[Review/Listen] – LCD Soundsystem – This Is Happening
Today’s review is a guest post by our good friend Stephen over at The Crosshair. Check them out for some really great reviews of music, film, games and TV.
In 2001, James Murphy sang “I hear you have a compilation tape of every great song by every great group ever” on the reputation-cementing “Losing My Edge”. It seems now that that particular line was more of a manifesto within a manifesto than was originally apparent. Murphy’s mission over the past decade has been to synthesise all the greatest music from the last thirty years into one sound. On this album, that he claims to be the last LCD Soundsystem album, he comes closer than ever.
The first thing that is apparent is that vocally, Murphy has transformed almost completely from Mark E. Smith to David Bowie. What this loses in force and energy, it makes up for in melody and emotion. Neither are easy to pull off, but Murphy manages without ever feeling like he is trying too hard. It’s this quality that sets Murphy apart from his peers – the feeling that he is never struggling to catch the zeitgeist, but casually setting it as he goes and playfully mocking it as he sails past.
Opener “Dance Yrself Clean” takes the Nirvana/Pixies quiet/loud dynamic and transplants it into what is almost a disco sound. We then slide right into first single “Drunk Girls”, which is the most obvious Bowie homage, from the backing vocals to the guitar sounds, all sounding very Berlin-era Bowie. Crucially though, and perhaps this gives LCD Soundsystem too much credit , but it feels more like an intelligent artistic statement than straight plagiarism. It also includes such giggle inducing lyrics as “Drunk girls know that love is an astronaut/it comes back but it’s never the same.”
The centrepiece of the album though, is the 9 minute epic “You Wanted a Hit”. This is as close as Murphy has sounded to the aforementioned “Losing My Edge” since. It’s astonishing as it moves from icy space-synths into a stripped down guitar and drums groove over which Murphy delivers his new manifesto. It’s also incredible that after three albums and 10 years, a band can still make tracks thatsound like a manifesto. On this track and on “One Touch”, LCD Soundsytem marry the irreverence and experimentation of the first album with the craft and melody of the second.
If anyone has a claim to defining the noughties in the way that say Bowie defined the 70s, or Oasis defined the 90s, it’s LCD Soundsystem. The decade’s virtues and faults can all be found running through Murphy’s trilogy of albums. There is the mainstream postmodern cynicism, the constant recycling of the now archived and accessible past and the arch refusal to bow to commercial pressure, all the while making something close to perfect pop music.
Whether this is the last LCD Soundsystem album remains to be seen, but it will be very interesting to see what Murphy does next, whether he reclines back into his comfortable producers chair, begins something entirely anew or just quietly retires into the background. Even if that is the case, the legacy he will have left us is one as strong as anyone can lay claim to in the past ten years. If only he would leave us with one last compilation tape.
9/10
“This Is Happening” is released via DFA on May 17th in the U.K. and the 18th in the U.S. You can listen to the whole album on their website.
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[Review/Listen] – The Fall – Your Future Our Clutter (2010)
Today’s review is a guest post by our good friend Stephen over at The Crosshair. Check them out for some really great reviews of music, film, games and TV.
The Fall’s 28th studio album is the group’s first for Domino Records, the home of such luminaries as Clinic, The Kills, and Franz Ferdinand. Despite their impressive roster, the capture of such an iconic band must have been a major boon for the label.
The lineup is, unusually, the same as the last album, 2008’s excellent “Imperial Wax Solvent”. The band sound tight and rigid on this record, and at times, it feels like the conclusion of the experiments that Smith has been conducting over the last decade. It gives us the two best sides of recent Fall, the straight up driving rhythms that made tracks like “Blindness” so great, on songs like “Bury pts 1 and 3″, and “Mexico Wax Solvent”, and the dirty, fat electronics that defined the “Unutterable” album on “Weather Report 2″.
Lyrically, Smith is occasionally, unusually coherent on this album (just). He sings about his health, his life and his public perception. Lines like “when will I quit, when will I quit this hospital” give us a peek through crack in the door into Smith’s life that we rarely have seen before. On “Weather Report 2″, he gives one of his best spoken word sections in years, over a throbbing, pulsing, dirty bass, intoning that “no one has ever called me sir in my life”. He sounds half disappointed, and half proud of the fact, as if he is not sure himself what he means by it. Of course, it is probably pointless to try and intellectualise and probe too far into Smith’s lyrics, as they can be so obscure and cryptic that each and every listener will take something different from them.
The album still provides some of the typically insane moments we have come to expect from The Fall though, like “Cowboy George”, which begins with a spaghetti western guitar riff, only to have a bit of Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” drift in, as if Smith had pointed his mic at a hifi playing the record. Or Smith’s many references to “Aqua Rosa”, which after googling, seems to be a hairdressing and beauty college in the Northwest of England. What to make of that – I simply do not know. What I do know, is that this is a solid album that, along with “Imperical Wax Solvent”, cements The Fall’s recovery since Smith’s American experiment, Reformation TLC.
8/10
“Your Future Our Clutter” is released on Domino Records on April 26th.
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[Review] [Listen] – Frightened Rabbit – The Winter Of Mixed Drinks (2010)
Trying to top an album as astounding as “The Midnight Organ Fight” (TMOF) is a tall order for any band, let alone the band who crafted it out of a broken heart and loneliness. Some things have changed for Frightened Rabbit since TMOF, and some things have not. Some that have include a new optimism and renewed hope in life and love. Some that haven’t include their unique storytelling and ability to create beautifully touching and catchy music.
If you’re a die-hard Debbie Downer and couldn’t imagine a Frightened Rabbit without some kind of melancholic despair, don’t fret, there’s still a smidgen of it on “The Winter Of Mixed Drinks”, in fact many of the songs talk about graves, drowning, stripping flesh and being alone. Since TMOF singer and songwriter Scott Hutchison hasn’t had a breakup, which played such an integral part in TMOF, but he has said (according to an interview with ThePopCop) that it’s about an escape and a slight breakdown. Album opener “Things” is a stark look at the materialistic nature of life in the western world as we insist on collecting and consuming things that matter not when compared to friends and family. The start of the song has the same note as the start of “Waterfall” by The Stone Roses, and incidentally lasts for the same amount of time (5 seconds), closely followed by grungy guitar and Scott’s quivering voice proclaiming “And the dust it settles on these things/Displays my age again/Like a new skin made from old skin and barely been lived in/I didn’t need these things, I didn’t them/Pointless artifacts from a mediocre past/So I shed my clothes/Shed my flesh down to the bone and burn the rest”. It’s a terrific start to the album and as it ebbs out and into “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” it’s a perfect transition from one song about ridding yourself of all of your possessions and starting afresh, to the next song about swimming as far as you can until everything you know fades into the horizon. It’s actually quite an upbeat-sounding song, with the intro being plucky and sunshine-filled, the bass plodding along behind and Scott’s refrained voice, keeping it’s feet firmly in the sand for some of the pelters that are yet to come.
“The Lonliness” is their most to-the-point song to date, however it’s not as dreary as you might think with a title like that. It’s difficult to make a dreary song and include handclaps, which they’ve done here, and whilst the lyrics are lonely and hopeful at the same time, the song itself is a mammoth. As it builds from handclaps and a single guitar, Scott’s voice gets louder and an acoustic guitar is thrown into the fray and all of a sudden it stops and leaves way for a single plucked riff, only to have the handclaps pick up and battle cries that sound as if they were sung by 50,000 people in a football stadium back Scott’s lyrics, “Fall down find God just to lose it again/The community together we were hammering it/Fell down found love I can lose it again/Now a communal heart beats miles from here”. As epics go, “The Lonliness” may just be Frightened Rabbit’s “Iliad”. ”The Winter Of Mixed Drinks” was written by Scott in Crail, Fife, on the coast of The North Sea about an hour and a half north of Edinburgh, and the sea takes a starring role throughout the album, possibly most evident on “The Wrestle”. It begins with haunting, almost sonar-like tones that continue throughout the song, reverberating handclaps interrupt the vocals and at the halfway point the drums make an appearance to drive home the lyrics “My enemies please stay close to me/No breath left, cold breath thief”.
“Skip The Youth” is one of their longest songs yet, clocking in at 6:18, the first 1:45 of that involves distorted guitars and feedback, dense drums and a looping keyboard. When it stops it makes way for a single piano note as Scott sings “And I’ve been digging that hole tonight/On my knees beneath the moon/All I need is a place to lie/Guess a grave will have to do”, it’s a song about how tiresome and exhausting youth can be, in turn making you feel old. “Nothing Like You”, the album’s almost mid-way point, is a snappy jumper, the opening of which is reminiscent of the jangly guitar that Jimi Hendrix used on “Crosstown Traffic”, subsiding for the solid guitar that Frightened Rabbit used on “Nothing Like You’. The chorus is contagious even if the lyrics may be a little on the clichéd side “She was not the cure for cancer/And all my questions still asked for answers” and chances are you’ll be humming it for days, I know I was. The album does have a throw-away song in the same vein as their short instrumentals from both of their previous albums. ”Man/Bag Of Sand” is a slower, more distant and less involved version of “Swim Until You Can’t See Land”, with audio clips presumably from movies and old carnival-like music. ”Foot Shooter” is a mournfully beautiful, piano-led song with Jesus & Mary Chain drums as Scott trembles whilst singing “And as the voice up comes and my mouth goes numb/I limp out to the sound of the breaking of broken toes/A vandal spoke/And in the stark and the sobering dry sunlight/I will blink my eyes and hope the blink in me erased/All the shit that I said, then”.
The hope that’s on “The Winter Of Mixed Drinks” rears it’s weighty head on “Not Miserable”, as Scott comes to terms with realising that what he lost “in the flood” (probably the failed relationship that populated “The Midnight Organ Fight”) was not that much after all. The song ebbs and flows from profound to personal in one fell swoop as the guitar wails in the background, almost drowned out by the piano and Scott declaring that he might just be happy again, “And though it’s easier now/I will always remember the night that I almost drowned/All alone in a house/And the love that I lost/With all of the shit that came out in the wash/Just a pocket of fluff/And I’m not put upon/I’m free from disease, no grays, no liver spots/Most of the misery’s gone/Gone, gone to the bone”. On their last two albums you’d be a liar to say that they were either front-loaded or back-loaded, they were just loaded. “The Winter Of Mixed Drinks” is no different and as the album closes it offers up “Living In Colour” and “Yes I Would”. With “Living In Colour” we’re treated to raucous guitars, militaristic drum beats, fleshy and immovable background yells, xylophones and the strength and speed of “Nothing Like You”, it has “next single” written all over it. “Yes I Would” is a much slower affair and almost touches on the country-esque tones of “Good Arms vs Bad Arms” from their last album, a fitting end to an exquisite album.
“The Winter Of Mixed Drinks” is a complete success and whilst many may say that it’s not as good as “The Midnight Organ Fight”, it’s a different album in many senses so all-round comparisons to it are unfair. Frightened Rabbit are taking us on a journey through life, love, aging, happiness, and sorrow. If “Sing The Greys” was about youth and “The Midnight Organ Fight” about love and sorrow, “The Winter Of Mixed Drinks” is about shedding yourself from each of those and moving on, letting things go and finding out what’s important in life, love and sorrow. The fans who liked Frightened Rabbit because of their doom and gloom will have plenty to be happy for on this album, but they’re probably also secretly hoping that the band continue to have miserable lives that contribute to their music.
Personally I hope they only get happier. I like the hopeful and smiley-but-tinged-with-doom-and-gloom Frightened Rabbit. Next up is surely their natural progression into Beach Boys territory making music that makes everyone else happy and smiley.
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9/10
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Worth checking out: Malcolm Midlleton, Mumford & Sons, Foxface
Buy “The Winter of Mixed Drinks”
“Listen Before You Buy” – “The Winter Of Mixed Drinks”
[Review] [Listen] – Frightened Rabbit – Sing The Greys (2006)
Initially released in the summer of 2006 on their own record label (Hit The Fan Records), Sing The Greys was given a limited run of 1,000 copies by Frightened Rabbit. Those first thousand were enough to put them on the radar of many a journalist, magazine, newspaper, blog, and year-end “best of” lists.
Hailing from Selkirk, Scotland, their sound is bluntly described as Scottish Indie-Folk, comprising of (now) five members playing the standard guitars, drums, and keyboards. What sets them apart from not only other bands they’re compared to (The Twilight Sad, We Were Promised Jetpacks, even Death Cab For Cutie and Idlewild) but from that basic pigeon-holed label I gave them above (Scottish Indie-Folk), is their passion and honesty, heard in abundance through “Sing The Grey’s”. Opening song “The Greys” is a splendid rock song in which we’re treated to our first dose of singer Scott Hutchison’s heartfelt and quivering voice as he cries “What’s the blues when you/When you’ve got the greys?/I don’t have much of a story to say/I just sit around at night and avoid the day/If I do anything at all, it would be to get up/And avoid conversation and human contact/You can’t touch the world if you can’t even feel pain/You should come back here”. On the second track “Music Now” the band are heard yelling “Music Now!” in a chant-like summoning to the Gods, shadowed by a kick-drum shadowing an upbeat acoustic guitar. Scott sings along in a child-like manner, hitting every word on the same beat as the drum, switching up pace halfway through and then ending on a phone tone (a tone from a phone), before meandering into “The First Incident”, a slow and timely 1:48 instrumental, the first of three on the album.
“He yawns/She yawns as well/She yawns because she’s bored/He yawns because he can’t sleep anymore/They go out, fill their mouths with drink and food so they don’t have to speak/And in between courses they’re gasping for air, so they yawn and look at their feet”. Scott’s bitingly honest lyrical style is evident on every song on “Sing The Greys”, with “Yawns” taking a bitter look at worn-out relationships, and “Be Less Rude” (a song they now refuse to play live) that involves clattering drums wrestling with a ringing guitar riff as Scott offers some friendly advice about someone perhaps not being such a dick as they might actually get along. After “The Second Incident”, the album’s second instrumental, we get possibly the best song on the album in “Go-Go-Girls”, a resounding jumper with static guitars that jab straight into your skull, words about drinking like it’s the end of the world, the blood of Christ, dancing girls, and street fights, and a drumstick rattle that sounds like the Alien from the Alien movies made a guest appearance on the album (although he’s not credited in the album notes).
“Behave!” is the eighth song on the album, a beautiful acoustic number under-pinned by a deep and intense bass line as Scott honestly imbues his lack of confidence in front of a certain someone. “Square 9” is the longest track on the album and by far the most epic, the huge sound of rambunctious guitars and Animal from the Muppets on drums building until it breaks with distant cries and as he sings “It’ll be like square one, where we fell in love/Forget about square two, there was no ‘me and you’/Just like square one, where we fell in love, under the tree/Forget about square three, oh that wasn’t me/Like square one, where we fell in love/Forget about square five, I was only half-alive”, you can’t help mourn the loss of a love you didn’t even know you had. As “The Final Incident” comes and goes it leaves behind “Snake”, one of the most beautifully simple and catchy songs they’ve done, Scott singing softly over an acoustic guitar about a draught excluder that he took with him to New York to see his girlfriend. The more you listen to “Snake” the more you can’t help but fall in love with it, and even though it’s out of place compared to the rest of the album it’s grand ending to an album that does live up to the Scottish Indie-Folk (add in Rock there, too) label it’s been given, but also gives so much more, an honest and passionate look at relationships, drinking, life, and draught excluders.
With “Sing The Greys”, Frightened Rabbit have a solid and majestic debut album, sure to garner them a legion of fans who can relate to the all manner of true-life happenings they sing about.
8/10
Worth checking out: We Were Promised Jetpacks, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Twilight Sad.
Buy Sing the Greys
“Listen Before You Buy – Sing The Greys”
[Review] [Listen] – Yeasayer – Odd Blood (2010)
With vocals dark and somewhat incomprehensible, reminiscent of those by The Knife on “We Share Our Mother’s Health”, drums methodic and cavernous, and the sound of someone rhythmically beating the crap out of a steel pipe in the background, Odd Blood’s opening song “The Children” is nothing like the rest of the album, an eclectic head-banger of an Indie-Dance album that’s guaranteed to get you off your ass, waving your hands and kicking your feet.
“Odd Blood” is Yeasayer’s (Chris Keating, Anand Wilder, and Ira Wolf Tuton) second album, their first “All Hour Cymbals” released in 2007 to huge critical acclaim was largely regarded as genre-bending, spacing gaps between genres where other bands failed to. “Ambling Alp” you have no doubt heard somewhere, even if you don’t know it by name or association. It’s an infectious pounder with singer Chris Keating harmonising the catchiest chorus you’ll hear all year (even though it came out in 2009), lyrics straight from “Old Man Schmelling”’s words of wisdom cook book; “Now, the world can be an unfair place it at times/But your lows will have their complement of highs/If anyone should cheat, take advantage of, or beat you/Raise your head and wear your wounds with pride”. If it hasn’t already, “Ambling Alp” is sure to be remixed a thousand times over and played on dance floors across the nation.
Next up is “Madder Red”, a dense Depeche Mode-inspired ballad, rife with resonating drums and a chunky bass line that shakes through to your chest. The contagious backing vocals of Keating, Wilder, and Tuton are spread throughout, ensuring you’ll have it stuck in your head for days on end, your only reprieve being to listen to a different song on the album which in turn will have the same effect. Keating’s falsetto rears it’s beautiful and mesmerizing head on “I Remember”, a divine recollection of love in its prime; “I remember making love on a Sunday/Like throwing hearts in a fresh cut grass in May, wooah/I remember making out on an airplane/Still afraid of flying but with you I’d die today, wooah/I remember the smell of your skin forever/Love us being stupid together, wooah”. Watch out for this one being covered by someone with an acoustic guitar and it showing up in movies and TV shows (in the same vein as Iron & Wine’s cover of “Such Great Heights”), it’s an exquisite love song that deserves it’s day in the sun.
Odd Blood’s second single “O.N.E” is equally as catchy as “Ambling Alp”, a delayed guitar riff that’s played repeatedly is accompanied by a samba-like beat, taking you through the streets on a float and dancing over and over again. Another sure-fire dance floor hit and with the middle 8/outro being the album’s most Soul/Saturday Night Fever moment, when it reaches it’s end at 5:25 you’re left with only one option: Repeat. After you’ve listened to “O.N.E.” four times in a row you might want to check out the rest of the album. “Love Me Girl” and “Rome” fall flat compared to the highs of “I Remember” and “O.N.E.”, with no catchy choruses or hooks of distinction, the former employing sounds of birds that don’t quite fit in and the latter having a huge tribal drum beat and 80’s synth that work but ultimately lead to nowhere, you’d be forgiven for wanting to move on to the next track.
“Mondegreen” is a hand-clap led powerhouse, funky bass line, horns, and scratchy wailing guitar solo in tow, you start off clapping your hands along from side to side, then find yourself on your feet and flailing them out in front of you as if trying to kick a tiny invisible alien who’s after your fresh supply acorns (aliens eat acorns, right?) and end the song sitting back down and trying to catch your breath as the little alien gives up his futile attempts and whines the song away. Album closer “Grizelda” comes and goes from nothing into something and back again, the hand-claps sporadic, spirally synths present but hanging back as they let the child-like backing vocals and pulsating drums punch through amidst Keating’s backstage vocals. It’s not the ending to the album I was hoping for (personally I would’ve put “Mondegreen” last) but it still fits.
“Odd Blood” is an album that may need a couple of listens before you can definitively come to a conclusion as to whether you just like it or whether you just love it. It’s an album that’s slightly front-loaded with anthems and back-loaded with songs that many other bands would kill to have. Either way you can’t go wrong with listening to “Odd Blood” for the next six weeks straight and if you do, you’ll be glad you did. If you don’t, well then you’ll have just wasted six weeks of your life.
8.5/10
Worth checking out: Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, MGMT
Buy “Odd Blood”
Listen Before You Buy: “Odd Blood”
