cheers from the crowd, before Ezra Koenig draws laughs by asking for “anger and ecstasy” from the crowd during “One (Blake’s Got A New Face)”. Perhaps he touched on the real secret to all this dancing?

After We Are Scientists pack the King Tuts tent out, The Coral’s crowd is sparse. It’s a minor mystery why they have such a good slot at all, and they don’t offer any clues from the stage. They start with breakthrough single Goodbye, before a dreary In The Rain and a new song with a stultifying chorus of “oh oh, waiting for a thousand years, oh oh, sailing on a thousand tears”. We don’t wait a thousand milliseconds more.

Rambling Man

Laura Marling | MySpace Music Videos

In the Futures tent, we’d earlier seen the quiet, folky Middle East suffer because watchers were too drunk to listen. But now the same tent is packed and wholly attentive for 20 year old Laura Marling, the new star of English folk thanks to her beautiful second album I Speak Because I Can. There’s a dramatic pause in Rambling Man that’s perfectly held by the rapt crowd, emphasising the effect of the return; before a sizable core of fans sing along to every word of Ghosts. Wonderful.

The BBC’s Vic Galloway introduces Young Fathers as “the best three-piece electro hip-hop group Edinburgh’s ever produced!”, which might sound a soft compliment but it’s pretty accurate: while their lyrics are hard to make out in the melee, there’s no hating their style. Before the crowd knows it, we're jumping around and flapping our arms like birds, all because of their infectious onstage energy and charm.

Seven years since he last played in Scotland, it’s an honour and a thrill to see Eminem performing again, even if we do have to wait an additional forty minutes past showtime for him to arrive. In some ways it’s like he’s never been away: his performance is full of energy, he doesn’t miss a beat and he’s clearly enjoying himself. Unfortunately his wireless mic isn’t quite so wide awake, meaning whole verses are occasionally inaudible as he patrols the stage, and his set includes a few recent stinkers: Beautiful and Not Afraid are particularly galling. Luckily, a late run including My Name Is, Without Me and Lose Yourself is clearly audible and full of fire. Anytime, Mister Mathers.

----

No way in hell was I missing the next day's World Cup Final, even for Jay-Z.

Eminem @ T in the Park, 10 Jul

2010-07-15T14:03:00.003+01:00

Eminem @ T in the Park, Balado near Kinross, Scotland, 10/07/2010 (***)
live review for The Skinny

Five years after his last scheduled UK gig -- and seven years since he last actually performed in Scotland -- it's teasing to have to wait 40 minutes past showtime for Eminem to finally take the stage to close Saturday's Main Stage lineup. But when Marshall Mathers arrives, it's a relief to see him still youthful and full of fight; considering the drug problems and the rare public appearances, my subconscious feared he’d turn up in a string vest and pyjama bottoms, or unshaven and greying at least. But seven years away haven’t aged him at all, physically; artistically, it’s a different story. Growing up is a difficult subject to navigate, for any person or any artist, but it’s extra hard for artists who have a stage persona and a real personality as messily intertwined as Eminem’s. So, just as a new greatest hits release from Em would sound strangely incoherent, tonight's set contained songs as if written by a few different Slim Shadys.

His earliest persona -- the funny one -- is who everyone’s here to see, but he leaves most of that for the end. The first half of the show is almost entirely Recovery and Relapse tracks, plus a three-song set with D12, and it’s underwhelming for all but the Stans on the barrier, frequently shown on the giant screens reciting every word. Presumably the cause of the delayed start was technical, and technical problems with Em’s wireless mic persist - entire verses are lost while his sidekick MC is fully audible. When it comes to Stan -- the song -- Em’s mic problems frustratingly remain: after the crowd sings along to Dido’s intro, the first verse is a washout.

The mic is working by the time Em wants to talk to the crowd, pitting all the boys and girls against each other in a noise-making contest, and encouraging all the boys to turn to the nearest girl and say “fuck you bitch!”. That’s Slim Shady talking, but then comes the real head-fucking sequence of the evening: he asks the girls “how many of you ladies feel beautiful tonight?”, dedicates the next song to every girl in the crowd, and sings “don’t let them say you ain’t beautiful”. Minutes later, the girls are singing along to Rihanna’s Love The Way You Lie hook, as Eminem threatens to tie her to a bed and set the house on fire.

Beautiful is on Eminem’s 2009 comeback album Relapse, but who is it by? Is it by a fake Slim Shady? Who was Kim, by? Is Beautiful by the real Marshall Mathers? Is Beautiful by the same artist as Kim? Is Beautiful by the same artist as Not Afraid?

Well yes, those two seem to go together: they’re both morose, self-pitying ballads that look for strength and hope but find cliche instead. Not Afraid, tonight’s second-last song, is a power ballad that sets Eminem up like an inspirational moral guide: “Everybody come take my hand, we'll walk this road together through the storm” and so on. What happened to “you can suck my dick if you don't like my shit”? That was only 20 minutes ago.

He created a monster, but it was a fully formed and living monster: as writer Jeff Weiss put it, he was “the id of every 16-year old boy in America”. Now what is he? A hotchpotch of moods, attitudes and beliefs: a normal adult? It’s hard to believe.

Eminem closed his T set with a furious Lose Yourself, but it was the other song to sandwich Not Afraid, Without Me, that was most revealing. 18 months after Stan, his comeback single declared an intention to be provocative: “...we need a little controversy, cos it feels so empty without me”. Now on another comeback, Eminem provoked boos from the T crowd whenever he addressed it as “Edinburgh”. It’s a reasonable mistake to make -- we’re well within a Ryanair definition of Edinburgh, at least -- but some fans weren’t happy. “Oi Eminem!” a little lass behind me yelled. “I’m fae Glenrothes!”.

Remember when Eminem was intentionally provocative?

M.I.A. - Maya

2010-07-13T21:01:00.002+01:00

M.I.A. - Maya (***)
album review for the skinny

When M.I.A. released a song attacking journalists just days after a scathing recent New York Times article, it either demonstrated a remarkable speed of execution, or that she had lots of room in her personal protesting schedule. That article exposed some of the half-truths in the M.I.A. mythos, including the discomforting leak that – having broken through as a pop artist with Paper Planes two years ago, and since got engaged to a multi-millionaire boyfriend – she's now very rich and famous. That's common for pop stars, but it leaves M.I.A. vulnerable: her rebel shtick could make her look like a trustafarian in a Che Guevara t-shirt if she isn’t careful with her words.

On new single Born Free she acknowledges that problem, singing “I don’t wanna talk about money, cos I got it”. She’s been forced to rein in the rhetoric, and thankfully she doesn’t say anything stupid on Maya about terrorism or truffles. But the problem with Maya is rooted in a far more mundane circumstance than the disorientating effect of celebrity: it’s that contentedness cools creativity. The NYT piece gave her a cause to fight for – her own reputation – hence the quick turnaround. But everything’s gone right for M.I.A. in the three years since second album Kala, so it’s no surprise that Maya is missing the spikiness so central to her personality.

Born Free is the stand-out, though – blowing through a four minute declaration of freedom in a frenzy, using an amped-up Suicide sample for its irresistible momentum. Story To Be Told combines heavily processed wailing Bollywood vocals and a low-flying jet with a cutting, juddering synth bassline, while Tell Me Why takes the Panda Bear route to psychedelia by endlessly looping and echoing choral samples. XXXO is probably the closest thing Maya will have to a hit, with a great shimmering synthline and a cloying hook: “you want me [to] be somebody who I’m really not”.

But it’s hard to take anything from, for example, Steppin’ Up, except the conclusion that the use of chainsaws for percussion is nowhere near as cool as it should be; or Teqkilla, which somehow stretches the dubious idea to pun on various drinks brands over six minutes of stuttering noise. If the politics of rebellion are now off-limits for M.I.A., then she’ll have to find something else to get angry about; we know what she thinks of journalists, so her fourth album is bound to be better.

Dirty Projectors + Bjork - Mount Wittenberg Orca

2010-07-13T20:58:00.004+01:00

Dirty Projectors + Björk - Mount Wittenberg Orca (***)
album review for the skinny

Dave Longstreth is a man with great ideas: his breakthrough album as leader of Dirty Projectors, Rise Above, was an attempt to reinterpret Black Flag’s Damaged despite not having heard it in 15 years. By the sounds of it, Mount Wittenberg Orca could be a similar attempt at a from-memory version of Björk’s Medúlla, only with Björk on hand, and not enough time to finish.

In fact it’s a 21 minute suite, available to download in exchange for a charitable donation, about a family of frolicking whales spotted by vocalist Amber Coffman last year. As with Medúlla, it’s almost entirely vocal, with Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle providing percussive chanting and precise harmonising to support the gymnastic lead roles of Longstreth and Björk. On And Ever Onward is the keeper, featuring Björk as the mommy whale celebrating the pleasures of a lifetime in the sea, with her calves cutely singing the title back to her.

[www.mountwittenbergorca.com]

Janelle Monáe - The ArchAndroid

2010-06-24T23:48:00.003+01:00

Janelle Monáe - The ArchAndroid (****)
album review for the skinny

It's easy to hear why Janelle Monáe has taken four years since her breakthrough as a guest on OutKast's Idlewild to complete her own debut album: The ArchAndroid is a staggeringly ambitious attempt. It's a first-time shot at a grand conceptual masterpiece that makes you wonder whether, considering the struggling record industry, she's perhaps pegged this as her only chance. She'll surely get another because her talent is obvious – the Big Boi-featuring Tightrope shuffles to an African rhythm before heckling horns intervene, Faster glides effortlessly and exuberantly like a Solange take on Stevie Wonder's Keep On Running, and Neon Valley Street showcases the full expressiveness of Monáe's voice. Almost inevitably for an 18 song opus, there are missteps – Make The Bus, featuring Of Montreal's Kevin Barnes, irritates as a Love Below pastiche, and the psychedelic ballad Sir Greendown frustratingly interrupts the momentum of a fantastic opening sequence. There is a masterpiece here, but it’ll take a little skipping to find it.

Primavera Sound 2010

2010-06-05T19:19:00.006+01:00

Even when it gets little things wrong, Primavera Sound never really fails.

feature for the skinny

Primavera Sound has its fundamentals cast in stone: always a great line-up of music (always, in fact, far too much great music to see), in one of Europe's most beautiful cities, under the Mediterranean sun. So, while I'm going to explain a little why Primavera 2010 wasn't a vintage year in the context of its predecessors, it's with reluctance that one would attach negativity to it at all. Weeks like this one make life worth living.

Over the weekend we clocked Wilco, Spoon, Orbital, No Age, Mission of Burma, Tortoise, Low, Sunny Day Real Estate, CocoRosie, Wire, Liquid Liquid, HEALTH, Shellac and Sleigh Bells on the Primavera schedule; we didn't see any of them perform. The depth of the Primavera programme means there's frequently three- or even four-band clashes, which makes for some wrenching choices, and some fast cuts. Gary Numan played Cars third in his set, and then watched half his crowd leave to go elsewhere; it's a competitive market.

Primavera's expert curation and wonderful location mean it's getting more popular every year. Fittingly, as it's primarily an indie music festival, its fans have mixed feelings about it succeeding too much. What the organizers are presenting as the great achievement of attracting record attendances of 35,000 per day, is experienced by the crowds as a reason for disappointment, since it's now harder to get near the stage, takes longer to walk between them between sets, and takes longer to queue for the toilets or for food. As you might argue for many bands on this bill, Primavera's best days may have been before "everyone else" discovered it.

But even if that's the case, it's doubtful anybody left Primavera in the early hours of Sunday morning disappointed. For, at worst there was still the final few gigs in the city centre's Joan Miro Park later that afternoon to look forward to, and a closing party featuring Jeffrey Lewis and Black Lips (another two to add to that list; we chose paella on La Rambla instead). For the non-Barca resident, the Primavera experience begins when you arrive in beautiful Barcelona. We spent the day before the festival wandering the labyrinthine streets of the Gothic Quarter, dipping in and out of old, dark bars and cafes, and exploring parks with glorious fountains.

Despite the rise of music tourism, Primavera's core crowd is still decidedly Spanish (or, more precisely, Catalan). It's hard to say whether anyone ever listens to what The Fall's Mark E. Smith is saying anyway -- as opposed to how he says it -- but surrounded by singalong Spaniards, phonetically feeling their way in the dark, it becomes even more mysterious. On one song, sung by the keyboardist, MES is so bored that he wanders the stage, splays his fingers across her keys like a drunken duck trying to type, and then smirks. He hates the sunshine.

The XX sound like they hate the sunshine too -- tall bassist Oliver Sim looks like a young Lurch -- so their pre-sunset slot is poorly timed. But as the sun drops, the darkness shrouds their songs in gloom, and the bright stage lights shining on their faces present a similar black-white contrast to their album imagery. After much restrained tension, the climax of finale Infinity is stunning, with Sim slamming cymbals as bass beats blast like machine gun fire.

Thursday's headliner is the newly reformed Pavement, who are just as the backhanded compliments of their youth suggested: very good. There's a thrill in simply seeing them perform so many of their best songs, but our favourite parts are when Bob Nastanovich gets involved: leaping to the front of the stage to yell the chorus to Conduit For Sale, leaping up and down to hit a wood block on Silence Kid, and, well, leaping to the front of the stage to yell the chorus of Unfair. Like a big kid, he looks like the one band member enjoying it as much as the crowd.

Geoff Barrow's Jaki Liebezeit-indulgence project Beak> is apparently inspirational in a dark, intimate setting, but as with The XX, here a large stage, bright sunlight and Mediterranean backdrop makes it difficult to admire. A little later, in the dark, Beach House make the same ATP stage intimate with an inspirational set. Their sedated sound bores some, but fatigue makes you forget social pretences, so the Baltimore duo's permanent tiredness lends an end-of-tether honesty to their ballads. Finishing with the unusually peppy 10 Mile Stereo sends us away regenerated.

Les Savy Fav's Tim Harrington is more frontman than singer, and more ADHD-mad toddler than frontman. He emerges in a giant furry bear suit, wearing flashing red lights round his eyes, strips down to his pants, then runs a good 30m through the crowd to balance, on his belly, on the top of a pole. He then races past us -- we're not near the stage at all -- nearly taking our neck off with the mic cable, finds a fan on someone's shoulders and heads to embrace him. There's a burst of noise -- no singing yet -- and he returns to the stage to attempt to climb it. Les Savy Fav are exciting to listen to, but they're much more exciting to watch.

Unfortunately where we headed next, The Vice stage, was problematic. Everything we saw there lived down to expectations. Panda Bear had to perform with a minimum of on-stage lighting, and at a volume which barely washed over the crowd's excited chatter. Stood there in darkness, with a guitar and a mixing desk, Noah Lennox's echoing warble sounded dreary, not trippy. Like Numan, whose fans abandoned him three songs in, Panda Bear had to deal with a quick exodus. Numan himself was delayed 25 minutes by technical difficulties, and Yeasayer's post-Pixies set was hampered by poor sound too.

Pixies themselves were thrilling, moreso than we expected. Sure, Black Francis has moobs and Kim Deal has a new "manageable" haircut, but fans lamenting the loss of Pixies' youth, the fantasy of their early wee garage shows, are clutching expectations wildly out-of-step with, y'know, how time works. Those days are past now, and in the past they must remain. Isla De Encanta and Vamos are sungalong to by Spaniards relishing lyrics they understand for a change, and Hey!, Debaser, Broken Face, Nimrod's Son and the encore of Gigantic and Where Is My Mind? get ecstatic receptions too. In a festival in thrall to nostalgia, the Pixies exude the most vitality. After Diplo finished the night at 5:30am, we walked five minutes to the beach to watch the sunrise, then went for breakfast. More Friday nights should finish like that.

The Food: Do the free-poured spirits with mixer count as food? The non-alcoholic food in Primavera is pretty poor: its signature dish, the pizza cone, is only to be enjoyed ironically ("It's like an ice cream, but pizza!" and so on). The flavour of the pad thai remarkably managed to be overwhelmed by the taste of the cardboard box it was served in, but the felafel kebab gains a few points by actually being a chicken kebab. A nice surprise for me, probably not if I happened to be a veggie.

Inevitably, Saturday begins slowly. Van Dyke Parks is credited with assisting Brian Wilson away from the Beach Boys' surf-pop origins towards the avant-garde, having worked with him on SMiLE. In the auditorium, his traditional pop and classical influences are clear: while superficially similar to Sherman Brothers-era Disney, his arrangements are complex: Parks on piano, his cellist, bassist and violinist all seem to start playing different songs before converging together. His modest patter is hugely endearing, his return for an encore seems genuine, and the standing ovation that follows certainly is. Built To Spill's set at the ATP stage is packed with highlights from classics Perfect From Now On and Keep It Like A Secret, but it's an epic rendition of Goin' Against Your Mind from the less-appreciated You In Reverse that unleashes rolls of energy through the crowd.

Headlining the final night on the main stage, Pet Shop Boys' bizarre on-stage choreography is endlessly entertaining: dancers with boxes for heads building walls, line-dancing skyscrapers of the world, box-headed couples fighting with the bricks of the wall; Neil Tennant dresses up as a king, and Chris Lowe seems to wear a pineapple on his head. More entertaining are their hits -- Can You Forgive Her?, What Have I Done To Deserve This?, Go West, Always On My Mind, West End Girls -- which buffer the lesser known songs to keep the mood high.

Finally, the 3am clash between The Field, Orbital and HEALTH is particularly galling, but we have no regrets about picking the former, at the Pitchfork stage. Playing with a drummer, guitarist and bassist enables Axel Willner to exercise a lot more fluidity in his performance than Ableton Live alone would allow; or at least, it looks more like a performance than a man at a laptop ever could. The drummer is especially good, adding frills, rolls and extra rhythms to create new patterns; he needs a break after 45 hypnotic minutes, before a final 15-minute Over The Ice that seems to hold for an eternity before shattering.

A Sunny Day In Glasgow @ Nice N' Sleazy's, Glasgow

2010-05-23T22:44:00.003+01:00

A Sunny Day In Glasgow @ Nice N' Sleazy's, Glasgow, 15 May (***)

live review for the skinny

Sadly, the A Sunny Day In Glasgow founding member who would be most excited about playing with his band on an actual sunny day in Glasgow has left the group, leaving co-founder Ben Daniels to understatedly point out the obvious irony to the packed Sleazy's crowd.

This Philadelphian band have gathered a lot of attention round these parts for their bizarre name; and held that attention longer with two beautifully textured albums. Unfortunately, in Sleazy’s ASDIG are unable to fully replicate all the depths of noise that they wash their sound with on record, which exposes a frailty common to any dream pop-type band whose melodic nous is anywhere south of Kevin Shields’.

Precisely: if the 'dream' goes missing, the 'pop' has to stand on its own. The cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Everywhere certainly achieves that, but the band's own songs gasp for a little more fog.

Meursault, Olympic Swimmers, Conquering Animal Sound @ Cab Vol, 10/4

2010-04-29T13:20:00.000+01:00

Conquering Animal Sound (***) spend half of their time on-stage crouched, and if you're at the front you can see why: pedals and knobs, wires and cables, gizmos and toys on the floor. It's fascinating to watch the Edinburgh duo use their array of devices to build up a song: they make a noise, loop it, pick something else up and loop it too, singer Anneke Kampman miaows and Jamie Scott fingerpicks his guitar and those sounds are looped; and six minutes later the pathwork is complete, it drops to silence, and there's huge cheers. Tonight their four rolling collages could do with a few more focal points, but it's clear to see why CAS are picking up plaudits.

MySpace

In contrast, Glasgow quintet Olympic Swimmers (***) are pretty conventional, being a five-piece indie-rock band in the vein of Yo La Tengo, female lead singer aside. Like the New Jersey band, Swimmers' slow, brooding songs don't exactly set pulses racing live, and they are also apparently handicapped tonight by the absence of their usual rhythm section. Final song Father Said is the standout, redeeming a somewhat sleepy set by growing from a tenuous start towards an epic, shimmering finale. More songs like this please.

MySpace

Finally it's Meursault's (*****) turn to launch their second album All Creatures Will Make Merry in front of a hometown crowd so keen the venue sold out almost a week ahead. They opt for the slightly risky strategy of playing the new album in full, despite few of the songs being known to anyone, but it's clear from the off how focused they all are on their performances. Sparse ballads, where singer Neil Pennycook is backed by just a cello and toy guitar, are interspersed with songs with racing beats and abrasive textures, and each one is met with roars at the end. On this form, Meursault are nothing short of awe inspiring.

MySpace

Meursault - New Ruin (Live at the Queen's Hall) from Song, by Toad on Vimeo.

LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening

2010-04-27T23:05:00.004+01:00

LCD Soundsystem - This Is Happening
album review for the skinny

The first thing James Murphy ever did as LCD Soundsystem frontman was confess to a serious music addiction. Losing My Edge, his 2002 debut single, was an acutely observed and very funny monologue about the one-upmanship of music fandom, expertly name-dropping bands in a way destined to endear himself to music geeks, bloggers and critics. "He's one of us!" we thought. "He knows who Pere Ubu are too!"

So when his self-titled debut album eventually dropped in 2005, it was easy to look past the myriad obvious influences – The Fall, New Order, Can, David Byrne, Suicide, funky Beck – because he'd already declared his deference to elder musical heroes in that first single. And there was more: the very first thing he sang on the debut LP was "Daft Punk is playing at my house", boasted like a connected fan rather than as a musical peer. By bridging the gap between fan and artist, James Murphy earned our empathy and the benefit of any of our doubts. By the time of the second album, Sound of Silver (2007), LCD had developed their own characteristic style, and added a whole new dimension which had been missing from the debut: love. We knew he was a party guy, and we knew he was occasionally a balladeer, but previously his slow songs had been inward-looking; in the core of Sound of Silver, Someone Great and All My Friends, Murphy allowed himself 15 minutes to be sincere about others who were important to him. He wasn't schmaltzy, he just explained from within; and it didn't ruin the mood because both songs retained a propulsive motion that the next song was able to pick up again from. Having quickly mastered motion, he'd now mastered emotion too, and he meshed the two so convincingly on Sound of Silver that his musical inspirations became irrelevant.

At the risk of cliche, Sound of Silver showed a maturity Murphy had previously lacked, or perhaps been scared to show. All this time one of his main concerns has been aging, about gradually feeling like he was getting too old to party. Now forty years old, we can't be ironic about it: the kids are coming up from behind, and James Murphy just might be losing his edge.

There are four Sound of Silver-worthy songs on third album This Is Happening, which is a pretty good ratio considering that high standard. Yet, the flaws of This Is Happening suggest a regression back to the naivety of the debut self-titled album. The central inspiration here is David Bowie: four of the nine songs could be traced closely to Bowie's late-70s Berlin period when he worked extensively with Brian Eno and Iggy Pop; another song is very similar to Iggy's Nightclubbing (written and produced by Bowie), and there's still more Eno, Byrne and Can references. Even the cover is like that of Lodger, Bowie's final Berlin album. But Murphy is no longer just a talented fan with great taste. He crossed that bridge long ago.

The best segment of This Is Happening is a stretch of twenty minutes or so in the first half which features three consecutive keepers. One Touch builds in bizarrely with sharp silver scratches and wet slapping synths, but it really takes off in the chorus when Murphy's automatonic vocal is counteracted by a childlike yell from keyboardist Nancy Whang: rough noise and fluid bass, the girl and the robot all complementing each other. Then it's All I Want, which initially prompts a cringe because of its e-bowed guitar line that's instantly recognisable from Bowie's Heroes. It's the backbone of the entire song and, as Heroes is such a universally known and loved song, it feels kinda cheap, especially when Murphy's vocal melody hits a corresponding "Heroes" note. Nevertheless, the way All I Want progresses with neon-bright keyboard flashes towards Murphy's pleading climax makes its second half irresistible. Finally in this stretch is the piston-disco of I Can Change, a sweetly heartfelt offer to compromise sung gracefully over what sounds like an extended mix of something from Low's Side A.

The closing track, Home, is another success, combining cowbell and mobile phone interference for percussion, and building into a celebratory groove supporting Murphy's David Byrne-like vocals.

Unfortunately, between that ecstatic twenty minute spell and the triumphant finale are three of Murphy's weakest songs yet. Hit is a nine-minute-long grumble about label pressure for a hit song, which definitely won't be a hit itself because it's intentionally flat and tuneless. It's just petulant: the way to react to undue influence is to ignore it, not to propel yourself in the opposite direction. Pow Pow isn't much better: it's a Losing My Edge-style rambling monologue over a rolling groove, except without any of the the wit, and with an inane chorus of "pow, pow pow pow pow, pow pow pow pow" yelled repeatedly. Then there's Somebody's Calling Me, a heavily sedated version of Iggy Pop' Nightclubbing that drearily plods along under the occasional brightly flaring drone.

These songs give credence to the notion that Murphy is doing the right thing by hanging up his LCD Soundsystem boots with this album. That LCD would resort to the third-album cliche of whinging about the music industry, for almost ten minutes, would've seemed so unlikely to early fans: he made jokes about Captain Beefheart, he surely must know about these well-trodden pitfalls? And This Is Happening's reliance on familiar sources of inspiration is not what you expect from an established artist. But, though Murphy crossed that bridge long ago, he remains a talented man with great taste, and that results in a clutch of thrilling tracks. Like the album that inspired its cover, This Is Happening is a fine – if flawed – end to a largely magnificent trilogy.

(104/139)

Introducing: Sparrow & The Workshop

2010-04-22T20:00:00.000+01:00

Introducing: Sparrow & The Workshop
(well, not if you've been paying attention here already)

feature for Clash

The Scottish live music scene is about as healthy as it's ever been right now, but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of new young bands trying to live out rockstar dreams based on little more than the ability to detune a guitar. Earplugs are always recommended, to protect your ears and to protect your sanity. But sometimes you catch one: a new band several steps above the others, like athletes where sloths went before, and it all becomes worthwhile. I knew Sparrow & The Workshop were special from the moment I first saw them live in late 2008. Now they're releasing their debut album and, whaddaya know, I was right!

Sparrow formed two years ago after Jill O'Sullivan (lead vocals) and Nick Packer (guitar, bass) moved to Glasgow from London. There they met Gregor Donaldson (drums, vocals), and the boys began to put some flesh on the bones of songs Jill was already writing. Since then they've been gigging relentlessly, in support of British Sea Power, Idlewild and others, and they've also released two well-received EPs, Sleight of Hand and Into The Wild, which have now been combined to make the album. Jill's high, agile voice, like Joni Mitchell's but with a Southern twang, has instant appeal, but a great singer would be wasted without great songs, and debut album Crystals Fall has those in abundance.

"People call us 'folk noir'," Gregor says. "They say it's just a wee bit weird, in a good way, or they say it's a new take on a timeless kind of music. We enjoy making it, so I'd like that to come across, that we're having fun." Early reviews have highlighted the dark themes of their lyrics and the folk roots of their songwriting, but guitarist Nick isn't afraid of causing a racket, as in the thrilling crescendos of Crystals and Into The Wild, and the sliding solo of Swam Like Sharks.

Gregor's drumming is crucial too. He's not content to do the basic 4/4 support while the song marches on. Instead, he's always looking for gaps, chances to duck in and out, like a winger using tricks as well as pace to beat his man. It's no coincidence that his drumming takes centre-stage on some of the album's best songs, such as Into The Wild and Devil Song.

"We've had some pretty nice things said about us already," Gregor says, and those positive vibes are only going to continue.

MySpace

Football in 3-D: The Beautiful Game

2010-04-19T20:33:00.008+01:00

blog for the skinny

As it's bright and sunny outside, everyone's wearing shades. But we're indoors, and not sitting-by-the-window indoors, we're deeply hidden away in Edinburgh's Three Sisters' backroom bar, round the corner from any mere vestige of sunlight, watching the telly. It's the Manchester derby, bizarrely now the richest city derby in world football, and we're wearing the darkened glasses because it's being shown on Sky 3-D.

When I was a kid, a 3-D film was an attraction at Universal Studios in Florida, alongside a simulator where you flew into a dinosaur's mouth and a boat that was thrillingly attacked by a giant shark. Now 3-D films are arriving every week at multiplexes, and 3-D football has arrived at the pub, except they don't squirt you with water at the pub for realism (there is an excitable crowd of sweary men though, just like at a real game). It's not a great match, but with the glasses on it was easy to lose interest in the actual football and begin thinking about the way the camera shots are being cut. Most of the game is shown in wide-shot, which isn't very different from how it is on normal telly. But close-ups and different angles show much more depth: you can see the layers of perspective, the sharper focus on near objects than far. It's not quite "like being there", as Sky's publicity says, because your total vision knows you're just watching a flat rectangle on the wall of a dark pub. But it is kinda like a window to actually being there: like you could reach your hand through this window and wave it around and freak everyone out at the disembodied limb shaking above the pitch.

That's probably the kind of silly thing people said about television sixty years ago, I know. Anyway, because it's not a magic portal -- because it's a television -- it's also brighter than real life. It's lit up, and that makes it quite beautiful to look at (unless it's a close-up of Carlos Tevez (above), of course). Instead of pointing to the screen to direct abuse or illustrate a move or tactic, this pub audience points at the screen for the angled crowd shot, to say "look at the layers!", or at a substitution, to see how the sub, the linesman, the dugout and the crowd are arranged. Of course, they're arranged exactly as they always are, but I've never been so enamoured just gazing at a substitution before.

The Three Sisters provided us with free half-time pies, which were nice, but no matchday programme, wind-chill, or deafening tannoy announcements of the half-time raffle results, which would've added to the realism. The next match to be shown is Chelsea v Stoke next Sunday, but you can check the Sky 3-D website for details on upcoming games, and where you can watch them.

Meursault: Escape From Auld Reekie

2010-04-10T12:34:00.002+01:00

feature for the skinny
(crappy photo taken by me on my phone about a year ago at The Bowery)

In the 16th century, after defeat at the Battle of Flodden, Edinburgh built a wall around its limits to protect itself from an expected invasion by the English. They never came, but the Flodden Wall proved useful to the city's rulers as a means of penning citizens in, making criminals easier to catch and traders easier to tax. The wall is mostly gone, but some mysterious force still seems to pen the capital's musical citizens in.

Every August, Edinburgh becomes the cultural capital of the western world, yet its own contemporary music rarely travels far. For two years, the chatter around these parts has been dominated by Meursault, and if you've been to a small-scale gig here recently, you've probably seen them. Meursault have performed live hundreds of times now and won new fans every time. Our readers poll saw their debut album, Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues, qualify as one of the best Scottish albums of the last ten years. But despite their obvious talent, the hype has remained dispiritingly local.

It's time they burst through the wall.

For the uninitiated, Meursault are a six-piece (formerly four-piece) led by singer-songwriter Neil Pennycook, a big bald guy with a breathtaking boom of a voice. Other members combine autoharp-strumming with Ableton-programming, korg-playing and banjo-picking: they play modern forms of indie-rock and electronica, but with strong roots in Scottish folk. Pennycook has a versatile voice, but when he yells, jaws drop.

We caught up with Neil to hear more about Meursault's upcoming second album, All Creatures Will Make Merry.

How did you want your second album to be different from the first?
The main difference would be that I'm a lot more certain of what it is that I'm trying to say with these songs compared with those on the first record. If I've learned anything, it's to trust my own opinion and to work at my own pace. Also, playing with a full live band has helped shape this record considerably.

Do you mean - expanding to a six-piece?
Yeah. The two new members, Pete on cello and Phil on guitar, have opened up a huge range of possibilities with these songs. As well as other less obvious benefits such as Phil also acting as our booking agent which brings a whole new level of organisation to things. With Pete joining it gave me the opportunity to work closely with someone who understands music from a completely different perspective than myself, what with his being classically trained and his ability to understand every facet of a song as he hears it.

What would you say your influences have been for this record?
I've been listening to a lot of The Microphones, Mount Eerie. And I guess that's influenced my production style a fair bit.

How do you expect people will react?
I hope people get what I was trying to achieve with the production and arrangements as well. It's this idea that just because a song has a grander arrangement, or is more than just guitar, bass and drums, that shouldn't necessarily entail that it needs slick production, which always seems to be the case and has been for as long as people have been making records.

Edinburgh's happy to have Meursault, but logistical problems have undoubtedly played a part in keeping them here. They're signed to a bedroom-sized local label, Song By Toad, better known as a blog run by Matthew Young, and there's only so much he can do. And with six members, co-ordinating time off work to tour has proved extremely difficult. Hence most of their gigs in the last couple years have been in the homely Bowery basement, downstairs at what is now the Roxy. They were able to rehearse there regularly, and played so often they became like an unofficial house band. Just around the corner from the Bowery, on Drummond St, is a still-standing portion of the Flodden Wall. They're very close to getting beyond it.

MySpace

Caribou: Selling Live Water

2010-04-07T22:41:00.004+01:00

interview feature for the skinny (revised)

"I thought everybody was going to hate this album," Dan Snaith aka Caribou tells The Skinny over the phone. Incorrect, red pen, cross. Show your working! "I've never been one to play it safe or want to not-rock the boat, but this is a big left-turn, there's much more dance influence, there's much less in the way of poppy songs." OK, so you follow up an award-winning breakthrough album with something very different, and you risk alienating fans. But no-one's going to hate Caribou's magnificent new album Swim.

Snaith is a very open and articulate talker. After half an hour's chat, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that his brain responds to music in a mathematical way. Partly that's because his back-story involves a lot of maths and it's hard to resist a good narrative, but partly it's because of the way he talks about music: like a song is a set of problems that can be solved, expressed in sound instead of numbers.

Dan Snaith's back-story (involves a lot of maths)

The Snaith family could hardly be described as multi-talented. "My dad was a maths professor, my mom was a maths teacher, my sister's a maths professor, my grandfather was a maths teacher, my brother-in-law is a maths professor." According to Wikipedia, his sister Nina works in random matrix theory and quantum chaos; just so you know. Dan himself has a Ph.D. in maths from Imperial College, London, where he now lives.

The very talented Snaith family were based in a little Canadian town called Dundas, in Ontario, population 25,000. Without a music scene, Dan's musical education lacked the constraints of received wisdom. "When I was in high school I was listening to Plastikman and Yes. Maybe if I'd grown up in New York or London or somewhere there'd have been a sense of context to the music, like 'oh yeah people are part of a scene here'. For me it was just like: this sounds exciting, I dont care if it was made fifty years ago or yesterday, I dont care where in the world it comes from. I didnt have any context for anything I listened to, because there was nothing musically going on in the little shithole town where I grew up."

About ten years ago Snaith began releasing glitchy, Warp-like electronic music using cut-up and re-worked samples, under the name Manitoba, but he had to change the name after a legal threat from the lead singer of The Dictators, Handsome Dick Manitoba. "Manitoba is a Canadian province, so it was irksome being told by an American asshole that nobody could use the name of a Canadian province apart from him! So Caribou is the North American name for reindeer and as a word it evokes the same kind of things and places as Manitoba does, to me." It has nothing to do with the Pixies song. "No, I was into Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and really horrible, terribly unfashionable progressive rock when I was a teenager!"

Manitoba's second album Up In Flames (2003) was the first to catch a prevailing wind, because it contained more accessible melodies smudged by reverb and echo, exactly as the bright, blurry cover art suggested. Having approximated his aesthetic, The Milk Of Human Kindness (2005, as Caribou) improved on it, and Andorra (2007) was better again, winning the 2008 Polaris Prize, the Canadian equivalent of the Mercury. Continuing the pattern, Swim is even better again, though it's far more based on rhythms than melodies. As he said.

The way Dan Snaith talks about music

Stuff like this: "I'm influenced by hearing someone else's music and thinking 'How the fuck do they do that, technically?', and trying to do my own take on it." If you add these notes, and these sounds, in this order, at this tempo, do you get this emotion, every time? And this: "I'd already settled on what I wanted to do for Andorra, I wanted to figure out how to write pop music, how to compose and arrange it," as if pop music is a quantifiable thing, a science that can be learned, with right and wrong answers at the end. And this, about lyrics: "Rather than on Andorra just sketching some hypothetical scene of two people falling in love, say, just this kind of format for lyrics to mirror what was going on musically in the song, this time it just felt kinda natural that the lyrics had more to do with things going on in my life." If I'd misheard that word 'format' as 'formula', it wouldn't change the meaning, would it? This is what a pop song looks like, now see if you can solve it for x.

And this all begs the question: is that how more of us, or all of us, respond to music, even if we don't realise it? Some people hear a power ballad and recognise the melody as being dramatic and emotional, and then feel the emotion and feel the drama; others hear the same melody and recognise the same formula, but refuse to be led to the same conclusion. What causes these opposite reactions? In an interview last year with Eye Weekly.com, Snaith said "Once I feel like I can do something, it becomes less interesting to do it again." He's found x.

"In high school I was in an indie rock band and all my friends were into that kinda shit but I hated it" Snaith says. "I didn't see the attraction to it until I got to university and then it totally changed, it became this very creative, abstract, more imaginative thing." OK, I cheated there. In the first quote he's talking about music. In the second quote he's talking about maths. Where do you draw the line?

Swim isn't about maths, at all. According to the press sheet, he wanted to make "dance music that sounds like it’s made out of water rather than made out of metallic stuff like most dance music does". "The last track on Andorra [Niobe] is essentially an attempt to rip off James Holden's music," he said on the phone, "to figure out how it works, music where elements seem to breathe and grow and then fall apart. It's a very non-machine-like process and I couldn't figure out how he did it, but I loved the idea".

"On a song like Kaili, all the synthesisers are constantly washing around, nothing sits still, everything's moving, appearing and disappearing. So there's this back and forth idea of musical fluidity." So that's why this record is called Swim? "And also just for the totally naive reason that I became obsessed with swimming over the last year, which probably had an influence on me wanting to make the music sound liquid."

So is the clanging percussion on Bowls really made with... bowls? "They're Tibetan singing bowls," he says. "You know you can run a stick around a glass with water? I picked up these bowls while I was in Asia cos I'd always liked the sound of them. I did this kind of thing a lot with this album: I sampled the sound of these two bowls individually and then played them on a keyboard as if they were the starting point for a synthesiser, changed the filter, changed the envelope. So it's kind of a hybrid between a bowl being hit and it being a synthesiser."

Even when Snaith shows his working, he still gets remarkable results.

MySpace

Super Adventure Club - Avoid Zombies

2010-03-28T17:13:00.003+01:00

Super Adventure Club - Avoid Zombies (****)
album review for the skinny

In theory, Glasgow (via Livingstone) trio Super Adventure Club could be a nightmarish proposition: they have a singer/guitarist, Bruce Wallace, who screeches, wails, screams, howls and croons; sometimes he sings too; and they have a drummer, Neil Warrack, who shifts between rhythms in a song like a girl trying on dresses in a shop. It could add up to a hellish noise, but in fact their second album Avoid Zombies is a scarily imaginative and hugely amusing trip, the most incongruous thing about it being the final track, a pre-emptive self-defence against anticipated criticism that really isn't necessary.

Before that final track, Super Adventure Club have spent the preceeding half-hour being totally unselfconscious, showing a buoyant disregard for any sensitivities that might get in the way of their fun. Some bands don't seem to know it, but making music is supposed to be fun. The intro to Avoid Zombies' first song -- Hip Hop Hot Pot Pot Noodle -- is five seconds of fast n' mindless single-note pinging, before an unexpected eruption of noise as Wallace and bassist/singer Mandy Clarke crazily rave "If you can read this, your head's on fire". The mania of it is startling: a few bars into the album, they've already asserted their presence, declared their intentions, and shown more personality than some bands manage in a whole hour.

When the singers aren't ranting and the guitars aren't in overdrive, SAC like to slow it down with some breezy, light-hearted laments. Pick Up Sticks provides such a counterpoint to Hip Hop etc's abrasive full-tilt intro, as Wallace wonders aloud about being stuck in a rut, and in My Other Brain he considers extreme measures to deal with sexual frustration: "...but John Wayne Bobbit did alright, and his looks like it's stuck on with Araldite." Best of all is SAC Attack, sung sweetly by Clarke over a fantastic leaping bassline and a scratching, scathing guitar: "phone your mum, make the tea, avoid zombies," she reels off her to-do list for the day, "lock the door, feed the cat, avoid zombies". Always set achievable goals; that's just good advice.

And don't worry too much about what other people think of you; that's implicitly advised throughout too. When a band is described as inoffensive, it doesn't mean others go around abusing the ugly, it means this: others, like Super Adventure Club, take risks knowing they might lose as many fans as they win, and they don't much care about that. Nosferatu is the seven-minute multi-part centrepiece of Avoid Zombies; it's very funny, full of ideas, and honestly a little baffling on first listen: it's Super Adventure Club in one song. Starting with an incomprehensible rant over a quick-breathing bassline, it slows into something eerie about spontaneous combustion, before shifting gear again in time for Wallace and Clarke to abuse someone for looking like Alan Carr (wait, what was I just saying?), then calming again for a guitar solo that fades to almost complete silence halfway through the song. For no apparent reason, just because they want to, and then they fade back in again and there's another twenty parts before the song ends.

But SAC's indulgent tendencies -- like beginning an album with a heart-attack-inducing shock and fading out to near nothing halfway through another song, not to mention the soloing and tempo shifts -- aren't a negative, they're intrinsic to the band's appeal. Other apparently good-time bands would be too self-conscious to try half this stuff, so it wouldn't be convincing. On the contrary, you know Super Adventure Club are having the time of their lives, because they're not stopping to think it over, analyse it, write down their options, arrange a meeting, draw a graph, run it by the boss. Time flies when you're having fun because you don't stop to check the time. Super Adventure Club's brio is natural, most of their risks pay off, and the joy is contagious.

Until we get to the appendix, the apologetic Pointless Self-Indulgence, ironically their least indulgent and most pointless song. It's like a new best friend saying sorry for one corny joke. It's actually quite charming, when taken on its own. Two minutes, no big deal.

MySpace

We Were Promised Jetpacks - The Last Place You'll Look EP

2010-03-24T22:54:00.003Z

We Were Promised Jetpacks - The Last Place You'll Look EP (****)
review for the skinny

The Last Place You'll Look reprises two standout tracks from We Were Promised Jetpacks' underrated debut LP These Four Walls – Short Bursts and This Is My House – in slower, more restrained versions. Despite Adam Thompson's primal wail being one of the band's strengths, it actually works quite well, highlighting the dark inspiration for those vocal dramatics. By now Jetpacks have the slow-build-to-ecstatic-release thing down pat, exemplified on With The Benefit of Hindsight, which accelerates from nothing into a magisterial finale. Opening track A Far Cry is even better, gathering steam with bump-and-rolling drum fills and brief flashes of big guitars, before somehow managing to keep its climax going for a full minute-and-a-half. Jetpacks' know what they're good at, and they're very good at it.

North Atlantic Oscillation - Grappling Hooks

2010-03-20T14:57:00.003Z

North Atlantic Oscillation - Grappling Hooks
album review for DiS

Mibbe it's just their name, but I can't think about North Atlantic Oscillation's debut album without thinking about water. It's in the depths and swells of their song structures, the thin fluid sweep of their synths, and the drums which splash and spray across everything. North Atlantic Oscillation are an Edinburgh-based trio who eschew verse-chorus-story in favour of elongated washes, proggy effects and ever-inventive drumming. Grappling Hooks is an ambitious and accomplished-sounding record, that nevertheless doesn't hit the heights it aims for.

North Atlantic Oscillation's debut does excel in one area, and that's rhythm. Every track showcases drummer Ben Martin's restless impulse, stretching for fills and rolls where a lesser drummer might content himself with four-fours. Fourth track 'Some Blue Hive' is a good example, the grand opening rolls giving way to a relaxed, lolling groove, before the flourish-dotted outro that grabs tight to the song instead of letting it drift. Next is 'Audioplastic', a cinematic near-instrumental that rides atop a stuttering, shifting rhythm like a milder version of Primal Scream's 'Blood Money'; it just wouldn't be possible without a good drummer.

Whether North Atlantic Oscillation have a good singer is a more awkward question to answer. Sam Healy's androgynous vocal tone is nearly always filtered and in falsetto, giving it an otherworldly sense which works best on lead single 'Cell Count': his deadpan "it's amazing what they can do... to you", delivered over skittering flashes and whirrs, sounds like an alien observation of human science or the politics of power. But in other places his lyrics are unclear, or his delivery reserved, rendering his effected voice an instrument among all others, like a different tone of synth. Of course, its potential is to be far more expressive, so it isn't used to the full here.

There's nothing especially new on Grappling Hooks, but North Atlantic Oscillation's borrowing isn't usually problematic. '77 Hours' is a heated-up and stretched version of Boards of Canada's 'Roygbiv' that slowly builds towards a manic climax, and it's the highlight of Grappling Hooks' second half. 'Ritual', on the other hand, suffers from its rather blatant Sigur Ros-isms: not just in the slow build-up and ecstatic release, but also in the high harmony vocals which sound suspiciously Icelandic as they're reversed.

Although that's the only track worthy of specific criticism on this generally consistent full-length, Grappling Hooks doesn't reward repeated listens with new discoveries. Its tempo changes and pressure shifts flow in mostly predictable sequences where a few deep dives or bends-inducing leaps would be welcome. For such a rhythm-based record - where other potential qualities like beautiful harmonies or gritty passages of noise or big choruses aren't so relevant - it should be aiming for extra points on the dynamics of structure.

The many reference points to other bands Grappling Hooks fits in - in addition to the forementioned, Grandaddy, Flaming Lips and Holy Fuck all make ghost appearances - suggest North Atlantic Oscillation's burgeoning identity is still more composite than characteristic. That's entirely understandable for a new band, and a minor gripe even at that. Grappling Hooks is a strong debut by a band who can get stronger.

6/10

Damon's Finest Five

2010-03-06T10:17:00.000Z

Damon's Finest Five (link)

Blur – Parklife (1994)
Britpop's finest hour, the album that launched a thousand magazine trend pieces about Essex lads behaving badly. So, that's mid-90s Britain generalised then, but don't blame the music. "Yes, they're stereotypes," Albarn sang on the first song of next album The Great Escape, "there must be more to life."

Blur – Think Tank (2003)
With more input from William Orbit and Norman Cook than estranged guitarist Graham Coxon, Blur were forcibly removed from their college rock comfort zone, resulting in their most creative album of all. A glorious final gasp before the burial.

Gorillaz – Demon Days (2005)
Before Danger Mouse hit No.1 with Gnarls Barkley, he helped produce Gorillaz' second album which included a trio of classic singles: the kids' choir trip-hop of Dirty Harry, the languid groove and manic laugh of Feel Good Inc, and Shaun Ryder lording it over Dare.

The Good, The Bad & The Queen (2007)
Again with Danger Mouse behind the desk, Albarn with Simon Tong, Paul Simonon and Tony Allen recorded a London-themed album that replaced the peppy energy of Parklife with more doleful, resigned tones.

Monkey: Journey To The West (2008)
The soundtrack to an opera based on a 500 year-old Chinese folk tale: a belated natural follow-up to Girls & Boys, of course. Monkey is daring, moving, sometimes confounding, and truly unique. It's also unrecognisable as a Damon Albarn work, an outlier that demonstrates his remarkable range.

City Dweller, Successful Fella

2010-03-04T23:16:00.009Z

albarn hagiography for the skinny

sorry, I mean "feature"

What is the best shorthand to introduce Damon Albarn now? Is it: "former Blur frontman..."? Too retro. Perhaps it's "Gorillaz mastermind..."? But that forgets his first decade of fame. Is it "Chinese musical composer..."? Well, he's from Essex, but he has composed a Chinese musical, Monkey Journey to the West. But that description leaves out Blur and Gorillaz completely, as would any focusing on his The Good, The Bad and The Queen supergroup, or his recording ventures in Western Africa. There is no shorthand for Damon Albarn. He's done a lot.

My first memory of Albarn is as a lairy looking lad singing Girls & Boys on some Saturday morning show, early 1994, I was ten. Country House was the first CD I ever bought, having been persuaded by hype to pick a side and fight for it in the great Britpop battle of 1995. Only £3.99 from Woolworths; fill in your own old man joke here. How the guy who wrote Country House, and the system that sold it, has changed since then.

That's quite a pish song, actually, but I chose the right side in that battle. Do you ever meet people who seem to have listened to the same three bands for the last ten years? Those bands used to be the Stone Roses, Oasis and Ocean Colour Scene. Now, they're Oasis, Kasabian and Kings of Leon. That's Noel Gallagher. Blur's final album, and possibly its best, Think Tank, was recorded in Morocco. Liam Gallagher can't spell Morocco. Though we didn't know it in 1995, Damon Albarn is a proper music geek. He's obsessed by it enough to be curious about its every form. That could make him a dilettante, but, incredibly, he's morphed his endless curiosity into creativity everywhere he's turned, and successfully too.

Following six Blur albums, four of which had topped the UK album charts, Albarn and his pal Jamie Hewlett thought it'd be fun to invent a virtual group, Gorillaz, 50% hip-hop, 50% everything else. Gorillaz' self-titled debut was Albarn's biggest selling record yet. Let's stop and think about this for a second. Was Blur not big enough for him? Gorillaz gets even bigger. Someone ask Chris Cornell how easy it is for a rock singer to make a good rap record (or, let's ask Lil Wayne the reverse). Few even attempt it. Then there was Mali Music, Think Tank, which also went to No.1, and the second Gorillaz album Demon Days, which was even better and sold twice as much as the first.

Before meeting his Blur bandmates in Morocco for Think Tank, Albarn spent months in Mali recording with local musicians including Toumani Diabaté. Mali Music (2002) gathered little attention in the British press, but it was praised by those already familiar with Malian sounds. Since then, Diabaté, Ali Farka Touré and Amadou & Mariam have taken Malian music worldwide. It might be a coincidence, or there might've been a push. Anyway, critics don't always take kindly to African sounds: Vampire Weekend get a lot of shit thrown at them for supposedly being "cultural tourists". How dare middle class Westerners be inspired by African music! That's all bullshit; but it's a persistent criticism, easy to cop, avoided by Albarn.

The Good, The Bad and The Queen, Mojo's Album of the Year in 2007, was Albarn with The Verve's Simon Tong, The Clash's Paul Simonon, and Fela Kuti's extraordinary drummer Tony Allen, himself one of the central figures of Nigerian music history. Shall I keep going? In 2008 Albarn and Hewlett created a musical stage show based on an ancient Chinese folk tale; Albarn composed the frequently beautiful score for Monkey Journey to the West.

Isn't this range remarkable? David Bowie is widely praised for his chameolonic tendencies: boho folk, to glam, to soul, to krautrock, to disco, to industrial. That is an impressive range, but those genres are all related, or at least neighbours in the same borough. Madonna gets similar praise for latching onto new fashions early and helping to boost them, in a self-propelling pop-culture-fashion-pop cycle. By 2005 Albarn had taken Blur from She's So High to Moroccan People's Revolutionary Bowls Club, and made an album of Malian music, and recorded two multi-platinum hip-hop(ish) records with guests like De La Soul, MF Doom, Roots Manuva, and Dennis bloomin' Hopper.

Now, Gorillaz are getting ready to release their third album, Plastic Beach, which includes guest spots from Snoop Dogg, Bobby Womack, Lou Reed, and – if you've been following up til now you'll almost be expecting this – the Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music. No joke.

Is this really the same gurning lad who was leaping around miming "following the herd down to Greece" at the height of Britpop's pomp? It's hard to believe. Going to Greece is something he might do, but he certainly wouldn't be following anyone.

Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

2010-02-22T20:49:00.003Z

Gorillaz - Plastic Beach (***)
album review for the skinny

Last year a couple of L.A. producers gathered an all-star cast of guests for an album about peace, love and understanding: N.A.S.A.'s The Spirit of Apollo was an idealistic dream that proved impossible to execute. Gorillaz' third album Plastic Beach is reminiscent because its impressive and wide-ranging cast list – Snoop Dogg, Lou Reed, Mos Def, Mark E. Smith and more – has gathered to grumble about consumption and pollution issues, and because the variety of guests has forced Damon Albarn into some dizzyingly eclectic styles.

When Snoop's drawl gives way to bongo rapping and a shimmering synth line is replaced by an ornate flute melody, you have to check you're not set to shuffle. The star of this show is Bobby Womack, whose pained warble adorns Cloud Of Unknowing and brilliant first single Stylo; beyond that, there's a lot of filler. That's the problem with all-star albums: it's hard to cut the lesser tracks when you made them with your heroes.

Joanna Newsom: Have Three On Me

2010-02-08T10:44:00.001Z

blog for Amazon Chordstrike

Criticizing an album before anyone's ever heard it would be a bizarre thing to do. Bizarrely, I think I'm going do just that.

Y'see, I'm just a little concerned about one of my favorite artists.

Joanna Newsom's Ys was one of my favorite albums of the last ten years, but she's announced her follow up, Have One On Me, is going to be a triple. There's no track listing yet, but whatever it is will be released on 3xCDs, or 3xLPs.

Is there actually such a thing as a great triple album? Serious question, I'd like to know. There must be a few, but even still - wouldn't they be improved by having a few lesser tracks chopped off to make it a more manageable double album? In fact, wouldn't the vast majority of double albums be improved by being edited down to a single?

I tend to feel that 35-50 minutes is the best length for an album, because shorter than that feels a little too short, but longer is kinda tiring. But how tiring a record is depends on what kind of music it is, too.

Aphex Twin's triple LP (or double CD) Selected Ambient Works II is over two-and-a-half hours of featureless ambiance. Even though that's a long time to do anything (a long time to have headphones on, say), it's easy to let it wash through you and only pick up on the broad movements of mood. On the other hand, Tupac's double-disc All Eyez On Me is 132 minutes -- nearly two-and-a-quarter hours -- and it's exhausting, because you have to listen much closer to hip-hop, to follow the lyrics. That kind of concentration is tough to keep up!

Joanna Newsom is not exactly easy to listen to in the first place. Her voice is polarizing, but even for those of us who like it, Ys, at 55 minutes long, was quite long enough, because her lyrics are so densely arranged that you really have to focus to keep up with them. We don't yet know how long Have One On Me will be, but if it's roughly three hours then that's surely too long to digest in one sitting. And if it's not meant for one sitting, why release it at all together under one name?

Joanna Newsom's music always seems very deliberate: every syllable is carefully measured, every flourish and flair under complete control. You can be sure that there's an explanation for the placing of every antique and animal figure on that cover, above, so the length of the album itself is no half-thought or accident. I imagine she must have some complex conceptual justification, I just can't imagine what it is!

Do you agree that triple albums are a bad idea? Or are you happier to get more songs from longer albums?

Have One On Me will be released on February 23rd. A new song, "Good Intentions Paving Company," is already streaming from her label Drag City's website.

The Stylus Decade pt.V: My Ballot

2010-01-22T14:48:00.001Z

1
to
50

Method: Off the top of my head I drew up a shortlist of about 80 contenders. If I couldn't think of it, it wasn't important enough to be a contender. I listened again to every one and ranked them, even outside the 50 (Since I Left You was 51). My library on SoundUnwound tells me my overall 2000s pool was 427 eligible albums from 307 artists.

Songs: I cannae be arsed finding all the artwork, so here's the list

Position--Points--Artist--Song--Year
1 60 OutKast Hey Ya! 2003
2 53 Blur Ambulance 2003
3 50 LCD Soundsystem Losing My Edge 2002
4 47 The Rapture House of Jealous Lovers 2002
5 46 M.I.A. Jimmy 2007
6 45 Avalanches Since I Left You 2000
7 44 The Pendulums Brand New Song 2006
8 43 Okkervil River A Stone 2005
9 42 Los Campesinos! You! Me! Dancing! 2007
10 41 Gnarls Barkley Crazy 2006

11 40 Antony & The Jonsons Hope There's Someone 2005
12 39 Kylie Minogue Can't Get You Out Of My Head 2001
13 38 Justin Timberlake ft. T.I, My Love 2006
14 37 Jay-Z 99 Problems 2003
15 36 The Walkmen The Rat 2004
16 35 Battles Atlas 2007
17 34 The Mountain Goats No Children 2002
18 33 The White Stripes Fell In Love With A Girl 2001
19 32 Eminem Kim 2000
20 31 Franz Ferdinand Take Me Out 2004

21 30 Grinderman No Pussy Blues 2007
22 29 Radiohead Like Spinning Plates 2001
23 28 The Knife We Share Our Mother's Health 2006
24 27 Eminem Stan 2000
25 26 Junior Boys Hazel 2009
26 25 Kanye West ft. Dwele Flashing Lights 2007
27 24 Basement Jaxx Where's Your Head At? 2001
28 23 Jens Lekman I Saw Her At The Anti-War Demonstration 2005
29 22 Meursault The Furnace 2008
30 21 Belle & Sebastian I Love My Car 2001

31 20 Aphex Twin Avril 14th 2001
32 19 Martha Wainwright Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole 2005
33 18 Beirut Postcards From Italy 2006
34 17 Yeah Yeah Yeahs Maps 2003
35 16 Miracle Fortress Have You Seen In Your Dreams? 2007
36 15 Edan Fumbling Over Words That Rhyme 2005
37 14 CSS Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above 2004
38 13 Yeasayer 2080 2007
39 12 Isolee Schrapnell 2005
40 11 Bon Iver The Wolves (Acts I and II) 2007

41 10 Viktor Vaughn Let Me Watch 2003
42 9 My Teenage Stride Chock's Rally 2007
43 8 The Hives Hate To Say I Told You So 2000
44 7 Vitalic La Rock 01 2001
45 6 Missy Elliott One Minute Man 2001
46 5 OutKast B.O.B. 2000
47 4 Arab Strap Love Detective 2000
48 3 Cat Power The Greatest 2006
49 2 Camera Obscura Lloyd I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken 2006
50 1 PJ Harvey and Thom Yorke This Mess We're In 2000

Right, I'll stop banging on about the Stylus Decade now. I promise. That's it, all done.

Frightened Rabbit - The Winter of Mixed Drinks

2010-01-20T22:30:00.006Z

first listen preview for The Skinny <---

-----

PS. I know, I know, it's a bit vague. The deal is: I'm not reviewing it. The Skinny review will follow, probably in a month or so, written by someone else. So I couldn't be too prescriptive about what's good and what's not in The Skinny's name, in case the reviewer disagrees.

Here, I can say I think it's very good. I'm not sure yet whether it's better than Midnight Organ Fight, but there isn't much in it, and it's sure to give their profile a big boost. I think the fans will be really happy.

Stylistically, the key concern for me about this third album was the possibility that FRabbit might accentuate the sentimentality (a.k.a. "they sound a bit like Snow Patrol in parts") in a bid for popularity. That might make sense to Scott Hutchison, even subconsciously, seeing as his unsentimental debut was nowhere near as popular as the follow-up (and remember, that's when Snow Patrol themselves became mega, when they went all widescreen weepy). I really like Midnight Organ Fight, I didn't find the sentimentality too much at all, but I know some people did. Winter of Mixed Drinks is definitely not schmaltzy, so it may well win over some listeners who weren't convinced by Midnight Organ Fight.

The Stylus Decade pt. IV: The Writing

2010-01-19T22:17:00.001Z

Welcome back to Broon's Tunes for comprehensive coverage of The Stylus Decade, cos I've apparently got nothing better to do (haven't you?)

The Stylus Decade comprises 200 blurbs between 100-500 words long, and eight long-form essays. It's far too much to read in one sitting, and far too much to discuss in one blog post, so I've decided to dedicate the next year or so to line-by-line analysis on this blog.

Not really.

All I'm going to do is mention a few of my favourite parts which I picked out while reading it.

The Blurbs

I don't mean to sound like a miserable bastard (it just comes naturally y'know) but when people just talk about the calibration of the lists, the numbers and sequences and omissions, the music itself is forgotten. I'm sure half the people who moan about Kid A being number one actually do enjoy that record, or at least enjoyed it before they realised everyone else enjoyed it much more than them.

Anyway, there's little worth to any stated opinion about music without justification, so I'd rather focus on many of the fine justifications offered up by my Stylus colleagues. As stated, there's too many to mention, but these are a few which jumped out at me.

I think my two favourite blurbs are those by Jonathan Bradley for The National's Boxer (No.41), and Fergal O'Reilly's Discovery (No.3). I've read them both four or five times now, because they're both just so wonderfully constructed. No quibbling, go read them in full.

Mike Orme's "Rebellion (Lies)" somehow manages to give a new perspective to one of the most-played indie rock songs of recent years (No.93)

and while you're there, check out Theon Weber's pinpoint take on the Yeah Yeah Yeah's "Maps" (No.82).

Paul Scott's says The Strokes "Hard To Explain" (No.59)

"both embodies and celebrates the indolence and inarticulacy of youth with a wit many miles from their contemporaries."

Most of Dom Passantino's album blurbs made me laugh, partly because he can always be relied upon to pull an obscure Britishism out of nowhere (rare in online music journalism which is always targetted at an American audience). Case in point: Half Man Half Biscuit's Achtung Bono (No.87) making the list in the first place; also, Brenda Blethyn, Danny Dyer, Rio Ferdinand and Nick Knowles all getting a namecheck in his blurb for it. No wonder he loves that band. But also, check out his Abbatoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus (No.60) blurb, which is self-deprecating in a wholly admirable and very funny way.

Dirty Projectors' Bitte Orca was one of only three 2009 albums to make the list. It's the kind of album music writers will always love, because it's so easy to write about, there's so much going on that it'll always provide a thoughtful writer with ways in which to show off their knowledge and interpretation. But the intro para to Tal Rosenberg's blurb (No.58) is particularly imaginative, and the rest aint bad either.

Actually, Tal was in top form throughout. Check out his short Erykah Badu (No.99), and his longer DJ Sprinkles (No.71), which come to similar conclusions: "so often, great art is the actualization of the all of the artist." That's what authenticity is, isn't it? When an artist can't help but convey their weaknesses as well as their strengths because they convey themselves, in full, their all. There's a dissertation in there somewhere.

Two of the hardest blurbs to write in this project were Merriweather Post Pavilion (No.23) and Kid A (No.1), the former because it's the great hype beast of the last twelve months, the latter because it's the great hype beast of the last ten years; so nobody reading your blurb is coming in disinterested. But Jeff Siegel and Josh Love did great jobs with their write-ups, in contrasting ways: Jeff didn't even acknowledge MPP's hype or context, he just talked about the record, remarkably in terms I hadn't read it written about before; while Josh wrote almost entirely about the reception to Kid A, the arguments, the meanings of those arguments, its importance, not in grand socio-cultural terms (the dreaded z-word avoided) but in real, fan-level reality.

Peter Parrish on Black Sheep Boy by Okkervil River:

Even when Sheff dabbles in the slightly ridiculous, as on "A Stone," he pulls it off. By embracing the ludicrous and flipping the song's focus on its head, he takes us on a bittersweet Pixar adventure about the daydreaming fancies of stones. As the mournful trumpet solo plays out, it's quite possible to start feeling sorry for inanimate chunks of geology.

For all its dark reality, anger and sadness, that's the moment when Black Sheep Boy really won my heart. It made me care about a goddamn make-believe rock.

Yes!

I've no idea if I agree with Ian Mathers' Six By Seven (No.95) blurb, but it was good enough to persuade me to buy the album on CD (it's now at the bottom of my pending pile, to be heard in approximately 4 months' time). Mathers' Endless Summer (No.74) was excellent too, though I know I don't agree with his high estimation there. Just below it, I enjoyed Todd Hutlock's take on Villalobos's Alcachofa (No.73), partly because writing about minimal techno is so damn hard to do without concocting ridiculous imagery or falling back onto cliche. Todd avoided both pitfalls with ease.

I actually need to stop now because there's just too much, and this post is already too long for 100% of the internet to read (margin of error 0.1%). I've not mentioned any song blurb in the top fifty and I've barely touched on the top twenty albums page which was the best overall page of the lot! I just can't cover it all, but leave a comment if you fancy mentioning anything else in particular.

The Essays

I have no real interest in country music, but I found Thomas Inskeep and Josh Love's chat about country very interesting: it seems I'm not alone in my disinterest for the genre, it discussed why, but it also explained a little why I might be missing out. Josh:

"The big complaint I think people still have is that country is corny, but of course that's because the songs are actually about stuff. It's a lot easier to not be corny when your songs are about nothing."

I don't know how I might adjust to songs that are actually about stuff. That kinda feels like a challenge.

Dan Weiss wrote an interesting piece about the de-politicisation of this decade's music:

"Twee ambiguity returned to the forefront with the freak-folk of Joanna Newsom and orchestral outpourings of Sufjan Stevens paving the way for too-hip LCD Soundsystem and Animal Collective to putter into the fold. Radiohead's lyrics went back to not making sense."

"...Unfortunately, those who really did detail atrocities went mostly unheard and unwanted, especially in rap. Nas reversed his tough-guy roots to do hardline reporting in a KRS-One move most took as preachy. Mr. Lif and Public Enemy made no waves ripping the housing crisis and even star of the hour Lil Wayne mostly got laughed down for trying to extend his moment ten minutes to blast Al Sharpton."

Is that all about the internet? The net is an eternal feedback loop. If your fans are a little bit annoyed with some of your lyrics, it's easier than ever for them to tell you, tell your label, and tell other fans. Where once they might've silently slid away, now they bitch and moan in comment boxes. And political lyrics are always likely to provoke negative feedback. When the net puts a billion opinions in front of you, idiots and experts level in the name of democracy, it's so much easier to play safe and out of the rabble.

Finally, I must recommend Mike Powell's piece (made of lots of little pieces) which is written in such a thoughtful way, using anecdotes and confessions and unanswered questions. Mike never writes like an expert handing down truth; he's always accessible, open to ideas, perceptive but not prescriptive. His work is always worth a careful read, and his essay for The Stylus Decade is no exception.

The Stylus Decade pt. III: The Lists

2010-01-18T23:12:00.000Z

There's two ways to analyse The Stylus Decade: we can talk about the lists, and we can talk about the writing. Unfortunately most of the analysis I've seen so far has been fixated on the former, but I'd like to discuss both over two posts.

The Lists

Complaining about lists is even more tedious and pointless than complaining about referees (I seem to be making a lot of referee analogies lately), so I'm going to break with internet convention and be positive about it. Both listmakers and referees have a massive number of potential decisions to make that no other single observer could possibly agree 100% with (the vast majority of decisions in a football game go unremarked-upon, including hundreds of decisions not to blow the whistle for a potential infringement). There are 40,000 albums released every year; that makes 400,000 for the decade; it's impossible to pick a sample a hundred-large which simultaneously includes all the albums reader A loves but none of the albums he thinks are over-rated (but are loved by reader B). Let's not even get started on the songs list! Both these boring and irrational pursuits of ref-slagging and list-slagging are easy to learn and impossible to master, which unfortunately makes for a lot of bullshit swilling around the internet.

The main criticisms of The Stylus Decade are that it's a predictable result and that it's too similar to Pitchfork's P2K list: Kid A at No.1 and Sound of Silver at No.2 is boring, and the Kid A result, Discovery at No.3 and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot at No.4 is identical to Pitchfork (these criticisms are pretty much the same, because the people who follow music lists closely enough to predict them are the same people who complain about the ubiquity of Pitchfork taste). Several of our staff are disappointed that Kid A won: those being the staff who didn't vote for it; if a record I hadn't voted for had won, I'd be disappointed too.

Even Simon Reynolds was unhappy - as he wrote on his blissblog, "The Stylus Decade was a jolly good read, but, um, those results. Meaning the Top 20 albums. The same old names." Then he revealed his ballot, including Discovery (his No.5, our No.3), Kid A (his No.11, our No.1), The Blueprint (his No.17, our No.7), Since I Left You (his No.24, our No.9) and Ys (his No.25, our No.14). That's right, five of "the same old names" in our top twenty had their positions boosted by his votes.

These kind of criticisms, which I've seen elsewhere too, are just so transparent. Presumably he voted for Discovery because he loves it and admires it and believes it should be recognised; exactly the same reasons I voted for Sound Of Silver, and Untrue, and so on: the same old names he wasn't so pleased to see. It's a group list. It's a collective effort built by consensus and compromise. It's not The Simon Decade. If these names hadn't been at the top of the list, we'd be liable to claims of inconsistency. And of course anyone who's been paying attention knows all about these albums already; these people should have learned by now that the lower reaches of these lists are where to find the 'interesting' choices.

As for the Pitchfork comparison: well anyone harbouring impressions of Stylus and Pitchfork being like chalk and cheese clearly didn't read both sites. Also, about half-a-dozen writers who contributed to The Stylus Decade also contributed to P2K, so inevitably there's going to be significant overlap. I'm going to quote Stylus writer John Cunningham now, he's already done some comparison between our list and Pitchfork's:

"I do think there are a lot of similarities between our list and Pitchfork (somewhat inevitable, as Nick admits), but I'm also pleased at some of the differences:

Burial, Untrue: #5 Stylus, #41 Pitchfork
Primal Scream, XTRMNTR: #10 Stylus, #142 Pitchfork
Ghostface Killah, Fishscale: #11 Stylus, #75 Pitchfork
Joanna Newsom, Ys: #14 Stylus, #82 Pitchfork
Eminem, The Marshall Mathers LP: #16 Stylus, #119 Pitchfork
Bjork, Vespertine: #17 Stylus, #92 Pitchfork
PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea: #18 Stylus, #124 Pitchfork

Not to mention the fact that nearly a third of the albums in the Stylus top 100 don't show up at all in Pitchfork's top 200, including 11 albums in the top 60:

24. Bob Dylan, "Love and Theft"
33. Miranda Lambert, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
36. Junior Boys, So This Is Goodbye
40. Studio, West Coast/Yearbook 1
45. Bark Psychosis, Codename:Dustsucker
46. Lindstrom, Where You Go I Go Too
49. Mountain Goats, We Shall All Be Healed
54. Britney Spears, Blackout
56. Booka Shade, Movements
57. Luomo, The Present Lover
59. Belle & Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress"

I'll add to that, five top 20 Pitchfork records which placed lower (or not at all) on ours:

Modest Mouse, The Moon & Antarctica (Pitchfork 6, Stylus 34)
Sigur Ros, Agetis Byrjun (Pitchfork 8, Stylus 77)
The White Stripes, White Blood Cells (Pitchfork 12, not on Stylus)
Sufjan Stevens, Illinoise (Pitchfork 16, Stylus 72)
Kanye West, Late Registration (Pitchfork 18, not on Stylus)

And we can also point out that, eg., the Stylus 100 included Luomo twice, Britney once, and the White Stripes not at all. Doesn't that say something about the orientation of the site?

Those complaining about Stylus's one, three and four matching Pitchfork's don't seem to have fathomed that there are ninety-seven albums not at one, three and four.

As for the singles list, the voters, writers and seemingly readers too have all acknowledged the impossibility of naming a hundred-best songs of a decade, so it's even less worth arguing over. All I'll say is a song I didn't vote for, won.

What bloody morons voted on this thing!?

Markus Thorsen's LIVE

2010-01-15T21:08:00.002Z

When I said I wanted to be more picky about what I write, I meant I want to do more interesting things like this: before Christmas I wrote a foreword for a book! OK, so it's a book that hardly anyone will buy, but it's a book nonetheless, so it feels a bit more... important than writing for a magazine, which itself feels somehow more worthwhile than writing for a website. It's a book of live rock photography by my friend Markus Thorsen, with lots of stunning images taken around Edinburgh's smaller venues. More details (including my foreword) can be found at his website.

The Stylus Decade pt.II: My Blurbs

2010-01-09T21:15:00.010Z

Since the initial purpose of this blog was just to put everything I write for other sources in one place for my mum and dad to see (Hi dad!), I may as well put all my Stylus Decade blurbs here too. If your interest is more in music than in me -- say if you're not a member of my immediate family -- I highly recommend skipping back to the main Stylus Decade page and reading the masses of great album and single overviews there.

Here's what I did:

Album No.96
The Twilight Sad
Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters (2007, Fat Cat)

...but zero springs, and just one depressing summer; that's how sullen Scots tally up the years. James Graham's memories feature cold days and hard rain, and Andy MacFarlane's guitars howl like freezing winds, but the key track on The Twilight Sad's debut album, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, is about that summer as remembered by the teenage Graham: a summer of school holiday boredom growing into intense feelings of isolation. Graham starts by innocently announcing his age, before exploding into a fury against his "strong father figure" and "loving mother". The rage is unreasonable, probably, but the savage, sarcastic delivery leaves no doubt that it's real, too.

So that's the summer jam. But it's not just Graham who knows how to exploit the simple power of placid/passionate shifts. MacFarlane's Mogwai-sized guitar storms and soft, glistening lulls provide a sense of size, kept in check by the recurring appearance of a warm, wheezing accordion. Those dynamic moves within each song are also part of a larger pattern, cohering nine ordered tracks into one intense, epic and elegant journey. By the end, Graham's vulnerable kid has become a persecutor, but he hasn't turned nasty, he's just grown up.

Single No.84
Antony & The Jonsons
"Hope There's Someone" (Secretly Canadian, 2005)

Antony Hegarty's voice is hard to deal with in a communal setting: his frail, androgynous wail is unsettling, his vulnerability is total; it begs to be mocked. But in solitude, with attention, it's uniquely moving. Antony takes 30 seconds into his breakthrough album to convince doubters of its power—that chilling falsetto, rising into the chorus, sounds like he's bravely holding onto the tune while he weeps. The anxiety of "Hope There's Someone" is unresolvable for decades to come; but listening to it alone, it feels pressing.

Single No.69
The Avalanches
"Since I Left You" (Modular, 2000)

What happened to the bright new dawn of collage pop? You'd be forgiven for hearing this record eight years ago and predicting that this decade would be full of songs just like it: cheaper, faster computers, better software, and Napster surely meant that millions of kids would be able to knock up a seamless montage of an afternoon. It didn't quite happen like that, but don't blame the lawyers: there's plenty of unauthorised mash-ups and remixes around. Perhaps we just didn't realise how outrageously skillful The Avalanches were. A decade in, nothing's come close to matching "Since I Left You"'s distillation of pure joy from a hundred different songs.

Single No.50
The Walkmen
"The Rat" (Record Collection, 2004)

All it takes is a well-intentioned request for The Walkmen to lose their rag: one long suffocating chord, furious, frantic drumming, and Hamilton Leithauser throwing accusations out like he dare not breathe in, throat tightened, anger but no air escaping. Leithauser's straining vocal and the momentum of the drums combine for a nervous energy that's thrilling to hear unleashed, like an articulate and timely rant that finally closes an argument. Like that, except that this is not final: even after a moment of reflection Leithauser returns to her door, and now he's pounding with both fists.

Single No.29
Gnarls Barkley
"Crazy" (Downtown, 2005)

Of all the crushing realisations to dawn on a child, that the pop charts aren't always right is one that occasionally receives a challenge in adulthood. Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" was No.1 in the UK for nine weeks before being deleted by the band. They had no fanbase, they're not sexy, they weren't famous, it wasn't a gimmick, it wasn't in an advert or a movie. Sometimes the song wins, or rarer still, the performance. Dangermouse's ghoulishly detached backing chorus and dramatic string sweeps wouldn't sound half as good without Cee-Lo's masterful one-take vocal, a lesson to any singer still holding on to the handrail.

Single No.2
OutKast
"Hey Ya!" (LaFace, 2003)

Mark was a trance DJ. He didn't talk to me about music because he knew I wasn't into trance. Annie was a huge Westlife fan. She didn't talk to me about music because she knew I wasn't into Westlife. Jack didn't talk to me about music because he was eight years old. In the space of a week each one of them started excited conversations with me about one song. "It's wicked," Mark told me; "It's amazing!" Annie told me; "I love it!" Jack told me; "I know!" I said. Then the video came out. Next time I saw them, we talked about it again. You can guess how it went because you had the same conversations. "Hey Ya!" acted like a decade-best song from day one: it opened eyes, it energised people, and there was almost no dissension. "It's not hip-hop," a few whined; "but listen to what it is," everyone replied. So, we could talk about its exuberance, its charisma, its bravery, its dichotomous structure, its odd time signature, its veiled ambiguity; but I know y'all don't want to hear me, you just want to dance.

The Stylus Decade pt. I: Intro

2010-01-05T22:28:00.005Z

The Stylus reunion has commenced!

The artwork is terrific, the lists so far are pretty good (no list satisfies everyone, not even the compilers), and the writing is really, really great too.

My only hope is that my own blurbs don't stand out as consistently inferior to the others. I don't think they do, and they haven't been picked out and mercilessly ripped apart yet (so far as I've seen), but I've got a high-profile one coming on Friday, we'll see how it gets on. Music writers are like referees, in that virtually all the discussion that surrounds them is negative. So I'll know I've done a decent job if I'm not talked about.

Stylus is the best publication I ever wrote for, and it always will be. So this decade-end reunion, and this decade-end, seems like a fitting time to withdraw from music writing. I think I've done quite well.

I'm not retiring completely (this post could quickly be made to look silly), but I'm going to be a lot more choosy about what I write. No meat'n'potatoes stuff. Features about Scottish bands I love and who I want to help? Sure, and I've got one commissioned already. Album reviews for artists I feel strongly about? Hmmm, possibly. Festival reviews, and reviews for sold-out or expensive gigs? Definitely. But I'd rather spend time on other things -- reading (not about music), watching films, going to the gym, learning Ableton Live, going out -- than all that other stuff that clogs my week up, little previews, middling reviews, all the mindless procrastinating on blogs...

Wake up! Go read Stylus!

My Favourite Albums of 2009

2009-12-31T08:31:00.001Z

1. Butcher Boy - React Or Die
year-end heads-up for DiS

Glasgow is typically characterised as a dreich, dank and violent city, but much of its musical heritage seems to be centred around the light, graceful and romantic: Orange Juice, the Fannies, Belle & Seb, and Camera Obscura. Butcher Boy need to be added to that list, and not just because of their similar style; their continuing low-profile, even in their home city, is perplexing considering the strength of both their albums so far. If debut Profit In Your Poetry was hugely promising, React Or Die fulfils that promise, with ten achingly pretty, perfectly paced and impeccably produced songs in thirty fatless minutes.

In opener 'When I'm Asleep', singer John Blaine Hunt pointedly insists that his night-times are sterile: "I never dream, I never feel anything" he sings over a trilling mandolin melody. His vocal control is important: he doesn't hold a note for an instant more than necessary; it's only when the song swells, when the strings and mandolin combine into a gorgeous melancholy, that his vocals allow for breath, his emotion seeping through. It's as if his stoicism is stolen by the song.

This whole record does that to me. I struggle to stay composed. I've tried to pinpoint why the keyboard outro of 'You're Only Crying For Yourself' draws my eyebrows into an arch and teases my tear ducts to stir, every time I hear it, like Pavlov's bell. But, well, my attempt at critical detachment is stolen by that song, by all of them, by their exquisite arrangements, by Hunt's romantic lyrics. I'm convinced React Or Die will one day be recognised as an equal of any of its hometown's indie-pop classics. For now, it's either "just too beautiful and bright for these times"; or I'm finally going batty.

React Or Die is streaming in full on Butcher Boy's MySpace, and on Spotify.

And the rest...

2. Animal Collective - Merriweather Post Pavillion
MPP was The Skinny's album of the year, as you can read about here (or that last blog post on the left there).
3. Fever Ray - Fever Ray
In my head, the music I imagine my hypothetical future self will make is closer to this in style than any other album, ever.

4. Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career
My first Camera Obscura album. I know! Between this and Butcher Boy, I've had a swoonful year.

5. We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls
My breathless Clash review for it here, which I knew was breathless at the time but I still stand by 100%.

6. Dananananaykroyd - Hey Everyone!
My 5-star Skinny review here, which I think is only my fourth full-marks album review - after Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, In Rainbows, and Third.

7. Bat For Lashes - Two Suns
I fucking love that cover by the way.
8. The Field - Yesterday and Today
In retrospect, better than his first album, which I wanted to like more than I actually did. Yesterday and Today has several passages of staggering beauty, I can't imagine ever getting bored of it.

9. Japandroids - Post-Nothing
Anthemic garage rock well encapsulated by the minimalism and friendship of the cover; until any clever sod can work out what the fuck is really "important", the answer is mates, music, girls and fun. Lad rock says the same, but Japandroids say it better.
10. Tony Allen - Secret Agent
One of the many sensible objections to music lists is that it's impossible to compare two works of art from completely different genres, so it's feels kinda weird positioning Tony Allen in a list just under Japandroids (and, for that matter, Japandroids in a list just under The Field). I try to make a guess as to how much I've enjoyed a record and rank it accordingly, because when you begin to think in genres, you apply your own perception of stylistic limits to the limit-free work of others. I discovered Afrobeat in 2009; it's not a genre I claim to know a lot about, and perhaps Afrobeat know-alls aren't impressed by Secret Agent; I haven't a clue. All I know is I played it to death and loved it every time.

The Skinny's Favourite Albums of 2009

2009-12-28T01:29:00.008Z

1. ANIMAL COLLECTIVE - MERRIWEATHER POST PAVILION

@The Skinny

Time is a great leveller when it comes to musical reputations, because it's much easier to make a solid judgement when you have the space to think freely about what you're listening to without the pernicious influences of hype, fashion or the temptation to be a contrarian. A year after it was first leaked, it comes as no surprise that Merriweather Post Pavilion still feels like the obvious choice for album of the year. It felt special from the moment it landed. If 12 months haven't dulled our feelings, will ten years? When will someone criticise it on its own terms, instead of on the tenuous extra-musical grounds of over-hype or hipster-hate? Where is the backlash going to come from?

"My parents listen to it and they're proud of it, and they like a song here and there, but it's definitely not their thing," Geologist tells The Skinny. So perhaps Geologist's mum could tell us why we're wrong? "No, I don't think she'll want to start the backlash! It's something she can show to her friends or to my grandparents, show them that I'm doing something worthwhile with my life, even though I have a beard!"

Merriweather Post Pavilion is going to be spoken of in rarefied terms for years to come, so you'd better get used to it. Sick of hearing the Kid A story yet? Well there's a MPP myth in the works already, you know how it'll go: progressive-this and zeitgeist-that. It's a wonderful album. It deserves it. "We love this record and are really happy with it, and we're very happy that people are receiving it so well. It feels good, you know?" Geologist says. "Everybody who puts something out into the world... wants it to be respected. We put a lot of work into it. But I think we have to be careful about it, we're going to be very conscious next time not to make MPP part two because that would be pretty boring." Panda Bear is still picking faults: "I don't know that we'll ever be completely happy," he says. "Listening to something 500 times or so throughout writing, touring, recording, mixing, mastering... you start to notice little things you might change. Sometimes you want to change things just because when you started the thing you were a different person."

Change it? Don't be silly. Panda Bear tells us something else remarkable: "We knew we wanted to have more of a focus on bass and bass frequencies, and we had some themes in mind like ballet, but like most of our albums the spirit of the thing kind of just came on gradually." Did you catch that? Ballet! Geologist, on the other hand, drops names like Kylie, dubstep star Burial, and Berlin minimal techno label Kompakt. Try to pin a genre on Merriweather Post Pavilion. It can't be done. Part of the MPP story, still in production, will require a succinct distillation of its aesthetic, one or two words to sum it up. But everyone's stumped. Merriweather Post Pavilion is an alien conflation of Burial, Kylie, Kompakt, ballet and bass. How could it not be album of the year?

the rest @The Skinny

2. GRIZZLY BEAR - VECKATIMEST
Through no fault of their own, sometimes great bands acquire unhealthy legacies: Nirvana, I'm looking at you particularly. One of Pavement's aesthetic choices which was seized on big-time was a perceived musical sloppiness, a too-cool-to-care attitude that has afflicted countless indie rock bands since. Grizzly Bear care about the placing and playing of every note, and that discipline doesn't breed sterility: their studied vocal harmonies evoke plenty of emotion. And when they're livelier, as in the first two songs and the last two-but-one, the spotless production gives every movement its space. Grizzly Bear might've sent you to sleep before, but now they'll start you dreaming.

3. DIRTY PROJECTORS - BITTE ORCA
Bitte Orca is where everything finally came together smoothly for New Yorker Dave Longstreth, mastermind of the Dirty Projectors, who'd previously handicapped himself by concocting ambitious ideological aims for his albums that he wasn't quite able to fulfil. Bitte Orca keeps things simple, relatively speaking, by foregoing overarching themes in favour of accessibility, achieved not by compromise but by focus. It's not a concept that glues these nine tracks together, it's the songs themselves: post-punk, afrobeat, indie pop, garage rock and contemporary R&B all mingle happily in the company of Longstreth and the girls' elastic vocals. Bizarre on paper, brilliant in practice.

4. DOOM - BORN LIKE THIS
2009 was a strong year for hip-hop, thanks to the likes of Raekwon and Mos Def outperforming the disappointing returns of megastars Jay-Z and Eminem. Best of them all was Daniel Dumile's umpteenth album, his first as all-caps DOOM, an endlessly replayable journey through his comic book rogue fantasies that's a little darker than prior efforts. Dumile's gruff croak serves up a thousand perplexing rhymes for you to unravel, and guest spots from Rae, Ghostface and a little-known lady called Empress Star all impress. Born Like This is Dumile's best solo record since Vaudeville Villain.

5. THE TWILIGHT SAD - FORGET THE NIGHT AHEAD
"We didn't want to make something that sounded like the first record, we definitely think we've progressed and moved on as a band" guitarist and producer Andy MacFarlane tells The Skinny. But how Forget The Night Ahead compares to debut Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters is a matter of heated debate. We (or rather you, discerning reader) placed Fourteen Autumns second on our list of the best Scottish albums of the decade; the NME included this one in its overall century of the century. "You'll always get some people saying 'it's not as good as the first record'" MacFarlane says. "Those people are wrong. But other people have been very kind about this one." It's a tight call, we'll grant that.

6. CONVERGE - AXE TO FALL
"This is a brilliant, furious album that manages to be both misanthropic in its message yet therapeutic in its sheer catharsis" said Chris Cusack in his 5-star Skinny review of Converge's seventh album Axe To Fall. But it wasn't straightforward for the progressive hardcore band to put together, because they borrowed the talents of nearly 20 guest performers. "Bringing some friends in to contribute to the songs added some new challenges to the process for us for sure," vocalist Jacob Bannon tells us. "But I really enjoyed what we created together and it seems that people are enjoying it, so that's a positive thing".

7. THE PHANTOM BAND - CHECKMATE SAVAGE
"We went in [to the studio] pretty naïve thinking that we were ready to make an album and were all set to record it in a fortnight, and it ended up taking about 9 months on and off" reflects Rick Anthony, lead singer of Glasgow's Phantom Band, who released the best debut LP of 2009. "It sometimes feels like we’re parents of this kid – you try and bring it up right and do the best by it but at some point you have to step back and let it go off on its own. It has its fuck ups but we still love it." We love it too.

8.MASTODON - CRACK THE SKYE [by Dave Kerr]
Having equated the struggles of modern life with hunting for crystal skulls down a dark hole on 2006’s Blood Mountain, Mastodon took to the sky(e) for the fourth and final album in their ‘elements’ series. “It’s an astral planing dream,” guitarist Brent Hinds forewarned us of the progressive odyssey to unfold. With a narrative backdrop of Tsarist Russia, psychedelic flavours were thrown into a blender with banjo-led sludge metal and ADD song structure – an unlikely recipe which has seen the Atlanta quartet realise a curious crossover appeal. So what are they doing differently? “We scream like banshees being stuck in the ass with a knife, although now there’s a lot more singing going on,” Hinds shrugs. Will someone please relay this idea to Duffy?

9. BAT FOR LASHES - TWO SUNS
For all the talk of its mystical themes and lavish production, what few people seem to mention about Two Suns is just how great a singer Natasha Khan is. Granted, singing ability isn't as important as X-Factor judges might claim, but Two Suns wouldn't be half the album it is without Khan's exceptional pipes. There's not a hair out of place on Bat For Lashes' Two Suns, a surprisingly inventive and remarkably touching second album that confirms Khan's singular talent. She even persuaded Scott Walker to collaborate; how can she possibly exceed that?

10. BUTCHER BOY - REACT OR DIE
It's well established by now that Glasgow's indie-pop credentials are second to none, a view supported by another fabulous album by Camera Obscura this year. But don't overlook Butcher Boy, whose second album React Or Die is a real treasure, borrowing equally from Belle & Sebastian and Arthur Lee's Love in the sculpture of ten heartbreakingly pretty songs. "My initial direction was that we should aim for something folky, in the sense of it being old and unsettling", singer/songwriter John Blaine Hunt told us. "And even if it was unsettling, it must still be beautiful." It definitely is.

FUCK YOU...

2009-12-17T21:55:00.000Z

OK so I'm warming to the idea of Rage Against The Machine topping the UK charts this week, in preference to the new X-Factor winner. Generally, I think RATM is tedious, adolescent bullshit, and I couldn't give a fuck about Christmas number one, or Easter number one, or Halloween number one. It's always shit. It doesn't influence my life. I didn't care when Mr. Blobby was the Christmas number one, or Bob The Builder, or Westlife or Alexandra Burke and I won't care if it's Joe McElderberry. But it would be quite funny to see the world's media squirm as they try to explain it, because saying the number one is an age-old song called "Killing In The Name Of" doesn't explain it. Would Christmas Top Of The Pops bleep out every single "fuck"? They'd have to, but it would draw more attention to it than conceal it.

Today Tom Morello and Zach De La Rocha appeared live on BBC Radio to talk about it. Before they went on-air, they were politely asked not to sing the offending lines, to which they agreed. But they couldn't hold to that, of course...

In a year in which Britain has seemed to regress towards conservatism with the Sachsgate pallaver (also involving BBC Radio), it would at least be amusing to end the year with a redress, a collective and explicit "FUCK YOU!" aimed at whoever you want it to be aimed at.

...I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME!

2009-12-17T21:54:00.000Z

But I didn't really want to dwell on RATM, because I've been thinking further about about how people react to hype. Last week I criticised music writers who have purposefully avoided Animal Collective's Merriweather Post Pavilion even though there's a good chance they'd really like it. These other people, I said, were reacting against the hype, refusing to even take part in the discussion out of some sense that they were fighting the cause of a greater good. How silly! And some who did listen, only to review, were forced to trawl the depths of their creativity to come up with criticisms, out of a belief that someone ought to be damn criticising it, even if it meant overlooking a lot of positive qualities.

Make sure you're sitting down for this, cos it's a shocker: I, the accuser, have been guilty of similar transgressions too. It's true. I have met and interviewed Vampire Weekend, for an extended cover feature on them for The Skinny. I have seen them live twice -- once in a mid-sized Edinburgh club called the Bongo Club, I was there to interview the local support band; and once in the Californian desert, after I had met them, at Coachella. Confession: I have never listened to their debut album. Yeah, I probably would like it, even though I wasn't too impressed by them live. What can I say? I couldn't be arsed. I wrote the feature and still didn't feel compelled to acquire it (you might call that unprofessional, but you get what you pay for. I wasn't given a promo of it, and I don't like downloading things. My feature said nothing about the album, only about the background. Now, I would fire up Spotify, of course). I've never listened to any Arctic Monkeys' album either, actually. Of course I've heard individual songs by both, but never out of choice.

Why did I opt-in to the Animal Collective conversation but not the Vampire Weekend or Arctic Monkeys' ones? I have a hunch it's because I already knew and enjoyed two AC records, so I was more receptive to the idea that I would enjoy MPP; whereas Vampire Weekend and the Monkeys were new bands with hugely hyped debut albums. I hadn't invested any time in them before the hype-rush.

Guess I should get round to the Monkeys at least by now, eh?

I realise that instead of trying to put people on some kind of hype-reaction spectrum, I should've just linked to these two Wikipedia pages:

Reactance

Reverse Psychology

In summary:

"Reactance is an emotional reaction in direct contradiction to rules or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. It can occur when someone is heavily pressured to accept a certain view or attitude. Reactance can cause the person to adopt or strengthen a view or attitude that is contrary to what was intended."

"Reverse psychology... relies on the psychological phenomenon of reactance, in which a person has a negative emotional response in reaction to being persuaded, and thus chooses the option which is being advocated against."

Hype is encouragement, lots of hype leads to lots of persuasion, but too much hype invokes reverse psychology: everyone wants you to listen to and love this album so much that you dig your heels in, because it's no longer encouragement, it's pressure, and it feels like a curtailment of your freedom to choose whether to like it or not.

Makes perfect sense, put like that.

But it's still an emotional response to outside factors, and so it should still be discouraged from entering the mindset of a music writer. Although I never bothered with the Vampire Weekend or Arctic Monkeys, I've never claimed to dislike them for their hype. I didn't react against it, I just didn't react to it, in either direction.

Amy Millan - Masters of the Burial

2009-12-14T21:02:00.003Z

Amy Millan - Masters of the Burial
album review for DiS

If there exists such a thing as a die-hard Stars fan, then Amy Millan will find out when she counts the sales of her second solo LP Masters Of The Burial, because it's hard to imagine anyone other than a devout Stars acolyte being interested enough to buy it. If mediocre first album Honey From The Tombs didn't put the casual and curious off, mediocre second album Masters Of The Burial certainly will. It's an intimate, country-influenced half-hour that's very easy to miss because there's so little actually to it. For every delicate moment of prettiness, there's a dozen that are just too delicate to register. It floats on, never daring to infringe your day, except possibly to help you end it. If there is an appropriate utility for Masters Of The Burial, it could be as a late-night anaesthetic.

Amy Millan has a very pleasant voice, it's true, and she uses it throughout this album, which is a good idea of hers. No guest singers for Amy's ballads, but Amy takes on four written by others, and these are among the strongest on the record. Richard Hawley's pensive ballad 'Run For Me' is sung slowly with just a chiming electric guitar for backup, and Amy's voice is very clear to enjoy on Jenny Whitely's 'Day To Day', which she sings with only a basic drumbeat. One of the more maximal arrangements features a really lovely string backing: Sarah Harmer's wistful ballad 'Old Perfume' is the album's stand-out. You get the point: everything's a ballad.

And yeah, I get it too -- it's intentional, Masters Of The Burial wants to sound intimate and cosy and warm -- 'Lost Compass' in particular sounds like it was taped within an inch of its happening. The problem is: albums prized for their sense of intimacy need points of connection -- a terse turn of phrase perhaps, a few cutting and convincing lines, or a soulful vocal performance, or a brief rush of vim and vigour -- because otherwise they're not intimate, they're just reserved. Like a lot of great records, Masters Of The Burial is minimally arranged, slowly performed and quietly recorded; but there's never a spark here because Millan doesn't give enough of herself to it. Her lyrics are familiar and generalised, so her personality is kept shrouded. She covers Death Cab For Cutie's 'I Will Follow You Into The Dark' and I don't believe a word of it. In 'Low Sail' she repeatedly tells of a determination to "find my way back to you", but it already feels like a foregone conclusion. She wants her man to stay with her in 'Finish Line', but it's more a polite request than a plea; I don't think she really cares, so neither do I.

Masters Of The Burial ends on a high note, literally. By leaving the final bar unresolved, Millan creates the tiniest hint of tension, the only such moment on the whole record. An unresolved ending in a film would suggest a forthcoming sequel; but not even Stars fans could get excited by that prospect.

5/10

The Skinny's Best Scottish Albums of the Decade

2009-12-09T23:18:00.001Z

Top 20 write-ups at The Skinny website

50. Lapsus Linguae - You Got Me Fraiche
49. Funk D'Void - Volume Freak
48. Dead Or American - Ends
47. We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls
46. De Rosa - Mend
45. James Yorkston - When The Haar Rolls In
44. Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career
43. Found - This Mess We Keep Reshaping
42. Christ. - Metamorphic Reproduction Miracle
41. Laeto - Zwoa
40. Sons & Daughters - Love The Cup
39. The Delgados - Hate
38. James Yorkston - The Year Of The Leopard
37. Y'All Is Fantasy Island - Rescue Weekend
36. Foil - Never Got Hip
35. Half Cousin - The Function Room
34. Withered Hand - Good News
33. The Beta Band - Hot Shots II
32. Butcher Boy - React Or Die
31. Half Cousin - Iodine
30. Macrocosmica - Art of the Black Earth
29. Life Without Buildings - Any Other City
28. The Phantom Band - Checkmate Savage
27. The Twilight Sad - Forget The Night Ahead
26. Mogwai - Rock Action
25. Arab Strap - The Last Romance
24. Aerogramme - My Heart Has A Wish That You Would Not Go
23. Idlewild - The Remote Part
22. Biffy Clyro - Puzzle
21. Belle & Sebastian - Dear Catastophe Waitress
20. Malcolm Middleton - Into The Woods
19. Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand
18. Uncle John & Whitelock - There Is Nothing Else
17. King Creosote - Rocket DIY
16. Meursault - Pissing On Bonfires/Kissing With Tongues
15. De Rosa - Prevention
14. Mogwai - Happy Songs For Happy People
13. Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out Of This Country
12. Arab Strap - The Red Thread
11. Aerogramme - Sleep And Release
10. Mogwai - Mr Beast
9. Boards of Canada - The Campfire Headphase
8. The Delgados - The Great Eastern
7. Arab Strap - Monday At The Hug & Pint
6. King Creosote - KC Rules OK
5. Boards of Canada - Geogaddi
4. Frightened Rabbit - The Midnight Organ Fight
3. Primal Scream - XTRMNTR
2. The Twilight Sad - Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters
1. Idlewild - 100 Broken Windows

I've seen worse lists (even though it is topped by a thoroughly unremarkable album). It doesn't exactly match mine, of course, so therefore it's incorrect. But it's not bad.

I googled to see if there was any reaction. On one forum, I read "what a shite list! Two from Mogwai, Arab Strap and King Creosote in the Top 20? What about promoting lesser known bands? It's all rather mainstream and boring for me!" On another forum, I read "what a shite list! I've not heard of any of that Top 20 except Franz Ferdinand! Where's The View, Glasvegas and Paolo Nutini? Bunch of elistist snobs!" Oh well, can't satisfy everyone. Probably can't satisfy anyone (not even Malcolm Middleton).

There are 7 (seven) albums from 2009 in there. This year has been a fantastic year for Scottish music, so in that way it shouldn't be a surprise. But in another way it's very odd, because canons take time to form, and decade lists compiled before the decade has even finished are more likely to be over-weighted in older years and under-weighted in recent years. That's very true for the Pitchfork list, the Lost At Sea list, the Stylus list. If any of these pubs do it again in a few years, it'll be more proportionate. For 7/50 records in this list to be from this year, which hasn't even finished yet, is remarkable. Even more remarkable is that those seven do not include Dananananaykroyd's incredible Hey Everyone!

This was the top ten which I submitted, which was also 2009-heavy:

1. The Twilight Sad - Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters
2. Primal Scream - XTRMNTR
3. Butcher Boy - React Or Die
4. Mogwai - Happy Songs for Happy People
5. Y'All Is Fantasy Island - Rescue Weekend
6. Boards of Canada - Geogaddi
7. Camera Obscura - My Maudlin Career
8. Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand
9. We Were Promised Jetpacks - These Four Walls
10.James Yorkston - Year of the Leopard

and even though I squeezed three 2009 albums into ten spaces, I couldn't find a space for Dananananaykroyd either! Scheisse.

It's also been pointed out to me by a mate that Kode9 is Glaswegian. That reminded me that Kevin Martin, of The Bug, was born in Paisley. If this list was not limited by geography to a country which is still very culturally homogenous, it would be criticised for itself being quite homogenous, being 95% indie-rock. In retrospect, it'd have been pretty cool if Memories Of The Future, London Zoo and Hudson Mohawke's Butter had made it, just for a bit of stylistic diversity. But (not butter) the first two are intrinsically linked with London, it would have been a bit odd to see them on a Scottish list. I wonder if they got any votes at all, just because the association is never made. And the latter (Butter) was released too late to be seriously considered - only a week or two before votes were cast.

The Pernicious Influence of Hype

2009-12-08T21:41:00.003Z

So it was exciting to have Simon Reynolds give the Stylus comeback a shout-out in his latest Guardian decade round-up yesterday. Also, he's participating, which was a surprise. I know he did an article for Stylus when it first opened, but he wasn't a regular contributor, unlike one or two of the regular writers who I believe can't take part. Anyway, one of the things Reynolds talked about was ex-Styluser Ian Cohen's Funeral blurb on Pitchfork's Decade list, which posited that Funeral was "the last of its kind", a unifying consensus-builder whose reception was so positive that it gave birth to a cynicism and contrarian-impulse in today's blogosphere that makes such unifying "event" records near-impossible now.

But cynicism and contrarianism have been a plasma through the internet's venous system since it came to life. Was Funeral's reception really cynicism-free? I liked Reynolds' phrasing that the blogosphere's "greatest liability" was that "there's no cool or ego-burnishing value to be generated from agreeing with other people". He's right: saying "I agree" doesn't impress anyone. Saying "no, you're wrong, and here's why..." is potentially very impressive. It's how you prove how smart you are, how different you are, how you tend to be right whilst everyone else is fooled by a variation of the same mysterious osmosis which fools the idiot public into believing the Black Eyed Peas are amazing. Look how smart I am, I see through it all. But that all depends on the "and here's why..." explanation being convincing.

Third gratuitous Stylus reference: the still-going Singles Jukebox last week caused a minor music blog kerfuffle by being very critical of the Animal Collective song "My Girls", being retrospectively analysed as it was missed on initial release. Of course, no record in the world could be loved universally, and there are surely lots of very good reasons to be unimpressed by Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavillion and "My Girls". But they weren't articulated well here; instead we got nit-picking rants, generalisations, assumptions and a lot of imagination. It looked less like genuine musical distaste and more like personal rep building. It wasn't "this is what I think of the music" it was "this is how uniquely I think".

It seems to me that a person's mode of reacting to music can be placed on a spectrum. At the far left, there are people who are very tolerant of and receptive to hype, who convince themselves that whatever their own most credible source says about a record is how they feel too; positive, negative or indifferent. These people rarely admit to being so influenced but to them, the canon is self-evidently accurate. At the other end, there are people who are very intolerant of and suspicious of hype. They convince themselves that the conventional wisdom on a record is dead wrong. If a record is well-hyped, it's probably shit, because other people get excited about rubbish things. People rarely confess to this position either (though Frank in my office does - which is maddening, but refreshing). To these people, the canon is self-evidently boring.

[Unfortunately, it's not quite so simple as this (so help me refine this if you can), because we have to work out what counts as "hype", a "credible source" and a "canon", because none of these things are the same for everyone. Also, I suspect a lot of people react differently, left-or-right, based on many different factors.]

Well, any critic who wants to be better at his job should strive to sit in the middle of that spectrum. The ideal is that no review should be influenced by other, prior reviews. I know I've been guilty of that in the past (and I probably don't know that I have, too), but people who put themselves forward as reviewers should at least attempt to adopt that mindset: of being equally as skeptical of hype as of dismissal. I don't think Ian Cohen is right that Funeral was the last of its kind, because I've read convincing rebuttals of that album's status, whilst the only Merriweather Post Pavillion backlash I've read has been straw-clutching and self-serving.

I admit it: I love Merriweather Post Pavillion; I don't care if you think I'm just another bee in the hivemind. I love Funeral too. So mock me.

Finally: to go further, the ideal is that no review should be influenced by any external factors at all. This reviewer must live in a cave with only a record player and a selection of fine headphones for company. Is Amy Winehouse's second album actually one of the best of the decade, as OMM and The Times have claimed? I always avoided it because I suspected she was mostly famous for being a fuck-up. Is it humanly possible to listen to that album without her tabloid persona influencing your reaction?

Japandroids, Super Adventure Club, Bronto Skylift @ Sneaky Pete's

2009-11-16T22:21:00.003Z

Japandroids @ Sneaky Pete's, Edinburgh, 13/11/09 (****)

live review for the skinny

Technical problems hold up tonights This Is Music at a sold-out Sneaky Pete's, meaning opening band Bronto Skylift take the stage an hour behind schedule. A delay can work for a band if the crowd is sufficiently excited, but tonight Bronto struggle to rile people up, despite the drummer doing his best by climbing onto the bar and smacking the lights out. It's not because they don't have energy, but because their painfully abrasive guitarwork and manic drumming is very indulgent: they concede no ground to audience members holding out for for a hook.

Super Adventure Club are indulgent in another way, in the long solos and multi-part multi-tempo songs sense. Sometimes it's hard to hold onto the thread of a song through so many changes, but when you can, it's riveting - Math Rock and 17th Century Ambassadors are particularly awe-inspiring. Near the end, a heavy, hard ten-minute long freeform instrumental piece is full-stopped by a scream and a belch; the next song starts with a smooth croon, harmonising backing vocals, and a melody like a 60s Fairy Liquid advert. Super Adventure Club are never predictable.

Vancouver garage rock duo Japandroids step the energy levels up a gear, and this time the crowd goes with them because they have the tunes to match. There's nothing complicated here: Japandroids play fast and loudly distorted teen anthems about girls and mates, with repetitive shouted vocals, easy to shoutalong to. So we do, mutually assuring each other that a manifesto for life developed as a kid can still apply in young adulthood. Responsibilities? Sorry, we've no space, you're not getting in. We prefer raucous mclusky covers with knob jokes, thanks.

New Stylus Link

2009-11-11T21:20:00.001Z

<-------------- wtf?

Frightened Rabbit, Ben TD, Ash, Wonderswan singles

2009-11-10T00:23:00.005Z

A few single reviews I've done recently and not been arsed to post on here...

Frightened Rabbit - Swim Until You Can't See Land (***)
single review for the skinny

Frightened Rabbit's success is based on nothing resembling modernity: ever since the first lovesick caveman grunted a tune, his descendants have been trying to marry clear storytelling with earnest convictions without tipping into mushy sentimentality. That's an easier balance to hold when girls aren't involved, so Swim's sexless metaphor about trying new things is delivered with a suitable level-headedness. Will Frightened Rabbit swim away from their comfort zone on album number three? Their breakthrough album was a break-up album; "Call this a drowning of the past," he sings here, "she is there on the shoreline throwing stones at my back." Let's hope he's not a specialist.

Ben TD - Leaves (***)
single review for the skinny

Let's give Glasgow-based singer-songwriter Ben TD the benefit of the doubt and say that his confused lyrics in Leaves are actually purposefully garbled. "I saw you in the street picking up leaves, isn't that funny" he starts, before strangely backtracking "cos leaves are cool, but not that cool". That's exactly the kind of mealy-mouthed blabbering that lovestruck men come out with, tongue engaged while brain's away for a walk. Leaves is a very lovestruck song, but unfortunately Ben TD misses a natural opportunity to tie it up into a neat little 3-minute package because he's got a minute more of pleading to do. Trim off that excess earnestness and this is a touching ode to the stupefying power of love.

MySpace

Ash - True Love 1980 (**)
single review for the skinny

It's a long time since anyone really cared about Ash, so in a valiant attempt to halt their decline, the Northern Irish rockers have promised to release 26 singles (one every fortnight for a year) instead of a new album. It's an interesting idea aimed at maintaining the interest and attention of fans over a longer period of time, but it could fall flat if all the songs are as poor as this one, the first of the proposed 26. True Love 1980 is a New Order parody, right down to the trite lyrics and flat singing, which aren't elements of New Order's sound that anyone should attempt to replicate. With tinny synths and schmaltzy verses, True Love 1980 is more foolish than brave.

Wonderswan - Furrrpile (**)
single review for the skinny

Leeds quartet Wonderswan say on their MySpace that they formed out of "a shared love for scuzzy 90s lo-fi slacker bands." No shit! The reason everyone's gone crazy about the upcoming Pavement reunion is because it's been demonstrated for a decade now that nobody can do Pavement quite like Pavement. Furrrpile is a crushingly dull imitation, featuring overdriven out-of-tune guitars recorded in low fidelity along with a flat and witless vocal: "Throw me on the furrrpile and I'll climb inside, down in the furrrpile we've got our own styles," and so on. Slacker cool can't be manufactured.

MySpace

The Dirty Dozen - Singles Column, November 09

2009-11-03T10:45:00.001Z

Compiling the Dirty Dozen is a dirty job because sometimes it involves bashing honest, hard-working bands who never upset anyone (because no-one ever listens to them). Then again, sometimes it involves bashing massively successful bands who make millions of girls greet, so that's virtually a public service. Snow Patrol's Just Say Yes (*) is as blubbery, wet and limp as a dead seal, and Gary Lightbody's pleading to the unfortunate subject of his affections is delivered with all the gusto of someone telling a child their dog died. Mind the Grange Hill cast's advice. Glasgow's Kick To Kill do a pretty good Cure impression for the first 80 seconds of Cut Me (**), but it's downhill from there due to the roughly four thousand repetitions of the shouted vocal hook. Dead Confederate's The Rat (**) is dark and gloomy, only coming to life when someone gets accused of having "stupid human for brains".

Eh? Local rockers Satellite Underground are already imagining a successful future, where they'll regularly be gigging in front of a Sea Of People (**). But you cannae pair "at least we're together" with "this time it's forever" without causing a wave of groans. Water And A Flame (**) is an over-polished melodramatic ballad, duetted between Daniel Merriweather and Adele. Ewwww! Meanwhile, 39-year old Rivers Cuomo is still writing songs about high school romances. Wheatus – sorry, I mean Weezer's (If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To (***) is ridiculous, but also kinda cute.

The Horrors' Whole New Way (***) is a strange choice for a single, a bonus track on the Japanese edition of their excellent recent Krautrock-inspired LP Primary Colours, it's no standout in that context. Passion Pit's full-length is a little tough to get through, because their rainbow-brite exuberance quickly gets annoying. But on its own, you'd need a heart of stone to deny Little Secrets' (****) earnest effervescence. If songs were judged by verses, few would appreciate The Cheek's Hung Up (****). But its brilliant stomping horn-led chorus more than makes up for the flatness elsewhere. John Peel woulda loved it.

Of all the Kate-Bush inspired femmes breaking this year, Mowgli's Road (****) marks Marina and The Diamonds out as the weirdest. Marina is so kooky, she cuckoos. Either a genius or a quack, we'll lean towards the former. Alex Turner is in typically graceful storytelling form on the Arctic Monkeys' Cornerstone (****). It's a perfectly measured slow pine for a lost love, but it just misses out on Single of the Month because Turner tries the most dubious rhyme of "ghost" with "toast" since Des'ree. Thin margins. Instead, the honours go to The Dead Weather's unique and baffling I Cut Like A Buffalo. Set to a reggae syncopation, singer Jack White riffs on a confusion between "choke" and "joke". "Is that you chokin'?" he hectors, "Or are you just jokin'?" It's not very funny, but when he makes a rhythmic choking sound over the breaks it sounds equally like a large animal suffocating, or a DJ scratching. Is that what "cut like a buffalo" means? No idea, but it's wonderfully eccentric.

Starless & Bible Black - Shape of the Shape

2009-10-18T17:22:00.003+01:00

Starless and Bible Black - Shape of the Shape
album review for drowned in sound

There's a King Crimson album called Starless and Bible Black, but this Manchester-based group say that's not their inspiration: it's in fact a 1965 track by jazz pianist Stan Tracey with the same name. That's not easy to believe judging by this record: second full-length Shape of the Shape involves no piano, lots of prog signifiers, and jazz in only the broad sense that includes lounge music (so, not very jazzy jazz). Lounge acts frequently hire vaguely exotic European singers, so Starless and Bible Black have a French lady who we could luxuriously refer to as a chanteuse - Hélène Gautier. But French female singers aren't always as gorgeous-sounding as the word used to describe them, and Gautier's unremarkable voice can do little to save a record mired in impeccable mediocrity.

To briefly give it some due, Shape of the Shape is lovingly produced, every pluck of a guitar string resonating in full, every gap between sounds given time to breathe. If your dad is like my dad -- caring more about the precision and clarity of the sound reproduced through his high-end speakers than about the melodies or rhythms or whatevers of the actual composition - well, Christmas is just around the corner and Shape of the Shape has a real warmth of sound. And there are a few lovely moments, such as when an angelic chorus revitalises fourth song 'Radio Blues' as it drifts towards its close by entering really high, in contrast with the low descending bassline.

But those moments get very lonely. Everything on Shape of the Shape is mid-tempo. Mid-tempo's fine, it's necessary, but like a referee, when you notice it it's a problem. Every song features at least one instance of the UFO synth effect, landing or taking-off or swooshing across the sky, like they do. Fine, sometimes. Nearly every song starts with the slow strum of an acoustic guitar, giving the whole record a grounding in folk. Of course, that's OK, in theory. Gautier's voice is high and weedy, she hits the notes, has little character. For the most part, trying to transcribe her lyrics is like trying to transcribe Liz Fraser, because she sometimes sings in French, and sometimes just poorly enunciates. The successes aren't encouraging: "Hold me down now my mind is open / tell me how many hearts are broken / how to see family tree, treasured, lost in history." Add meaningless mush to indecipherable yawning and the vocals are clearly not a strong point. But it's hard to know what might be a strength here, production apart. There are no hooks, no memorable tunes. There's no rollicking rhythmic excitement, no dynamic shifts, no climaxes, no purges. No one-liners, no discernible stories, no themes. No risks taken, no happy accidents occuring, no disasters, no distastefulness, no surprises. Shape of the Shape is bland and instantly forgettable.

One song breaks the mould a little, the nine-minute album centrepiece 'Les Furies', which achieves a kinetic energy we might be able to describe as 'upper mid-tempo'. After three whole minutes of stereo-weaving buzz effects - like having your head shaved with different-sized clippers mowing tangled patterns - 'Les Furies' gains a chugging guitarist and a drummer with a sense of urgency. His flailing fills and rolls towards the end are the only passages where Shape of the Shape rises out of its dreamy inertia.

Vocals aside, Shape of the Shape is a good articulation of how I imagined Emerson, Lake & Palmer might sound in their quieter moments, though I'd never actually listened to them. On Spotify, I found 'From The Beginning', which pretty much nails this album in four minutes. It's what prog became after its first flurries of invention - complacent, conservative, self-satisfied, cliched - not 'progressive' at all. It's sometimes hard to condemn an album as inoffensive as Shape of the Shape, but nobody is a music fan because they love competence.

4/10

The Dirty Dozen - Singles Column, October 09

2009-10-17T17:34:00.002+01:00

The Dirty Dozen
singles column for the skinny october 2009

Believe it or not, the Dirty Dozen isn't the dregs of the promo pile – some singles don't even earn a casual dismissal. Unfortunately, Stirling's Vegas Nights just squeeze in. They're apparently gaining support in the Far East, which is presumably why their warbling harmony vocalist seems to be trying to sing in a tonal language. Touch And Feel / It Came As No Surprise (*) suffers from more problems than I've got space to mention. It's difficult to find much right in Alley Cat (*) by overdrive-heavy power-poppers Monocle Rose either. Their boring singer requests a less-boring person to lead her astray, and its need is apparent. Meanwhile, Kid Harpoon's Back From Beyond (*) boasts all the edge and charm of a boiled potato. Despite his claim to be "still singing tunes about you", there's no discernible tune about anywhere.

Finally we hit a second star, and it's for – gulp – Airdrie screamo. Flood Of Red's Home Run (**) makes a ridiculous melodrama out of driech skies, but at least there's some energy and good drumming in it. The Xcerts' drummer is having a ball on Nightschool (**) too, but their epically earnest pop is hard to distinguish from a clutch of other tear duct-teasing bands. Irish quintet The Brothers Movement combine BRMC's sleazy swagger, the Verve's woozy swagger, and Oasis's boozy swagger, into one swaggeriffic package. Standing Still (**) has caused this band to miss the boat by a good 7 or 8 years.

Stirling returns in the form of Jack Butler's Surgery 1984 (***), which steps the competition up a level via the simple method of slowly building towards a climactic explosion. It's the first great moment of the D12 so far, and herky-jerky b-side This Soul Accelerates is pretty good too. The name Bonobo rings a bell – Wikipedia says they are also known as Pygmy Chimpanzees – disambiguation fail! Apparently, this ape-like Ninja Tune producer specialises in the kind of lounge grooves that got stuffed onto a billion chillout compilations around about the time The Brothers Movement are familiar with. An album's worth might be tiresome, but The Keeper (***) is pretty smooth on its own. Wild Beasts are doing rather well for themselves, despite their singer shrieking throughout All The King's Men (***). But he hits the notes, so like in Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights, the agile vocal melody becomes a big part of the appeal.

Take It (****) by Auld Reekie's Action Group is a real low rider, built of rhythm upon rhythm upon riff upon rhythm. It's moody and dark, and almost danceable, and while it never fully takes flight there's a lot to appreciate in their approach to songcraft. The Nextmen's Round of Applause (****) is the only hip-hop track in this month's D12 – a laid-back party jam based on a couple of New Orleans funk samples. It's flippant, but fun. Same same but different is Virgil Howe's Someday (****), which uses soft hip-hop beats and a brief vocal sample with trippy guitar lines and atmospherics to construct an enchanting single of the month.

Nick Cave @ Picture House, 13 Oct

2009-10-15T23:03:00.003+01:00

An Evening with Nick Cave (****)
HMV Picture House, Edinburgh, 13 October 2009

live review for the skinny

One of the first rules of writing, in any sector, is to write about what you know; so one great challenge all novelists face is to create characters and stories that don't betray too much of themselves. The title character of Nick Cave's new second novel, The Death of Bunny Munro, is a violent, "sexually incontinent" degenerate, an alcoholic travelling salesman with scant regard for anyone but himself. And what is Nick Cave doing here? Travelling the country selling his book, of course. When he perches on a chair to bombastically roar an early passage from the book, in which Bunny gets obscenely horny whilst cruising through Brighton listening to Kylie Minogue's Spinning Around, you wonder just what other parts of Bunny's character or narrative are borrowed from the Brighton-dwelling, former Kylie-duetting author's own life. Just sayin'.

Tonight's performance is part book reading, part gig, part Q&A; though in reality, the brief Q&A sections dissolve quite quickly as no-ones got any decent questions. With only multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis and guitarist Martyn P. Casey for support, each song is played more carefully than usual, Cave's usual theatricality muted by the greater need for precise playing. The all-seated crowd don't care; everyone's an acolyte in here, laughing uproariously at every tossed-out quip; "but you're beautiful!" a man shouts when Cave asks for the stage lights to be dimmed slightly. Tonight's setlist features three songs from this writer's favourite Cave LP The Good Son, plus assorted career highlights like "Into My Arms", "Red Right Hand", "Babe, You Turn Me On", and "The Mercy Seat". And the book? Well, it seems a touch over-written, but I ordered it as soon as I got home anyway. He's a good salesman.

Hockey - Mind Chaos

2009-09-24T15:50:00.001+01:00

Hockey - Mind Chaos (**)
album review for the skinny

Showing some admirable self-awareness, Oregon's Hockey use the first song on their first album to pre-empt what they know is going to be a recurring criticism of their band: singer Ben Grubin's extravagantly affected vocal style. "Look out, cos I'm just too fake for the world, oh you know it's just a game to me" he squeals, yells, and coos, but that confession doesn't make his flagrant oversinging any more palatable. I'd say it was a shame, but it's a USP they'll work to their advantage in some quarters: if you catch yourself thinking Brandon Flowers has got himself rather over-excited, or that Razorlight have got much funkier, you're probably listening to Hockey on Radio One. There's a few good ideas here -- the lilting backing vocals on third track Learn To Lose are particularly nice -- but they're outweighed by repeated resort to modern rock cliche; and everything's overshadowed by Grubin's histrionics on the mic.

Taken By Trees - East of Eden

2009-09-21T13:55:00.001+01:00

Taken By Trees - East of Eden (***)
album review for the skinny

Victoria Bergsman's second album as Taken By Trees is born of admirable intentions: seeking to break free from her comfort zone, she travelled with a sound engineer to Pakistan to find some local musicians to record with. So while East of Eden never strays too far from Western indie-pop norms, its South Asian instruments and backing vocalists give it a vivid sense of the exotic. Bergsman's lethargic vocals even sound like she's wilting in the heat, although, if you remember her guest spot on Peter Bjorn & John's Young Folks, that's just the way she sings. A blog-chasing cover of Animal Collective's My Girls seems unnecessary, but there are other, better moments on several tracks: the man wailing in the distance on unsettling opener To Lose Someone, the flicked-out guitar trills of Watch The Waves, the complex but gentle hand-tapped percussion of Day By Day. East of Eden is ambitiously conceived and modestly played.

The Twilight Sad - Forget The Night Ahead

2009-09-16T23:45:00.005+01:00

The Twilight Sad - Forget The Night Ahead (****)
album review for the skinny

The Twilight Sad have taken on a leaner, meaner look in time for the release of their hugely anticipated second album Forget The Night Ahead. Singer James Graham and guitarist/producer Andy MacFarlane have both shaved their heads, as if two-and-a-half years of wondering how the hell to follow up their magnificent debut album has left them both ready to escape to the same institution as Britney. Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters didn’t take the Twilight Sad into the charts, but it did elevate them into an exalted position in Scottish indie rock; reams of positive press across the Atlantic, where Graham’s local brogue earned him dodgy comparisons to Groundskeeper Willie, solidified an international indie reputation. And it came out of nowhere - three tiny gigs and a low-key EP release preceded the album, which had won rave reviews from Los Angeles to Melbourne before the Kilsyth band reached Edinburgh.

Forget The Night Ahead isn’t coming out of nowhere. It’s following one of the most acclaimed Scottish albums of the young century; 30 months of touring the US, Europe and Britain in support of some pretty big bands (Smashing Pumpkins, Mogwai, Snow Patrol); and a couple of stop-gap EPs which weren’t all that satisfying. If second album syndrome really exists (and Wikipedia says it does), Forget The Night Ahead must be odds-on to show symptoms. You’ve already seen the rating above: its symptoms are mild.

Forget The Night Ahead isn't massively different from Fourteen Autumns, but it is a bit louder and noisier, and hence more intense. Both records are concerned with the possibilities of guitar noise, and how to shape feedback, reverb and other effects around otherwise unshowy, austere but emotional indie-rock. There’s a slight move towards shoegaze‘s chromic fog, but that only materialises momentarily in a few songs. Scissors is where the clearest My Bloody Valentine influence shows: their famous live ‘holocaust’ section - a twenty-minute endurance test of unfathomably loud and brittle guitar noise played as a finale during You Made Me Realise - is the basis for this three minute vocal-less interlude. Abstract echoing waves wash over Scissors’ middle, but from recent gigs it’s clear the band are most keen on the painfully rough intro and outro here.

Whereas the theme to the first seemed to be adolescent anger at neglectful domestic life (although Graham diplomatically insists otherwise), there’s no clear theme here: the lines that stand out seem significant within their own song, but don’t connect to the others. Graham’s lyrics are obliquely dark, often sung as non-sequiteurs, and full of references to stories not fully told. But he possesses an emotive vocal style which is capable of lending weight to otherwise confusing lines: “head up dear the rabbit might die” still feels like the most profound thing in the world when Graham cries it live. In new song The Room he croons “you're the grandson’s toy in the corner/ don’t tell anyone else you were seen in the cherry tree/ look what you have done.” It’s an impossible line to parse, but the sweet vocal melody excuses it. That holds true for most of the record: the standout lines are those most sweetly sung or loudly cried, and there’s plenty of room for interpretation.

The most prominent vocal on the whole album is troublesome, though. It kicks off the album’s centrepiece, Floorboards Under The Bed, a brave anti-commercial footstamp from the band. Preceded and followed by two of their most conventional indie rock songs yet, Floorboards begins with Graham singing a cappella in a reflective room: “We’ve taken all of our mistakes/ turned them into aeroplanes/ and the boy’s throwing rocks off my face”. Then harsh guitar stabs twist and slice, a piano wanders in, and the song descends into a stark instrumental anti-song, just in case you were having fun for a minute there. It’s a stunning shock and awe move, but what are we to make of those conspicuous opening lines? Do the first two parts refer to scrap paper, and therefore to playfulness, and the latter to suffering backlash or hatred? Perhaps, but that doesn’t really clear anything up.

If Forget The Night Ahead's lyrics can be cryptic, for the most part they remain on the right side of mysterious, allowing the visceral thrills of the band to dominate. That Birthday Present fades in with a ferocious momentum, guitars howling and drums racing like …Trail of Dead during their youthful vintage. First single I Became A Prostitute also begins with driving force, and is then carried by a heartbeating drum-kick into a huge anthemic chorus and a thick, loud guitarscape. Unsettling closer At The Burnside builds in with ghoulish but timid guitar squeals, before exploding in cacophonous, disastrous noise.

Like Fourteen Autumns, Forget The Night Ahead is a serious grower. There's little point in giving it just one listen - five will persuade you to persist much further. But, it's not quite a match for the debut. Why? Some of the best moments of the first album were where Graham seemed to genuinely lose his rag: like when he raged "and they’re sitting around the table, and they’re talking behind your back" on That Summer. Perhaps mindful of now having fans and therefore expectancies to meet, Graham's a little more restrained on this album, meaning we never feel the full hairdrying force of his anger. Also, the accordion was a key part of the band's sound on Fourteen Autumns, but it's missed here amid all the storms and swells of guitar.

But the Twilight Sad still pack a helluva punch: in Scissors and Floorboards Under The Bed, the group explicitly demonstrate their commitment to the anti-commercial noise aesthetic; and in I Became A Prositute, Made To Disappear, That Birthday Present, Interrupted, and The Neighbours Can't Breathe they've added a handful more powerful anthems to their catalogue. Were Forget The Night Ahead recorded by a new band, it'd be hailed as a stunning debut. Keep an eye on the Twilight Sad - this band's got some potential, by the way.

Withered Hand - Good News

2009-08-24T23:47:00.004+01:00

Withered Hand - Good News (****)
album review for the skinny

By the time Edinburgh's Withered Hand opens Good News's final track with "maybe the world would be better without me", you'll want to give him a slap and tell him to pull himself together. Depression is a mental illness and that line proves Dan Willson is delusional. That's the bad news; the good news is that his debut album makes good on the promise of his two early EPs, partly because four of his strongest early songs are included here too. Supported by local musicians, including his friends in Meursault, Willson ponders his own existentialist quandaries on standouts Love In The Time Of Ecstasy and I Am Nothing. But all the self-deprecation and talk of alienation would get dreary were it not laced with dry humour. Every track features a handful of great lines, but Religious Songs is both his most quotable and most graceful number. The world is better for songwriters like Willson.

MySpace

Sweet Baboo - Hello Wave

2009-08-11T21:49:00.004+01:00

Sweet Baboo - Hello Wave
album review for drowned in sound

I wish the diplomats who argue against the need for negative music criticism would spend a bit more time sucking on bogeys like Sweet Baboo's Hello Wave. Yes, you can download anything you want for free on the internet, but the pounds you save in your pocket can't buy back the time you've just wasted. Occasional exposure to albums like this are actually to be recommended for anyone pretending to be a music critic; they give you a grounding. If your listening diet is nothing but critically lavished and 'important' albums, it's easy to lose sight of where the borders of Sturgeon's Law are to be drawn. Sturgeon said that 90 per cent of everything is crap, and he was right; but his 90 per cent doesn't apply to the vaguely disappointing third albums from your favourite band, or slightly underwhelming debuts from hyped-up new scenesters. It's stuff like this, Hello Wave, that floats under the water waiting to sink your ship.

It makes no-one feel big or clever to lay into a well-meaning musician who operates entirely for love not money. Sweet Baboo's Stephen Black is probably a good guy who'd buy you a pint if you shook his hand and told him you enjoyed his music. And that must be why this album, his second, exists, because of stingy, thirsty sycophants. It's only 36 minutes long and it's difficult to get through. The first song, laboriously titled 'If I'm Still In Love When I Get Back Home From Travelling (America)' is the same knowingly cheesy novelty song the every-night resident at your local live music bar plays under the presupposition that the simple act of playing a guitar and singing is entertainment enough for folks. That's why you avoid that bar, because it isn't. Here is also where the first signs of Sweet Baboo's tedious 'quirkiness' arise: he nonsensically interjects "cheese!" after referring to the city of Philadelphia har har; he claims to have shot a seagull and then admits to making it up, cos he's wacky like that; and you know when he twice concedes he was "quite drunk" that it can't be a winking understatement because these drunk stories are rubbish. But he decided to write a song about them anyway.

It's got to get better and it does, kinda, marginally. The following song sports some niftily agile fingerpicking and third track, 'It's Three Let's Go', is a shuffling Broken Social Scene intro extended into a pleasant enough three minute-long instrumental. But don't lose track of your standards just yet. Stephen Black's voice has yet to show any more expressiveness than my dog's, and his personality is somewhat harder to locate too. In 'Hello Bullfrog, Hello Wave' -- we're at track seven now - Black fantasises about being washed away by a river into the sea, drearingly singing "take me from here, to there, from there, to here, from here, to there" for, god, ages. At 5:05 it's hardly an epic, but it's the longest song on the album by a full minute, and it really feels like it. He's melancholy, because pretty girls don't reciprocate his feelings, and his rabbit died and there's other odd references to death, but he still hasn't given me a reason, in his lyrics or his melodies, to give a fuck. "In the night sky I hear him calling me," he begins the next song, and if you read that in a booming Nick Cave voice it could seem quite dramatic: "and although my hands aren't tied and I tried with all my might, the demons have a hold and I've got no place left to go." But Sweet Baboo isn't Nick Cave, so he's singing it lightly over a jaunty two-chord campfire singalong strum. I could be listening to 'Stagger Lee', but no, I'm listening to 'Kumbaya' instead.

And then he interjects "Steve!" after "I hear him calling me", to further demean his own declared demons, and I wonder if even the Monday night guy down the road would sing this song to three punters and the barman. It's hard to think of a 36 minute-long record as indulgent, but Hello Wave is about half-an-hour longer than it ever earns.

2/10

Interview: Dirty Projectors

2009-07-31T11:28:00.000+01:00

interview feature for clash magazine

Depressingly often, talking to a musician is far less interesting than listening to their music. When "we just make songs what we like, like" is the most perceptive explanation a band can give about their creative processes, the facepalm is instinctive. That's not the case with Dave Longstreth, mastermind of the Brooklyn-based Dirty Projectors, whose new album Bitte Orca is one of the best records of the year so far. Despite Bitte Orca being an endlessly inventive and fascinating listen - and a fun one too, beard-scratchers - he talks a real good game, if you can actually get hold of him. Sure, he's performing with David Byrne, and yeah, he's in the studio with Bjork; we've heard all these excuses before, press person! When Clash finally does touch base, he's still juggling a million things to do, but while we've got him, he's going to make an impression.

Dirty Projectors have been a going concern since 2002, and used to include two members of Vampire Weekend. In recent years they've been cultivating a reputation as a band easy to admire, but not quite so easy to love. Isn't the idea of a chopped-and-screwed rock opera about a suicidal Don Henley kinda amazing? That's Dirty Projectors 2005 album The Getty Address. And what if a band tried to cover an entire album that they hadn't listened to for 15 years, basing the whole thing on blurry fragments of teenage memories? That's Rise Above, from 2007, in a conceptual nutshell. Both albums had plenty of great moments, but ultimately felt like they were born of better ideas than execution. Bitte Orca isn't so easy to narrow down, but it seems like the absence of an overarching theme has taken the edge off its abstract experimentalism, allowing the band more room for baser aims, like hooks.

So I ask Longstreth to explain what Bitte Orca's about, really, and he says this: "Collapsing dualities, conciliating factional antagonisms, creating Mexican blankets of formal beauty and arresting emotionality". I don't quite know what to say to that, so he continues: "Parsing the future for potsherds of the past, reggae kaleidoscopes, goofing around with noise-gated snare drums". There's a pause. "'Stillness Is The Move' is sort of a love song" he continues, much to my relief. "The beat is based on T-Pain. We commissioned a radio mix of the song by the guy who mixes all of Timbaland's records, but the mix we made sounded way better, so we didn't use it." 'Stillness Is The Move' is the album's first single, a juddering, trilling, soaring kind of alien R&B ballad, featuring bright lead vocals from Amber Coffman. Explaining the new prominence of both female band members -- following song 'Two Doves', a clear tribute to mournful German chanteuse Nico, is sung by Angel Deradoorian -- Longstreth says "I wanted it to feel like a Beatles album, each of the singers with a lead number, playing with foreground and background. So much of our singing is about sharing a melody between two voices, or dividing a harmony into component voices, you know. Giving the girls a lead number felt like a natural application of that idea to the album as a whole."

Like all Dirty Projectors albums, Bitte Orca is packed full of ideas - but this is the one which gets them all to coalesce together most smoothly. It's all pretty odd on first listen: you'll hear flashes of Peter Gabriel, King Sunny Ade, Pere Ubu, Captain Beefheart, Talking Heads, The Fiery Furnaces, Arthur Russell and Frank Zappa in there at different times, not forgetting the aforementioned T-Pain and Nico. Somehow, even though he's pulling from so many different boxes, Longstreth still manages to put his hundred-piece puzzle together and form a clear picture, a picture that looks in whole like no-one else. It's been enough to convince two of the world's most critically revered musicians, David Byrne and Bjork, to collaborate with Longstreth in the last few months. Firstly, Byrne and Dirty Projectors recorded 'Knotty Pine' together for the Red Hot Organisation's Dark Was The Night charity compilation this winter. Then Bjork got in touch, having been impressed by a Dirty Projectors cover version of her own 'Hyperballad', and Longstreth agreed to write a suite for her to sing, again in support of an AIDS organisation. The six-song Mount Wittenberg Orca, which is planned for release "sometime", is about an imagined moment of eye-contact between Coffman and a whale. "Bjork is a huge inspiration for me," Longstreth says, "It was a big honour to write music for her. She said the only other person's music she's ever sung was Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire." That's not a name that often gets dropped in interviews with indie-rock bands. But Dirty Projectors are not a normal indie-rock band.

Wickerman Festival 2009

2009-07-30T23:13:00.011+01:00

Wickerman Festival, Dundrennan, 24-25 July
festival review for the skinny

Strangely, but thankfully, the Wickerman Festival near Dumfries is a Friday-Saturday weekender, not a Saturday-Sunday affair. That's fortunate because when The Skinny got up on Sunday morning to pack up the tents and head home, the gusting winds and lashing rain soaked us skinwards within minutes. We were lucky - other than some brief showers on Friday afternoon, Wickerman was blessed with long spells of gentle sunshine, particularly on Saturday. All music festivals are dependent somewhat on favourable weather, but it seems particularly important for Wickerman, because this year's packed line-up was still pretty bare of appealing acts. That puts more emphasis on the ancillary pleasures of camping and drinking with friends, and on the non-musical entertainment, because there's fewer bands to get excited about. In theory, at least; we got excited about plenty of bands.

Much of our weekend was spent in the Solus Tent, a long and narrow marquee dedicated to up-and-coming Scottish bands. But when we first walk in 5 minutes before the start of Meursault, it's completely empty bar the sound guy. Singer Neil Pennycook isn't a quiet performer, so his bellowing voice soon draws people in to a set which focuses on highlights from last year's debut album. As great as that record is, it's new song Crank Resolutions which has been the standout of recent sets, its pulsing beats and racing rhythm contrasting with Pennycook's distressed vocals.

The Seventeenth Century play to a slightly bigger crowd, but they leave me unconvinced. They seem to adhere very closely to the Arcade Fire's eloquent brand of melodrama, using long maudlin violin lines and wailing vocal outros to convey a vague melancholy that doesn't quite match the mood of the evening. Perhaps they'd suit a dusky bar setting, but their self-seriousness today doesn't connect.

On the other hand, the always-impressive We Were Promised Jetpacks know exactly how to play to a festival crowd. They warm us up with, eh, Keeping Warm, and then Quiet Little Voices entices the quiet little crowd to begin using their own, eh, voices, in support. By the fourth song everyone has got it, so wild finale Short Bursts is served to a crowd on the verge of climax. It's a perfect set closer, shifting between quiet and loud moments with ecstatic energy. Jetpacks are getting better with every gig.

Headliners The Human League bring a touch of glamour to this very modest festival. Singers Susan Ann Sulley and Joanne Catherall still look gorgeous 30 years into their careers, while Phil Oakey commands the stage in a tight black lab coat, looking like a slender Dr Evil. They reel out hit after hit -- Tell Me When, Love Action, Open Your Heart, Seconds, Mirror Man -- and to finish, Don't You Want Me, which is incredible, of course. Even those who came with high expectations left fully enamoured.

Saturday's schedule kicks off with a Solus tent show from Bronto Skylift, who are really not the kind of band you want to soundtrack your hangover. So instead of being gently eased back into life, we're smacked around the chops by the savagely loud Glasgow duo, who play their instruments like they're trying to kill them. In "the closest thing we'll ever get to a love song", screeching feedback and vicious drumming underpin what I think is the repeated romantic yell "I'm a tiger, I'm a tiger!". A family with three young kids look a little perplexed, but three cooler boys aged about 10 start their own moshpit at the front. Shame on us for leaving them to start it.

The afternoon provides a good opportunity to sample some non-musical fare. Down at the spoken word tent, a middle aged man recites Bill Maher's comedy routine about translating rap lyrics into "white" - watch that here - and then tried a rap of his own, which we'll generously call 'spirited'. Then we try the nine-hole crazy golf, which was only crazy insofar as it was pitch 'n putt with no putters and no fairways. So the first 20 minutes were spent looking for missing balls in deep, rough grass, and the next few minutes were spent trying to tap them into the hole with sand wedges. A once-over with a lawnmower, and some putters, would've made the golf far more enjoyable.

Back at the main stage were Norwich's The Kabeedies, who fulfilled just about every stereotype of meaningless art school post-punk you can think of. They looked cool and they danced a lot, but their patter was terrible. "How do you pronounce this place, is it Dun... Dun... Dundrennan?". Not. Hard. "She hit me on the arm, I have a bruise! That's amazing!". Not. Amazing.

Candi Staton seems to be best known now for her vocal on The Source's 1991 hit You Got The Love, but her biggest solo hit was Young Hearts Run Free, and in the late 60s she recorded some beautiful soul ballads, like What Would Become Of Me and I'm Just A Prisoner. But after trumpeting how many hours she'd travelled to be here, her set may as well have been torrented in. A lacklustre cover of Suspicious Minds is followed by a wedding singer performance of Stand By Your Man, cheapened to novelty status by a calypso beat. Clashes call.

Punch and the Apostles are much more fun, if a little ridiculous at times. Most of the time it's a cacophonous din, as each song is built up towards a big melodramatic climax and then brought down to earth again slowly while the saxophonist wails free-form solos. Occasionally, moments of glorious clarity break through the headache-inducing fug, suggesting that there is method behind the apparent madness after all.

But by far the best show of the day, and possibly of the whole weekend, was still to come: Drums of Death, in Solus, face painted like a zombie panda bear. He's hopping around a laptop and mixer, running to the barrier, working the crowd, rapping and singing, and I've no idea what he's saying but his beats are just brilliant. They seem to incorporate bits of everything -- electro which leans to Italo, to house, to punk, to techno, to grime, to indie-rock -- and he's putting everything into riling the crowd. There's a piano-based interlude, like recent LCD Soundsystem, which bangs back into life with astonishing force, and unbelievably he moves onto something even better. Who is this guy? He's called Colin, he's from Oban, and he's jaw-dropping live.

At midnight, the 30ft Wickerman which has stood watching over the site is ceremoniously set alight and fireworks are let off, but it's not the end of the festival yet. A DJ set from Utah Saints on the main stage is surprisingly brilliant, because their song selection is a perfect mix of big-hitters (Justice, The Killers, MGMT) and lesser-known maintenance beats. Finally, Edinburgh's William Douglas and the Wheel perform classic rock covers and originals to a raucous crowd in what was earlier the spoken word tent. We stumble back to the tents at 3am, actually get to them at 4 (don't ask), and thank the heavens for waiting until the end of the festival before unloading on us.

Julian Plenti - Is Skyscraper

2009-07-23T22:23:00.003+01:00

Julian Plenti - Is Skyscraper (****)
album review for the skinny

The press sheet for Is Skyscraper notes that mysterious singer-songwriter Julian Plenti took a sabbatical between 2001 and 2006, but doesn't explain why. Actually, it was because he was busy being Paul Banks, moody Interpol singer and unintentionally funny lyricist responsible for such classic face-smacking lines as “She says brief things, her love’s a pony, my love's subliminal", and "the subway, she is a porno". He's grown a moustache too; are we sure this isn't actually Brandon Flowers? Thankfully, no such lyrical duds intrude on Is Skyscraper, an ambitious and accomplished record that uses unsettling string arrangements and snippets of film dialogue and found sound as often as guitar riffs or heavy drums. Third song Skyscraper is more like a classical mood suite than a rock song, Madrid Song is clearly inspired by Boards of Canada, and On The Esplanade's finger-picked bed is overwhelmed by a array of dramatic string sweeps.

T in the Park 2009

2009-07-16T09:58:00.000+01:00

T in the Park 2009, Balado, Scotland
covered for The Skinny

I suggest (if time allows) reading the full coverage over at The Skinny website, for a much broader picture including blurbs by Darren Carle and Chris Buckle. Friday review here, Saturday here and Sunday here.

But here's what I wrote anyway...

T in the Park 2009 was largely pre-billed as "the year T went pop", as if it was totally something else before. Bands that write their own songs and play guitars 'n' that can still be pop bands, of course, but this year the presence of fashionable girlies like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry was supposed to show an ideological side-step. And there was, slightly.

For us, this year's disappointing aspect was how the biggest bands on the Main Stage - Kings of Leon, Razorlight, The Killers, Snow Patrol - sucked up the crowds like a black hole in the middle of the site, to the noticeable detriment of the shows on the eleven other stages. It's great that T is trying to encourage diversity by adding more stages, but how long can that last if the punters continue to gravitate to the same predictable big-hitters instead of trying something different?

It wasn't just the Main Stage, actually, it was more about which artists are on the telly all the time: more people watched Tommy Reilly than Nick Cave or Nine Inch Nails, while the King Tut's tent was half-empty for the Manic Street Preachers but bursting full the next day for The Saturdays. That kind of thing's depressing for musos like us, who've had our lives changed by bands like NIN and can't believe so few others have too; and then we can't even get near the front for a perv of Frankie Sandford. It's just a wee bit outta balance, that's all.

Navel-gazing aside, T in the Park 2009 was brilliant. We saw some fantastic performances from a wide variety of bands on loads of different stages. We drank a lot. And the sun came out, and stayed out, for most of the weekend. There's no better way to spend a weekend than at a music festival with good bands, good friends, beer and sunshine. It ended with an epic set from the newly reunited Blur, an hour-and-a-half late but worth the wait. Sometimes a Main Stage band deserves to swallow up the entire crowd.

FRIDAY:

An Edwyn Collins gig isn't like a gig for anyone else. Four years ago, the ex-Orange Juice frontman suffered two serious strokes, which he's been slowly recovering from ever since. He can't play the guitar, walks with difficulty, and it takes real effort for him to speak: "I. Am still. Learning. To talk" he tells us, hand clawing forward as if to throw each word out. It's impossible to divorce the context from the performance: this man could easily choose to retreat into a comfortable retirement, but instead he's determined to push himself because he loves playing music. The couple hundred fans here really appreciate the effort; they'd respond rapturously to Falling And Laughing, Rip It Up and A Girl Like You playing on a pub jukebox; to have Edwyn Collins perform them for us is just magical.

13 years since they formed, Camera Obscura finally make it to the Futures Tent. (Well, at least it wasn't the BBC Introducing... stage). Having just released their gorgeous fourth album My Maudlin Career, it's a shame that Camera Obscura are tucked away like this at their own local megafestival. Their performance is tight and professional, and comprises six completely lovable songs, including French Navy and the title track from the new record. They're not the most exciting live band, but with songs like these it doesn't really matter.

We're standing pretty close in for Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but it's still difficult to even hear at times. Their two favourite ballads, first album classic Maps and new album re-write Skeletons, are drawn out and whispered so thinly that the guys tunelessly singing along beside me completely drown out Karen O's vocals. But they can't drown out the pipe band which appears at the end of Skeletons, to inevitable roars from a crowd easily pleased by a pop star merely acknowledging we're not English. New songs Zero and Heads Will Roll are much better, and final song Date With The Night goes down a storm too. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs are much better when they're audible.

Nick Cave's headlining set at the second biggest stage - the Radio 1/NME Stage - is watched by a pitifully small crowd, but he shows no reservations or signs of disappointment - he's as ebullient and theatrical as he would be in front of a packed stadium. Red Right Hand, The Weeping Song and There She Goes My Beautiful One are highlights, but it's the pre-encore finale of Stagger Lee that, ahem, staggers me, with a crazy cacophonous climax and blasting lights followed by an extra verse and another screeching, screaming ending. More people needed to see it.

SATURDAY:

So maybe I'm just too old - I have a beard and have been drinking legally purchased beer after all - but Unicorn Kid's so-called chiptune niche is just Nokia Tuned happy hardcore, right? This being T In The Park, the wee crowd at BBC's Introducing stage is going, going, going fucking mental for 17 year old Oliver Sabin's fairground beats, but that's because they've clearly forgotten an important lesson from history - Bonkers. It's a responsibility of every sanctimoniously minded elder to remind the youth of today of the horrors wrought by Bonkers, lest they occur again. Ten minutes of Unicorn Kid's Jamster Dance is enough to concern any right-minded citizen about this country's future.

It'd be easy to snark on Edinburgh hip-hop trio Young Fathers, if they weren't such endearing live performers. It's the natty synchronised dance moves that do it -- well, the beats are pretty sweet too -- and final track Straight Back On It really gets the crowd going, if only after a bit of on-stage cajoling. There's one definite lull -- a ballad with the line "do you connect to my ringtone?" -- but Young Fathers' party jams do exactly what they want them to do - they ignite a party atmosphere, for a few dozen folk at least. Watch the set here.

SUNDAY:

It's a bit silly having The Twilight Sad on the BBC Introducing stage - it seems to be the biggest crowd this stage gets all weekend, and no-one is being introduced. From near the back, beyond the roof, the sound swirls out a bit, and the nearby Slam Tent's beats interfere; but I can also see the whole crowd, and how positive and excited everyone is. There's several stunning moments: new single I Became A Prostitute's explosive drum slams; the slow, almost a cappella intro to Cold Days From The Birdhouse bursting into its ascending three-chord maelstrom; James Graham screaming "head up dear, the rabbit might die!" as And She Would Darken The Memory approaches its incredible cacophonous crescendo. With a second album just approaching, it's tempting to feel that The Twilight Sad might be on the verge of something big here: the Futures Tent, beckoning for 2010. Watch the performance here.

(Here's a shot of Andy and James from The Twilight Sad performing an acoustic version of their new single, I Became A Prostitute, in, eh, a tent dressed up like an old fashioned kitchen, in the media bit. Expect the video to be posted to theskinny.co.uk within days.)

Bloc Party's last two albums haven't been as rewarding as their first continues to be, but they do deserve credit for making significant efforts to do interesting things with their sound. Some of the bizarre noises they sneak into their mid-afternoon Main Stage set are quite unsettling, and not what crowds standing here are usually challenged with. A new song, for example, starts with heavy 4/4 Slam Tent beats, a giddy piano riff and a low-slung grooving bassline, very odd in combination but it seems to work. Mercury continues to be divisive, with the hardcore fans near the stage lapping it up while the rest of us get distracted. But of course, no-one's attention wanders during This Modern Love and Helicopter.

"Stay calm, stay calm, stay calm" Adam Thomson sings during Roll Up Your Sleeves, but nobody's staying calm at We Were Promised Jetpacks' early evening T-Break set. Everyone is waving, singing, clapping, cheering, jumping, moshing, climbing on shoulders; the energy in this packed out tent is incredible. Then before Quiet Little Voices, he lies: "This is our only decent song"; it segues straight into an epic Ships With Holes Will Sink, and then Short Bursts keeps up the momentum as blinding lights flash at every cymbal hit. Wow.

The Pet Shop Boys' first ever T In The Park show comes across like a Kraftwerk pastiche at times: the German-language sloganeering, the tinny techno beats, the dancers wearing blocks on their heads like robots. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe know they have no stage presence, so they entertain us with blockheaded dancers and bizarre video wall projections instead. Pet Shop Boys aren't just a singles band but few here know anything other than the big singles: it makes for long spells watching the screen between momentary eruptions for Go West and Always On My Mind, before noticeable numbers trail off for Blur.

The Phenomenal Handclap Band

2009-07-14T23:01:00.003+01:00

The Phenomenal Handclap Band - The Phenomenal Handclap Band
album review for drowned in sound

http://drownedinsound.com/releases/14506/reviews/4137332

How much trust can you put in a band when their first big creative decision - their name - is a stinker? And what if the record sleeve is terrible too? The Phenomenal Handclap Band, the name, is surely a play on The Incredible String Band - and not a very funny one at that. Rightly or wrongly, there's so much music available now that people make snap decisions on what's worth trying, and I can't help but feel that The Phenomenal Handclap Band have given themselves hurdles before they've even recorded a note. Nobody needs another Polyphonic Spree right now, you might fairy think, so let's try something else. Fortunately, despite the name, The Phenomenal Handclap band are nothing like The Polyphonic Spree.

For a start there's only eight of them, all formed around New York-based DJs Daniel Collás and Sean Marquand. Collás and Marquand apparently got bored of playing other people's records, deciding they could do it better themselves. There's much to like in The Phenomenal Handclap Band's loose, languid style, which embellishes its disco beats with George Clinton's psychedelic funk, Curtis Mayfield's blax-light grooves, and on 'Dim The Lights', Marc Bolan, generally. There're spaceship swoops, pulse pad percussion, high buzzing synth riffs and cowbells (of course), but also harmonica solos, alternately weeping or grinding guitar licks, and melodramatic echoing whispers for full Funkadelic props. And the beats, which step, stride and swagger unhurriedly throughout, cohere all 12 tracks together into a nonchalant but focused whole. Following in the footsteps of Sound Of Silver and Hercules And Love Affair, this is a disco record that believes in the rockist concept of an album, rather than the dance stereotype of the good and not-so-good singles collection.

This album's first two singles - 'You'll Disappear' and '15 To 20' - are probably the standout tracks. Taking musical cues from LCD Soundsystem and CSS respectively, they both use casual but cute female vocals to portray a playful self-assurance about potentially awkward topics. But after that 11-minute mid-section peak, there's a noticeable drop in standard towards the end. At 66 minutes long, The Phenomenal Handclap Band isn't particularly long, but the final three tracks could certainly have been lopped off without detriment. Penultimate song 'Baby' irritates because its repeated soulful refrain - "Baby/ I could rule the world/ with a girl like you/ on my arm" - is a terrible chat-up line; or if he's addressing an established partner, even worse to be that girl. Once would be forgivable, but repeated over the whole song it speaks to a lack of ideas. Then, final track 'The Circle Is Broken' takes nine indulgent minutes to announce the end of the record - "The circle is broken, the people have spoken, no reason pretending, our time here is ending" - which, like the guy at the party who has to personally say goodbye to everyone three times before leaving, is just a bit exasperating.

While the first nine tracks are harder to criticise in specific terms, there's perhaps something self-defeating in The Phenomenal Handclap Band's own coolness. It's hard to get excited about music which never gets too excited itself. What good ideas The Phenomenal Handclap Band do have are spread a little thinly on this debut.

6/10

An Introduction: Meursault

2009-07-08T14:27:00.000+01:00

feature for Clash

Ask any music fan around Edinburgh who their favourite new local band is, and there’s a fair chance you won’t get the same answer twice.

This is a boom time for a city which lags way behind bigger brother Glasgow in terms of musical heritage. At the forefront of the capital city’s efforts to catch up are Meursault, a foursome led by singer and songwriter Neil Pennycook, who released a superb but slept-on debut album late last year.

Pissing On Bonfires / Kissing With Tongues was released at the height of year-end list season, meaning its many gushing reviews were quickly forgotten in the rush to put 2008 to bed and get on with 2009’s next big thing. But fans in Edinburgh didn’t forget - Pennycook is a big guy with a big heart and a big voice - why look for anyone else?

Though he tells me the word bugs him, we can’t proceed with a description of Meursault without talking about folk. Any group which uses banjo, ukelele, accordion and acoustic guitar, and which has songs that create mythologies around long-forgotten local heroes, is inevitably going to be associated with folk music. But that’s only a small part of the Meursault story, because they also use an assortment of electronic devices to add beats, beeps and rushes. Please, don’t call it folktronica - it’s much more fun than that.

Take ‘The Furnace’ for an example. “I was trying to write the catchiest, most infectious pop song with the weirdest bunch of instruments I could get my hands on,” Pennycook says, and he succeeded: it’s got a ridiculously catchy banjo melody sitting between skipping beats and abrasive scratching noise. Recent live shows under the side-project name Art Fag have demonstrated even more experimentation, with new influences like Holy Fuck and Animal Collective appearing. These recent shows have been stunning.

But then, when the noise subsists, Pennycook’s gift for straight-forward songwriting shines through. Songs like ‘Salt Pt.2’, ‘The Dirt And The Roots’, and ‘William Henry Miller’ from the ‘Nothing Broke EP’, are simultaneously heartbreaking and heartwarming. “There’s not a lot of hard fact out there about him,” Pennycook says of the latter titular figure, “that’s why I like it, because you can piece things together and make your own pseudo-folklore.”

But perhaps their most impressive single feature is Pennycook’s unmistakable foghorn voice, which you can sometimes hear just wandering the Old Town streets, where you used to hear bagpipes. Now there’s a new way to seduce the tourists.