Check out this intriguing article in The Guardian for another view on why the record industry is facing problems. I'd recommend reading it in full (it's not too long, and if you have time also look at the linked-to article where Ben Goldacre scrutinizes some industry statistics), but in summary, the writer Charles Arthur suggests that it's the booming video games industry, not MP3 filesharing, that's the main cause of the record industry shrinking between 10-15% every year for the last four or five years. Arthur's argument is that levels of disposable income are pretty stable, but people are spending over three times more now on video games than they were a decade ago. So, something's got to give. He's drawn this graph with British figures:
When people are deciding how to spend limited amounts of money, it's no surprise that they spend it where they can't otherwise get free or cheap adequate replacements. The internet is full of free music -- legal and illegal -- and there's also lots of low-quality videos and films to view; but it isn't full of free Nintendo Wii games. And while games have got more innovative and more involving, and television and DVD technology has improved so that home movie viewing is better than ever, the major music technology innovation of recent years - the MP3 and the portable MP3 player - is a downgrade in quality which favors convenience over engagement. Put like that, it's no surprise that the big money is heading towards video games, DVDs are doing very well, and it's the CD market that's losing out.
So what's the best way to analyze such an important issue? With personal, anecdotal evidence, of course! As a male between the ages of 15-30, I'm in a key demographic for both music and gaming, and I can confirm that my games purchases have dwindled to zero while my CD and vinyl buying has grown to addiction-level heights. But if I was still into gaming, I wouldn't have the money to buy all the music I do - and if I bought three games a month (as said, the games industry has apparently tripled in size in the last decade), there's no way I could afford to buy music.
Of course, people who pirate lots of music and never pay anything back are still stealing. Access to music isn't a right, it's a privilege, because musicians put a lot of time and money into doing what they do, and they need to be remunerated. But what this article suggests is that it's not a simple case of every illegal download equaling a lost CD sale; it's that music suffers from being the most easily available form of entertainment, generally, in a very competitive marketplace. It also perhaps offers hope that when the games industry stops growing and hits a glass ceiling, the record industry might also hit a glass floor, from where it can reassess and seek to grow again.
So, it might not be CDs and legal MP3s versus illegal MP3s, but CDs and MP3s versus games. Do you agree? How have your gaming habits affected the music you buy (or don't buy)?
Future of the Left - Travels With Myself and Another album review for clash
Welsh post-hardcore trio Future Of The Left, who were formed from the ashes of Jarcrew and mclusky, released a near-faultless debut LP in 2007 with Curses. Its thrilling energy and bizarrely hilarious lyrics are qualities retained by the follow-up, Travels With Myself And Another, if not quite so consistently. But it's impossible not to love tracks like Stand By Your Manatee, where frontman Falco revels in retelling an "awful truth" that's really a playground taunt; and Lapsed Catholics, where Falco's meandering spoken intro describes Sky News as a "hysterical gung-ho technicolour crapfest". Travels... is certainly no crapfest, but it is both hysterical and gung-ho, in much better senses than Falco meant.
Georgia's Horse - The Mammoth Sessions (**) album review for the skinny
Georgia's Horse is a vehicle for the rather gorgeous voice of Teresa Maldonado, a Texan chanteuse who sketches similar characters to PJ Harvey on To Bring You My Love: aged-too-young girls and murderously neurotic wives. Maldonado's debut album The Mammoth Sessions is a record of intense intimacy, with production polish spurned in preference for dust-covered twanging guitars, eerily straining violins, melancholy piano motifs, and that voice, slurred as if by sedatives. In fact, it's all a little too sleepy, meaning the not-particularly-lengthy 53-minute running time feels a lot longer. If Maldonado can barely muster the energy to enunciate, it's little surprise that most songs are soporific in effect. A brief climax in Erzulie Dantor is stirring, but by the tenth track you'll be ready to drift off to sleep... and there's still three songs left to play.
Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca (****) album review for the skinny
Dirty Projectors' last album, Rise Above, was an attempt by New Yorker Dave Longstreth to recreate Black Flag's Damaged despite not having heard it for 15 years. Yeah, it's a great idea, but the execution wasn't totally smooth. Bitte Orca is where it all comes good for Longstreth, the hifalutin conceptuals dropped in favour of writing idea-crammed songs with almost-pop hooks.
Momentarily reminiscent of Pere Ubu, Talking Heads, King Sunny Ade, Nico, The Fiery Furnaces, Frank Zappa, Peter Gabriel and on and ariston, Bitte Orca sounds wholly like no-one at all. Hear how his vocals leap and spin over complex fingerpicking and Afropop rhythms on Temecula Sunrise; how the female vocals of Stillness Is The Move soar like an R&B diva's, adding pop shine and grace to all the underlying oddness. Listen to how Useful Chamber glides from Casio demo mode beats and natty rapping to a raucous garage rock freakout to a chorus of painful-then-angelic cries to bizarre crooning balladry and, whew, back to Jack White's nightmares again.
Bitte Orca is playful and romantic, and often quite bewildering, but for all the elastic singing and idiosyncratic structuring, it's also Longstreth's most lovable set yet.
Cards on the table: We Were Promised Jetpacks' signing to FatCat was a surprise to many music fans watching the Scottish unsigned music scene. It was thought by a fair few of us that there were better undiscovered gems out there, and that Jetpacks would struggle to follow-up the preceding FatCat releases from north of the border: The Twilight Sad's awesomely powerful debut album and Frightened Rabbit's widely acclaimed ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’.
Hands up: Jetpacks have proved us doubters wrong – ‘These Four Walls’ can stand proudly alongside both those brilliant records. The Edinburgh four-piece were actually brought to FatCat's attention by Frightened Rabbit, and have made good on their early promise with new, improved recordings of previously heard tracks; even better new tracks; and an attitude to constructing an album-as-whole that makes ‘These Four Walls’ greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, it's one of the best Scottish debuts for years.
And it's all about the rhythms - well, mostly. Like early Echo & The Bunnymen and U2, Jetpacks know that propulsive drums can be hugely effective without any concessions to funk or swing. It seems an obvious tactic, but by building everything on top of rollicking percussion from drummer Darren Lackie, Jetpacks ramp up tension for singer Adam Thompson to powerfully unleash. It's demonstrated best on ‘Short Bursts’, the fast-rolling drums on which sound huge, and in a hurry to get somewhere. A sombre, ominous opening is ripped up by scratching guitars and splaying hi-hats, Thompson yells, guitars fall away and tease themselves back in, the bass pokes a head round the door; "We'll teach you to die!" prompts an almighty squalling racket and, then, everyone leaves, steps out… and just the huge drums remain.
If it seems kinda simple on paper, it's exhilarating in practice, and the way they use driving 4/4 rhythms throughout gives ‘These Four Walls’ an undeniable energy. Check out the catalytic beats of ‘Quiet Little Voices’, which support a repeating three-chord riff and Thompson's anthemic chorus - it's sure to be a festival favourite this year.
Thompson's a romantic young guy, whose lyrics are repeated regularly so they become more like mantras. You won't forget his protective advice to "stay calm" or to "keep warm" or to "make time for us", because he says it again and again. But lyrics aren't really important here - too-clever wordplay would be implausible for a vocalist who hollers like Thompson, on a record that's more about sweaty youthful urgency than thoughtful rumination.
And such incessant rhythms could get formulaic, but Jetpacks have thought of that, too. The fifth track is a percussion-less instrumental interlude, an atmospheric drift and swell that sets the scene for the second half; and the tenth and final track is a beautiful acoustic-only lament, which eases us home with a sigh. Again, that's a standard album closer tactic, and yes, Jetpacks' debut album follows a big bunch of unwritten rules about how to meticulously construct an epic song, or an anthemic chorus, or whatever. But they've just taken good advice about how to get the most out of their songs, and most importantly, how to not be just another pedestrian indie-rock band.
Sonic Youth - The Eternal (****) album review for the skinny
Sonic Youth's greatest album is always whichever one you heard first - unless that was NYC Ghosts & Flowers (you poor thing). The band's famous experimentalism, so initially radical to the sonic tuning of a youthful mind, starts to sound kinda formulaic after your fifth or sixth album of it. But so what if they've been scratching the same off-chords for 20 years, if Thurston Moore is still sloganeering cryptic bullshit in his same slacker-kid drawl now he's hit 50 years old? Somehow - maybe it's a good skin care regime - The Eternal keeps up their new millennium hot streak, which is still slightly behind their '80s hot streak, but catching. Somewhere, today, a 15-year-old's musical world is being turned upside down by The Eternal; for the rest of us, it sounds a lot like a Sonic Youth album. This is no bad thing.
Broken Records - Until The Earth Begins To Part (**) album review for the skinny
Broken Records have had 18 months of building support from fans, bloggers and critics in the run-up to Until The Earth's release this month. A superb self-titled debut EP and regular enchanting live shows all over Britain had them marked as an obvious prospect. In fact, success seemed an inevitability, because unsigned bands as fully formed as Broken Records never stay unsigned for long. That no record deal was forthcoming from the rumoured bidding war until a celebrated signing with 4AD in January of this year was a only a minor concern.
Early comparisons to Arcade Fire might've been directed at Broken Records' passion, melodrama, and self-seriousness; or perhaps it's just because both bands have seven members. A better comparison for their music emerges now - The Waterboys, led by Edinburgh's own Mike Scott. The Waterboys' most acclaimed album, This Is The Sea, was a self-consciously big record, an untethered attempt at large-scale profundity which was difficult to listen to without cringing at its bombast. But Scott's indulgences were overlooked by many because, underlying it all, the songs were strong enough in other ways.
Broken Records' singer and chief songwriter Jamie Sutherland is how Mike Scott would be were he equally in thrall to Beirut's Gulag Orkestra as to Astral Weeks. There are clear Eastern European and Celtic influences on Until The Earth, which is part of the reason Broken Records were so enjoyable in the first place. The rip-roaring A Good Reason fuses boisterous Russian squat-kicking folk with muscular indie-rock, and If Eilert Loevberg Wrote A Song... makes use of an accordian-led polka to similar effect. Broken Records' pianist regularly finds a gorgeous chord sequence, such as in the intro to A Promise, and again at the start of Ghosts. Closing track Slow Parade majestically grows from shivering strings and guitar arpeggios into a dramatic and moving finale, one that should surely one day soundtrack a Hollywood rom-com's happy ending. In fact, Until The Earth's set is consistently strong, and the way several songs are blended directly into the next one provides a sense of continuity that adds to the album's overall cohesiveness. Unfortunately, like This Is The Sea, Until The Earth also presents a challenge to listeners: to appreciate the songs despite the pretentiousness of their presentation. If it wasn't for Sutherland's oversung vocals, the formulaic structures and grandiose arrangements of several songs, and song titles which heap on the pomposity by referencing 19th century Norwegian theatre, Until The Earth would be a classic.
Sutherland has always had a tendency to oversing, but it was masked somewhat by muffling effects on the EP. Here, the vocals are cloyingly forceful and false throughout. It's like when Bruce Springsteen summons up all the strength from his chest before he erupts into voice; his emphasis threatens to suffocate the actual meaning of the lyrics. And when, out of nowhere, Springsteen huffs and puffs a line like "let's blow this fucking place apart", as he does on his most recent album, he descends into self-parody. Until The Earth's opening track, Nearly Home, is reminiscent of a similar vocal excess when Sutherland sings "And rip it up, rip it all apart, this place that our parents built, we'll let it all burn down to the ground" before slurring that final word because he's seemingly too angry to pronounce the vowel. Fourth track A Promise features more bombastic bluster, as Sutherland strains so hard to emote each line: "hhhand if our hearts all disappear, hhhand if our bones they crumble to the soil, hhhand all our love will rise again, hhhand all fall to the sea." Almost every song features instances of such exertion that the album becomes as tiring to listen to as it sounds to perform.
A Promise also demonstrates the other major problem with Until The Earth. Listen to that delicate, tender piano intro: it lasts just a few seconds on its own, and it's gorgeous. Then Sutherland's vocals come in: a little oversung, but the melody is just right, and the story he recites about the burial of a loved one is genuinely touching, for a moment. Then piano chords louden, and my heart doesn't swell, it sinks. A Promise is the fourth track, but it's the third to do this exact same thing. What was originally subtle must now be made epic, the profundity amplified so you're left in no doubt that you must care, harder. Later, the embellishments fall away and there's another lovely strings interlude. But then the drums start to pound and the strings hold and tremble to build tension before, yes, the bombastic climax. By now it's a formula, and it's still to be repeated four more times before the album's end. It's like Broken Records don't trust us to comprehend their subtle majesty, so they decide to hammer it home in case we've missed it. Combined with Sutherland's emphatic angst, it portrays a sense of self-importance that's difficult to bear.
And that is so very frustrating because Until The Earth is an album that could've been "important", as far as indie rock ever can be, had it been recorded with a touch of modesty in mind. The producer could've minimised the gradiosity of the arrangements, not highlighted them. Someone could've had a discreet word in Jamie Sutherland's ear about his vocals. The band could've directed more songs towards un-epic endings. Sutherland could've thought about why the sixth track was like a song as written by Eilert Loevberg, and renamed it so we might understand. Until The Earth isn't a disaster. For many, Broken Records' grandiosity will amplify the obvious strengths in the songwriting. The Waterboys sold millions, won awards and rave reviews, and toured the world, and Broken Records still have a lot of achievements within their grasp. But others will be blinded by their bluster, dissuaded from listening by the forced sincerity and manufactured meaningfulness. Until The Earth Begins To Part is as ambitious and indulgent as its title suggests; and that's a pity.
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