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ALBUM REVIEW: HAIM ‘Something To Tell You’

The wait is over! HAIM's second album is here, but it's not like they've been completely off the radar. 

There was that collab single with Bastille which was fun, 'Pray To God' with Calvin Harris - a leftover from the 'Days Are Gone' sessions that I'm hoping the original pops up on an anniversary reissue in, gosh, 2023, 'Holes In The Sky' from the soundtrack of the 2nd Divergent movie that I wasn't feeling at all, and their cover of Tame Impala's ‘Cause I'm a Man' which is BETTER than the original (sorry Kevin).

While all this was happening, they were making an indelible but overlooked mark on the pop and cultural landscape - which I’ll elaborate on in seven topics

 TRENDSETTING

I started hearing their inventive brand of polyrhythmic synth guitar pop crop up in tunes like Shura's 'Touch' (lowkey soulful icy synth HAIM), 'Emotion' by Carly Rae Jepson (Latin Freestyle HAIM) and most recently Paramore's 'Told You So' and 'Forgiveness' (all of the above).

Just like The Strokes East Village thrift was hugely influential back in the day on Mens fashion (what Spin magazine hilariously described as “part Bowery Boys, part CK One hotties”) 

HAIM definitely popularized a uber long hair, leather jacket and cropped shorts LA boho look that was practically everywhere in 2014/5 (or maybe just in the hipster places I hang :P )

There is an actual website called What Would HAIM Wear?

 DAYS ARE GONE MARK II

Now here we are with 'Something To Tell You' - not a repudiation but builds on 'Days Are Gone' - a sequel and clear step forward that's more confident and audacious in its approach and teeming with new musical ideas and different sonic textures.

While still largely stuck to love songs, the lyrics represent a quantum leap in terms of thoughtfulness and maturity.

 THE INTERPRETATION GAME

 The first glimpse of this record we got was 'Right Now' which came in the form of a video filmed as they recorded a take - giving an instant impression of muso credibility. a down tempo, foreboding ballad, not really a summer jam but hot on it's heels came 'Want You Back' the euphoric banger if there ever was one.

Lyrically they could be two sides of one story, 'Right Now' a tempestuous rebuke against an dishonest ex whose come crawling back.  Like an argument that evolves into a full on row , the song builds and builds with each incrimination like thunder, a guitar squalls, Taiko drum patterns rumble - and then it all explodes. 'Want You Back' the ex, having gone back into the dating world, realises that they miss the narrator, apologises '' I’ll take the fall and the fault in us. I’ll give you all the love I never gave before I left you''.

'Want You Back' has the wistful wisdom of a folk song which makes complete sense when you learn that it was originally written as a much slower song on an acoustic guitar. I remember John Lennon saying on The Beatles Anthology Documentary (or it could've been from Ian MacDonald's Beatles book 'Revolution In The Head') that whatever instrument a song is written on influences the flavour of the song, and its defo left its mark.

I really love 'Night So Long' though. The desolate blend of echoic harmony, ambient guitar twang & weeping melodies gives it a real nocturnal, countrified, dark night of the soul vibe to it. a lovelorn hymn that's really evocative of post break up, being lost in quiet despair, resigned to another crack around the merry-go-round of Love - for the narrator Romantic Love is a Sisyphean act

I could get really SAT English Literature with my interpretations of these songs but I'll spare you the pain lol

 STUDIO AS AN INSTRUMENT

One of the common critics of HAIM albums, especially this sophomore release is that it's over produced. To be honest it's no more heavily produced than a classic Neptunes track or Timbaland one a decade before and Trevor Horn back in the 80s.

The Daddy of them all being Phil Spector whose Wall of Sound approach was a dense aesthetic that included an array of orchestral instruments—strings, woodwind, brass and percussion—not previously associated with pop music, characterizing his methods as "a Wagnerian approach to rock & roll: little symphonies for the kids".  

Brian Wilson, a huge Spector fan, used a similar recording technique, especially during the Pet Sounds and Smile eras of the Beach Boys, the most recognizable examples being "God Only Knows", "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and especially, the psychedelic "pocket symphony" of "Good Vibrations"

Wilson says "Before Spector, people recorded all the instruments separately. They got great piano, great guitar, and great bass. But he thought of the song as one giant instrument. It was huge. Size was so important to him, how big everything sounded. And he had the best drums I ever heard."

‘Something To Tell You’ (and ‘Days are Gone’ too) is very much in the spirit of Spector but with a modern vernacular. ‘Ready For You’, ‘Want You Back’ and the title song are really sonically dense and defly work in a lot of elements.

The dichotomy of the synthetic, adventurous interpretation of the songs on the record compared to the more reigned in, organic live version isn’t unique to HAIM.

Led Zeppelin live were, as legendary rock critic Lester Bangs described them, 'a thunderous, near-undifferentiated tidal wave of sound that doesn't engross but envelops to snuff any possible distraction' or in Robert Plant's words it was a "very animal thing, a hellishly powerful thing,". In contrast Page's production on the records gave their songs a sense of auditory cinema to what could have been, in a less-imaginative producer’s hands, simply bombastic rock songs.

There’s all sorts of panning and added the effects, echo-chambered voice drops into a small explosion of fuzz-tone guitar, including using Low Frequency Oscillators on tape machines that was really startling to hear at the time.

I had qualms about the use of pitched vocals that are at the start of ‘Little of Your Love’ and in the call back in the chorus of ‘Right Now’, because in the latter I thought it undercut the poignancy by having something so alien sounding in something so human, and the prior I thought a synthetic touch in something so throwback was jarring – like T Pain at the start of Springsteen’s ‘Hungry Heart’ – but maybe not a teenager who hasn’t grown up with sounds being rigidly compartmentalized in genres the way people did in the 20th century.

SIDE NOTE: In fact it could be argued that auto tune / vocal pitch shifting (techniques for deliberate misusing of programs designed for correcting pitch as a way of colourizing the human voice with distortion) is the musical signature of the 2010’s the same way a Wah-Wah pedal makes you think of the 60s or the sound of a Fairlight CMI is very 80s. Which if true makes Cher’s ‘Believe’ ridiculously ahead of it’s time – the pop equivalent of what The MC5 were to Punk?

 SPOT THE INFLUENCES

 Critics love to play ‘Spot the Influences’:  X sounds as if The Reminder-era Feist fused together the acoustic riffs of ‘I Don't Want to Know’ and ‘Never Going Back Again’ – it weirdly reminds me of families gathered around a new-born baby talking about how it has it’s mother’s eyes but grandfathers nose – all these are just cosmetic judgements that are useful to introduce the uninitiated to artists they’ve never heard about but music, like babies, are more than the sum of their parts.  

When critics would name check Fleetwood Mac in reference to HAIM in 2013 it always felt tenuous though I knew what they meant – the songs didn’t sound like Fleetwood Mac in the autonomy of the song structure but in the emotional resonance. People hadn’t heard a guitar pop band sing about relationships like that, in a style like that for a long time – since probably Fleetwood Mac and so made the connection – but the fab ‘You Never Knew’ completely pastiches the gossamer textures of Tango In The Night era Fleetwood Mac in its production to its detriment I think because every time it starts I’m half expecting Christine McVie to come on and tell me sweet little lies.

 NO GENRES

I once stumbled on a useful insight about art criticism from an article that the writer and journalist Janet Malcolm wrote in response to vitriolic critiques on J.D Salinger's writing made by literary luminaries such as Updike and Didion: ''negative contemporary criticism of a masterpiece can be helpful to later critics, acting as a kind of radar that picks up the ping of the work’s originality''.

Now, I’m not saying this record is a masterpiece - It's really good - but unpacking and investigating the critiques have lead me to some interesting places, like this douchey one from the Guardian.

‘’…Haim were swiftly co-opted by the world of mainstream pop, which seems less interested in their place within a lineage of classic Californian rock than their way with a honeyed melody.’’

 From the off this is not true because they did tour with Florence and The Machine and play the big pop extravaganza that was Chime For Change before they even dropped an album. This smells more like a Luddite Gen Xer hang up about transgressing the dividing lines between musical genres.

Music critic Lizzy Goodman on the promo trail for her excellent book ‘Meet Me In The Bathroom’ a thrilling 600-page oral history of New York’s Rock renaissance of the 2000s  - brought up a fantastic point on a podcast about the analogue kids of The Strokes generation and their Post Napster successors Vampire Weekend, Grimes and HAIM etc.

Listen to that podcast here (it’s brilliant)

https://soundcloud.com/the-watch-podcast/lizzy-goodman-on-the-rebirth-of-rock-n-roll-in-new-york-city-from-2001-to-2011-ep-153

 but here’s the paraphrased version of what I want to highlight:

 Interviewer: The time between ‘Is This It?’ and Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut is 7 years – one was the beginning of something and one was the end of something.

LIZZY GOODMAN: You could imagine The Strokes debuting in 2008 but you could not imagine Vampire Weekend happening in 2001 because there is no Ezra brain without the internet.

Interviewer: When I interviewed Ezra for Spin, I became the most oldest man in the universe! I was so angry, I was like: ‘’how dare you go to an Ivy League school, be white and like Hip Hop’’ says the guy who went to an Ivy League school, was white and loved Hip Hop, but how dare you talk about it (so well) and have fluency in all these different worlds and jump between things and never break a sweat.

LG: He’s literally like ‘I don’t know what you mean?’

This is normal to a Millennial but to a Gen Xer that level of musical sophistication is unheard of because they didn’t have the access to everything ever recorded pooled together in one space that the internet is. This Age of Musical Plenty has freed people up from the rigid lock of genre and toward an eclectic palette which is also reflected in the music they make.

  BAND BY IT'S COVER

I LOVE ALBUM ART! (I'm also a keen linear notes reader *did you know there's a Grammy for best linear notes? musicians take note lol*) when done right they're great windows into the tone of the record inside. 'Days Are Gone' & 'Something To Tell You' are really cool to contrast.

'Days Are Gone' was the start of a huge career for the band. The album offered listeners a look into their sunny, romantic lives and the cover art too reflected HAIM's bright prospects. Seated in three fold-up chairs on a big green lawn (suburban kids) the heads of the HAIM sisters are turned to the left, eyes averted and covered in shades (future's so bright, I gotta wear shades)

They followed the Spice Girls’ template of being a charismatic group, whose individual styles all added to the bigger picture - their meshing of high street and storied, thrift store pieces gave them an indie rock relatability. They looked like regular joes with great personal style.

On the flip-side 'Something To Tell You' is the glam fulfillment of that promise. It's like a souped up version where the pastoral suburban LA setting of 'Days Are Gone' gives way to more traditional iconic rock images of LA interspersed with glam fashion editorial-like images and (my fav) the quirkier bold coloured zoot suit-y David Byrne-esque stuff.

  'Something To Tell You' is a clear step forward, artistically and career-wise. You can hear adventurous enthusiasm in how they approach every song and from the lyrics you get that too that the uncertainty that was a motif in a lot of the songs from their last LP is gone and not only do they finally know what they want from life but are racing towards it. Record #3 is going to be an exciting listen.

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“To go to bed and to wake up again day after day besides a woman, to lie in bed with our arms around each other and drift in and out of sleep, to be with each other—not as a quick stolen pleasure, nor as a wild treat—but like sunlight, day after day in the regular course of our lives. I was discovering all the ways that love creeps into life when two selves exist closely, when two women meet.”

Audre Lorde (via honeysuckle-poison)

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PJ HARVEY ‘DRY’ ESSAY PT 6

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PJ HARVEY ‘DRY’ ESSAY PT 5

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PJ HARVEY ‘DRY’ ESSAY PT 4

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PJ HARVEY ‘DRY’ ESSAY PT 3

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PJ HARVEY ‘DRY’ ESSAY PT 2

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PJ HARVEY ‘DRY’ ESSAY PT 1

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Albums

ST VINCENT - ‘St Vincent’

What a year Annie Clark has had! 4AD Art Rock Chanteuse signs to a major label and remodels herself as this Art Pop Futuristic Deity with her most weirdest and totally badass guitarwork yet. Clark’s Ziggy Stardust moment has produced her most accessable album yet, she fronted Nirvana at their Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame induction, played on SNL, had a brand of coffee named after her and her Digital Witness Tour totally rewrote the narrative of live rock performance with it’s bizarre yet compelling mix of dance, mime and spoken word. Like Bowie’s ‘Hunky Dory’, Clark’s previous album was the more emotionally direct record but this 4th record more than makes up for it in ambition, imagination, melody and pure excitement.

RUN THE JEWELS - 'Run The Jewels 2’

BEST straight up Rap record of the year. Smart, topical, blazing production.

tUnE-yArDs - 'Nikki Nack’

Such a joyous cornucopia of African & Haitian instrumentation and singing styles splattered with quirky electronics and a smidgen of Dub (‘Sink-O’) & Post Punk gloom (‘Time of Dark’). It just explodes with wonderous exhurance and Garbus’ zany imagination & big heart. LOVED IT!

WARPAINT - 'Warpaint’

I was watching this interview with a female stand up comic who was talking about her favourite female comedians and she said something that really made an impression on me, I’m paraphrasing but it was something like ‘if there’s a difference between male and female comedy is that male comedy is ejaculatory and female comedy is more slow burn’ it’s a massive generalisation but I see where she’s coming from - but it totally explains Warpaint. Their impact is not immediate, you have to let yourself slip into the vibe they are making and the luxuriate in the instrumentation and melody, like you would a bath, and their power really opens up to you. This self-titled sophomore record definately is in keeping with this, it doesn’t have an ‘Undertow’ or ‘Composure’ that are more instantaneous but these bunch of new songs are a lot more powerful if you don’t mind ethereal.

PERFUME GENIUS - 'Too Bright’

This LP was my first contact with Perfume Genius’ music and it’s just so awesome that when you ignorantly think you’ve heard it all that you could run into weird exciting music you never knew existed. This is his 3rd record and it’s a totally new sound to his 2 previous deeply personal piano centric ballad albums - more Scott Walker than Rufus Wainwright (his 2nd - Put Your Back N2 It’ is great, especially the song ’Hood’) and now he’s got beats and synths as well as rock intstruments and has become this electro Glam Rocker but he’s turned his gaze away from himself and talks about Gay issues in a very provocative, witty and abstract way - 'Fool’ where he rips on some straight women’s festishisation of Gay men as style imparting pets rather than friends or the best line of the album from the menacing stomper 'Queen’ where he takes a ironic jab at Right-wing America’s paranoid fear of homosexuality’s family destrying wicked influence with the killer defiant baiting: ”No Family is safe when I sashay” - I’m a straight dude but even I guffawed and clapped at how wonderfully badass that line and this whole record is.

JUNGLE - 'Jungle’

Dressed in mid 90’s Junglist garb (satin bomber jackets, straight jeans either Air Max 90s or Reebok Classics) these Londoners mine the bombastic grooves of 70s Funk, big fat synth lines that you’d hear pulsing out of Manchester’s The Haçienda in the early 90s with gorgeous falsettos that sound like Stax samples. I could whinge that this is dance music that fetishes the past just like how Tumblr is this image engine for borrowed nostalgia of a decade that the kids were too yong to experience (wasn’t that the same with Britpop’s fascination with The 60s though?) but these songs are so good and so fresh.

AZEALIA BANKS - 'Broke With Expensive Taste’

Twitter battles and a three year tussle with her record company has blighted the fact that Banks is actually a incredible artist and her debut LP finally released is probably the most NEXT LEVEL, INNOVATIVE & SASSY albums of 2014 and ever.

MØ - 'No Mythologies To Follow’

Nordic Punk Rocker goes solo with a super spunky baroque-ish Pop and the most bonkers unpredictable beats I’ve ever heard. That she managed to make these soulful vocals blend so awesomely with the eccentric production is no easy feat. Aestrically she’s held on to her Punk roots with Zine-like album record & poster design and a Punk dress sense with a Pop 80s ponytail. She’s deffo my fav solo Pop artist of the year and very interested how she develops as an artist.

JULIAN CASABLANCAS & THE VOIDZ - 'Tyranny’

WOMAD gone Futuristic! Julian Casablancas is kind of like a Film Director - he spewed out his musical brain on the 1st 2 Strokes records, his bandmates more like talent helping him achieve his musical vision but now The Strokes have become a democracy he’s created a side band of technical musical Wizards to help him realize his personal musical expression - The Voidz. When ‘Human Sadness’ dropped I didn’t feel it at all. I thought it was an indulgent overlong bit of spacey Doo Wop noise. ‘Where No Eagles Fly’ crashed in with it’s fat Joy Division-ish groove and vocals and lyrics that reminded me of early 80s UK electro artist The Normal’s cult single 'warm leatherette’ - but then it explodes into a fury and swagger straight out of ‘Is This It’ era Strokes - I was shocked and aroused! lol The album is this really nightmarish sludgey Sledge hammer bit of hard experimental rock that like Bombay Bicyle Club and early Vampire Weekend borrows AfroBeat but instead of referencing the sound it uses it’s time signatures and applies them to heavily progressed & distorted modern instruments - it takes in Middle Eastern as well as other World Music favours and turns them kooky - like ‘Father Electricity’ which is like listening to Latin music played thru a Gameboy with menacing Rock guitar and Casablancas vocal Jazz scat singing. This shit is BOLD! LOL and it works! Lyrically it’s a mish-mash of a protest record and a ‘Blood On The Tracks’ break up record but all the pain and regrets aren’t about a broken romantic love affair but his tragic Oedipal relationship with his Father - ‘Human Sadness’ especially. Despite Casablancas’ claims this is not a mainstream Rock record - you gotta get yourself in the head space of listening to Pink Floyd or King Crimson if they were into Punk and electro - this is progressive rock for the 21st century.

FKA TWIGS - 'LP1’

Tate Modern R&B. I admire the Art of the production, songwriting and how it’s all presented visually (Grace Jones for the Internet generation) but, like the new St Vincent record and most Bowie, it’s the genius of artifice - it has my brain but doesn’t touch my emotions.

BLOOD ORANGE - 'Cupid Deluxe’

Being ancient, I remember seeing ‘Test Icicles’ at the Astoria (R.I.P) back in the white heat of New Rave in 2006 and raising my eyebrow when Lightspeed Champion’s first single came out and then REALLY loving it but if somebody told me that Dev Hynes would morph into this slow jam MJ meets Terrence Trent Darby sound but syntheses that into something that was fresh and modern I’d of laughed at you the same way you’d laugh if I told you that MC Ride from Death Grips would turn into the next Bon Iver then change again into a future Prince. The fact that Hynes has pulled these genre flips off and with such heart and forward thinking finesse is incredible and should be more lauded. Could ‘Blood Orange’ be the final metamorphosis or are there more styles in Hynes’ musical wardrobe? I dunno but I’m excited for more either way.

KATE TEMPEST - 'Everybody Down’

Storytelling has kinda fallen out of favour in UK Rap. Mike Skinner and Roots Manuva did it exceptionally well last decade, Grime artists like Kano, early Dizzee Rascal (he shouted out to this style again in on ‘Sirens’ before totally going Grime Pop), Mitchell Bros and the like too bit nobody has done it since in a compelling way until Spoken word poet, Playright & Rapper Kate Tempest went solo. Dickensian Tales of underclass strife but without the cartoony spin Jamie T tells similar stories - Tempest has a documentary-like observational eye with that spot on, unusual turn of phrase you read in great literture and poetry. She tells a single story over 12 tracks but so cleverly changing the POV that they sound like and could be 12 short stories. This album is best appreciated reading along with its map-like lyric sheet lol

D’ANGELO & THE VANGUARD - 'Black Messiah’

D’Angelo’s back. Nuff Said.

LA ROUX - 'Trouble in Paradise’

Criminally overlooked! Irristable Pop music with that isn’t aimed squarely at teen pop radio.

FLYING LOTUS - 'You’re Dead!’

The Sly Stone / Miles Davies of Hip Hop drops another LP of freakish soundscapes and outlandish flows but this is his most accomplished record yet.

MICA LEVI - 'Under The Skin Soundtrack’

Classically trained experimental pop musician of Micachu & The Shapes fame puts all her experiments with clashes of sound, cutting ‘n’ looping and making new instruments to incredible use composing the serene, ominous and otherworldly soundtrack to Jonathan Glazier’s strange, beautiful and scary science fiction fable.

APHEX TWIN - 'Syro’

One of 2014’s many unexpected comebacks. This new record is definitely his most accessible - a fun and light on the glitch record.

SAM SMITH - 'In The Lonely Hour’

The Male dance-y Adele? Sure this record was annoyingly omnipresent this year but isn’t that what good Pop is supposed to be, no? The dance elements are really cool and his ballads are very interesting because you hardly ever hear guy’s singing love songs from an emotionally vulnerable position and wondering the sincerity of a lover - it’s not really what a stereotypical bloke thinks about in songs, anyway. Smith being an out Gay man & saying his love songs are based on true life experiences is rad coz they’re very popular songs about Gay love - maybe not explicitly so but the fact that the ecstasy & heartbreak has struck such a chord with millions of people really sticks it to right wing conservatives & archaic laws that see homosexual love as being 'other’ or different to 'normal’ love.

KINDNESS - 'Otherness’

I can’t really call myself a Kindness fan, more an admirer - I wasn’t going to include this album but the songs that Baines hands over the mic to feature artists are so damn good I chucked it on.

LYKKE LI - 'I Never Learn’

a relentless barrage of tearjerking bangers - not in an uplifting Gloria Gaynor way, every song wallows in self pity, regret and loneliness but they’re so anthemic and cinematic in scope with her signature Phil Spektor Girl Group drums. I enjoy how poppy it is but, Man, if I was ever in emotional turmoil I can’t think of a better balming tonic than this - except maybe another Scandinavian break up tonic: Häagen-Dazs lol

JAMIE T - 'Carry On The Grudge’

Last decade was a brilliant one for UK wordsmiths - we had ‘the Chas & Dave with library cards’ wittisms of Carl Baret & Pete Doherty, The Bob Dylan aping colourful lyric sheet of Johnny Borrell, the precocious poetric social observations of Alex Turner and the whirrling patois flavoured William Blake-ish London lyrical vistas and characterizations of Wimbledon Brylcreemed troubadour scallywag Jamie T. He’s come back after 5 years just as brazen but this time with a tenderness that is as surprizing as it’s affecting.

CHARLI XCX - 'Sucker’

Bratty lyrics, killer hooks, sharp riffs, simple & tightly structured Pop songs and a confidence that’s flooring. If I there was just one word to describe this album it would be: Defiant. XCX grabbed the attention of critics, rabid music fans & hipsters back in 2011 with a slew of audacious & inventive singles, mixtapes that lead to a fantastic debut album but proved too quirky for Pop radio & failed to dent the conversations of mainstream Pop fans. She was a cult star when her talent warrented more. It took the surprise explosion of 'I Love It’, a demo XCX tossed to Swedish party Gremlins Icona Pop on a whim & helped sing, to break that Pop barrier. it seems she reacted to that with a chart topping ambition that’s almost breathtaking in it’s shrewdness and a bunch of songs with simple brash lyrics and spoke about love like how a teenager would know it and had the lyrical preoccupation with wealth & fame obsession that you’d hear in a 2 Chains song - the kind of things a Reality Talent Show loving teen fantasizes about. I really liked this album - I enjoyed it in the same way as a Summer Blockbuster - which I think was the intention. It’s product, a piece of commercial Art unlike her 1st album which to my ears harked back to the Post Disco Dance Pop of early Madonna & outlandish New Wave Pop of Bow Wow Wow that would come off strange & unusual on modern Pop radio. This new record seems like a fiercely confident custom made Pop missile to blow up the charts as an affirmation to her own abilities as a songwriter and a EFF YOU to all the industry naysayers and it’s mission accomplished.

BOMBAY BICYCLE CLUB - 'So Long, See You Tomorrow’

A beautiful kaleidoscope of multicultural sounds that buoy up these wonderously exhubrant and tender melodies.

SHABAZZ PALACES - 'Lese Majesty’

Yeasayerish Hip Hop that leans on Afrofuturist themes and spacey acid trip soundscapes

CARIBOU - 'Our Love’

I dunno how to talk about dance music other than this was a very pleasent listening experience lol

THE WAR ON DRUGS - 'Lost In a Dream’

I first heard this waifing from a workmates computer and I loved it. It reminded me of this wistful mix of The Replacements and 80s Springsteen but - strangely - the vibe I got from the production was ‘Tango in the Night’ Fleetwood Mac - that daydreamy guitarlines and drums, am I being weird? I think I am. (I think I’m now sick of referencing other stuff that stuff reminds me off LOL)

EPs

SHAMIR - 'Northtown’

Fresh, Bold, Fun and Emosh. Late 80s / Early 90s R&B with a fresh spin. I’ve seen these songs played live and had a total blast!

WOLF ALICE - 'Creature Songs’

Im super embarrassed to admit that I completely thought Wolf Alice were a one hit wonder last year (‘She’ is such a TUNE!) but this EP really grabbed me by the lapel (‘Moaning Lisa Smile’, ‘Storms’& ‘Heavenly Creatures’) and seeing them play live was a total mindblower - such a killer live band! All the exciting songs that I stupidly dismissed - ‘Bros’ and ‘Fluffy’ - really kicked my ass live and I rolled out of Heaven night club like St Paul stepping into Damacus - a diehard convert lol

TIRZAH - 'No Romance’

I found her via an AlunaGeorge interview when they were asked whjat they were listening to at the moment and I was happy with what I found. A friend / collaborator / protege of Mica Levi but Tirzah’s stuff learns more of the quirky dance beats of Levi’s Kwesachu Mixtape Vol.1 than her more experimental stuff. It’s wonderfully strange and rhythmic and her voice is beautiful - a total WIN!

YEARS & YEARS - Various Singles

I’m a bit of a snob, okay - i complete snob. It’s nothing to be proud of. I first heard of this band fronted by an actor that I’ve seen in a few cool indie films and on the TV Show ‘Skins’ and without listening to their music I marked them out as ‘30 Seconds To Mars Bullshit’. I know, I suck. I then heard it ‘Real’ and I fucking loved it. It’s really immediate fun House-y Pop music. I then checked out ‘Take Shelter’ and their cover of Blue Cantrel’s ‘Breathe’ and loved them too. Saw them play live in the tiny Plan B in Brixton and Olly - the actor turned lead singer was dishing out live vocals as good as the CD without an earpiece. Super impressive. I can’t wait to hear what the record is like.

MIXTAPE TWENTY-14

SIDE A

MOANING LISA SMILE - Wolf Alive

BLOCKBUSTER NIGHT Part One - Run The Jewels

REAL - Years & Years

HEAVY METAL & REFLECTIVE - Azealia Banks

WHO DO YOU LOVE? - Kindness featuring Robyn

NEW DORP NEW YORK - SBTRKT featuring Ezra Koenig

ON THE REGULAR - Shamir

BUSY EARNIN’ - Jungle

WALK THIS WAY - MØ

ST JUSTICE - Albert Hammond Jr

0 TO 100 - DRAKE

BOOM CLAP - Charli XCX

RATTLESNAKE - St Vincent

i - KENDRICK LAMAR

CRUEL SEXUALITY - La Roux

MONEY - Peace

ANACONDA - Nicki Minaj

BLANK SPACE - Taylor Swift

NO ROMANCE - Tirzah

WATER FOUNTAIN - tUnE-yArDs

SANCTIFIED - Rick Ross, Kanye & Big Sean

LONG HAIR - Drowners

NEXT TO IT - Lupe Fiasco

I BLAME MYSELF - Skye Ferreira

ZOMBIE - Jamie T

DROWNING - Banks

GIRL - Jamie XX

SIDE B

INTRO / KEEP IT HEALTHY - Warpaint

THEME FROM BECKY - Kate Tempest

NEVER CATCH ME - Flying Lotus featuring Kendrick Lamaar

EVERY OTHER FRECKLE - Alt J

TOUCH - Shura

HOME BY NOW - Bombay Bicycle Club

CAN’T DO WITHOUT YOU - Caribou

TWO WEEKS - FKA Twigs

EEZ-EH - Kasabian

OCTAHATE - Ryn Weaver

FATHER ELECTRICITY - Julian Casablancas & The Voidz

NO REST FOR THE WICKED - Lykke Li

GRID - Perfume Genius

WEST COAST - Lana Del Rey

RED EYES - The War on Drugs

STAY WITH ME - Sam Smith

MUSIC 2014

Albums

ST VINCENT - ‘St Vincent’

What a year Annie Clark has had! 4AD Art Rock Chanteuse signs to a major label and remodels herself as this Art Pop Futuristic Deity with her most weirdest and totally badass guitarwork yet. Clark’s Ziggy Stardust moment has produced her most...

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Thoughts From The Front Row I wasn’t from the generation that listened to music communally, I didn’t grow up sitting around listening to vinyl, I was from the tape / CD generation where I listened to my jams on my Walkman or on my stereo at home with my headphones on, a private experience that was almost an onanistic pleasure in that regard. So when I went to my first gigs and found myself faced with the music I loved being played out in public and louder than bombs, it was a complete thrill.

The last four of years, this year especially, I’ve been going to more gigs than I did as a music crazed teenager, and what struck me about the concert going experience now that I am older, a little wiser and with an annoying habit of filtering the world through a literary lens like I’m living inside a novel, looking for subtext, motifs and allusion where there sometimes is none, what has struck me about gig going is the mystical aspect of it all.

I can imagine your scrunched up faces, let me explain…

There’s a pop-up community that happens at a concert: a group of people brought together by chance and have never been in the same room together, which happens all the time, but unlike a train carriage or clothing store where everyone despite sharing the same space are actually all caught up in their own little preoccupations, at a concert there are all engaged in the same spectacle. You never really know what’s going to happen.

When an audience gets caught up in music that moves them something special and odd happens, they kind of turn into this one organism.

It reminds me of social scientist Lauren Carpenter’s Pong experiment which involved a bunch of people in a darkened hall holding ping pong bats, one side red and one side green, standing in front of a large luminous screen displaying the Pong videogame. They were given no instructions but eventually the crowd figured out that red was for up and green was for down and after a few fumbles they were playing the game to the point where they weren’t verbally communicating. Carpenter described that moment of connection as ‘subconscious consensus’ like the participants of a Ouja session pushing a glass around a table.

Something similar happens at a gig where an enraptured audience reacts as a whole to whatever is happening on stage.

Music journalists that review gigs never really mention the audiences role in a show.

A song played for the fiftieth time can obviously and quite rightly lose the vitality that it had when the performer played it for the first time but when an audience, depending on the tome of the song, react to it fervently or swaying with their eyes closed, completely lost in a moment it can, and does, reinvigorates the song for the performer and instil it with meaning again.

We as an audience have just as much a responsibility to the quality of a show as the performer in that case. We are the other side of a reciprocal relationship. A pop concert, is like a play, is a living thing but unlike a play (and classical recital) where the actors only really need to play off each other, the audience are participants too.

This idea occurred to me after seeing Kate Bush’s ‘Before The Dawn’ concert where I left it so moved and euphoric I was trying to figure out why it made such a colossal impression on me. I came to the conclusion that it was because of the audience. Not taking anything away from the show – it was the most wildly imaginative and beautifully executed music performance I’d ever seen but whatever The KT Fellowship gave out in stellar music and visual wonderment, the audience projected back with their overpowering energy and unbridled waves of adoration and love. It was crazy.

Now coming back down to Earth, another thing that struck me about concerts was unique and important function they provide for a psychological decompression.

Typically the best gigs would be from Thursday onwards but often, I’ve found from talking to people at gigs, at a midweek gig people would book a day off work the following day, as I do, and you can sometimes have a far more raucous and hedonistic gig on a Tuesday.

Concerts as an entertainment provide a unique opportunity to escape the rules and rigors of everyday life and for a short period of time lose yourself in something different from the omnipresent screens that we face everyday and instead face a flesh and blood human being in three dimensions playing music amplified so loud we can feel it going through our bodies and there’s a lack of control and safe chaos in that we don’t know each other and what’s going to happen but we can go wild and dance or sing along or luxuriate in the experience.

There are few places where people are allowed to do that so put down your phones and party.

I wasn’t from the generation that listened to music communally, I didn’t grow up sitting around listening to vinyl, I was from the tape / CD generation where I listened to my jams on my Walkman or on my stereo at home with my headphones on, a private experience that was almost an onanistic...

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getting into this technique where i record a vocal take on my super crappy old 80 $ live mic from like 2 years ago and then do a take on my nice mic and blend them together - it creates a really cool sound where u get the distortion and richness of the old mic but the clarity and precision of the…

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Stop Dismissing Young Female Musicians as “Inauthentic”

In a Slate “Music Box” review this week I talk about new albums by New Zealand-born teen prodigy Lorde and L.A. sister trio Haim, which signal that we might finally have arrived at a point when rock, pop, R&B, and hip-hop mix with more blithe abandon and fewer scare quotes. But there’s another old prejudice their stories ought to put to rest—against the way many young women come up through the record industry.

To most listeners it seems like Haim and Lorde appeared out of nowhere in the past year, but they have longer histories. After their Partridge Family-style start in their parents’ classic-rock cover band, the two eldest of the San Fernando-bred Haim sisters were in a Richard Marx-produced tween-pop band called the Valli Girls in the early 2000s, which had a tune on the Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants soundtrack and a theme song called “It’s a Hair Thing” for a kids’ TV show called Trollz. The sisters have said they quit the group because they wanted to be writing their own material. As for Lorde (born Ella Yelich-O’Connor), the new 16-year-old poet of minimalist R&B? She was discovered in an online talent-show video, signed and “developed” by Universal starting when she was 12.

These kinds of backstories tend to breed suspicion, and catcalls about inauthenticity—witness the Internet-wide pillorying of Lana Del Rey in 2011 and 2012 after her past as major-label signee Lizzy Grant came out, as if that somehow undermined a persona that couldn’t be more draped in theatrical artifice if her adopted pseudonym had been David Bowie. In a similar vein I was disappointed when a friend, the usually astute critic Maura Johnston, wrote in Spin recently that “it’s hard not to view [Lorde’s] age as some sort of clumsy ploy,” insinuating that her corporate minders have been ordering her to drop references to her slender years into her songs. To my ears, her adolescent perspective is integral to everything she writes, the grounding of her poetic electricity. Nothing seems wedged in out of place.

What makes it less believable that this 16-year-old writes from a 16-year-old point of view than it was when Taylor Swift did the same, except that Lorde does it with impossibly greater sophistication, like a pop Bonjour Tristesse? If anything I’d expect accusations that some grownup had slipped her a thesaurus, but she’s said in interviews that songwriting partner and producer Joel Little mainly serves to rein in her verbal excesses—and that she selected him after rejecting many proposed collaborators, because he wanted to support her vision, not supplant it. You might as well attack those “manufactured” bands the Sex Pistols and the Jimi Hendrix Experience, both assembled by producers … except that nobody does.

And then this week Sinead O’Connor condescended to assert, out of “concern,” that the Disney-cultivated multi-millionaire Miley Cyrus is being “pimped” by the music industry, despite the fact that Cyrus repeatedly expressed enthusiasm for the twerking, racial-boundary-violating direction she would soon take before the current gossip cycle even began. Judge it as you please (and I’m ambivalent myself), but denying Cyrus’s agency smacks of the kind of contempt that says all Muslim women wearing veils are duped victims of their husbands and fathers, as if cultural imperatives weren’t multisided, as if every Western woman in a tight skirt and heels weren’t also fulfilling expectations she can either receive passively, resist, or make her own.

The fact is that for many young women the route to a life in music is more likely to lead through girl groups and talent shows than out of a garage band—and there’s no reason to assume that most scruffy guys with guitars aren’t equally hungry for success. It’s the do-it-yourself model, in many ways, that demands a higher level of presumption: the arrogance to believe your way is superior to what the professionals are already doing, as well as the luxury to chase contrarian romantic dreams rather than straightforward career goals. Look at Motown and Nashville—careerists have made at least as much great music as anyone else. As the next generation sweeps away some rules about who gets to speak what pop language, let’s also ease up the vigilance over where they learn those vocabularies, and concentrate on what they have to tell us.

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So I unexpectedly got to see Albert Hammond Jr play last night (thanks to my amazingly gracious pal Romana) and as a crummy old Strokes fan - I say ‘crummy’ because I’ve never seen them live despite loving their stuff to bits and being a walking Strokes encyclopedia - but, yeah, so I went in with a lot of built up curiosity, on how he’d be IRL as opposed to on wax, and excitement too.

Did he live up to my giddy expectations as a music fan as well as a self confessed Strokes fanboy?

I’ve decided to let you all in on that in the style of a goofy self-interview just for the lolz.

Ramsey will be in regular type and RAMZEE will talk in pure CAPS. Here goes:

Ramsey: This is weird

RZ: DITTO

R: Let’s just go with it and see where it leads

RZ: WELL, I DUNNO ABOUT YOU BUT I LOVED IT!!!!

R: Even though I knew AMJ’s first LP really well and haven’t heard his other stuff I had an awesome time. AHJ is a really dynamic guitar player. I was totally gobsmacked by his spin on ‘One Way Trigger’. It wasn’t as ferocious as JC’s, it sounded like a ‘Yours To Keep’ song coz of how summery melodic it was. I don’t even think it’s actually been played live by The Strokes themselves!

RZ: DID YOU SEE HOW FRECKIN BADASS HIS BAND WAS?

R: Of course I did, I’m you! It was like AHJ but on steroids coz he had 2 other guitarists, so it was beefed up and when things got wild, licks were going off like Chinese New Year. It was exciting stuff. It’s the same with The Voidz.

AHJ and JC are biggest creative voices in The Strokes - I loved Nickle Eye’s record, it mostly had a Folky homespun feel and the songs are really gentle and modest in their presentation and Little Joy’s record has a really breezy, almost Bossa Nova feel - none of these things have really crossed over into ‘Angles’ & ‘Comedown Machine’ but JC & AMJ’s shizz is all up in those LPs so that’s why I guesstimate they’re the biggest voices. But in AMJ’s & JC’s solo stuff it seems like they’ve cobbled together really shit hot musicians who can help them indulge in making/playing songs that are technically more ambitious. Why can’t they explore that within their band (The Strokes) like The Beatles did.

RZ: OH MAN! FUCK OFF ABOUT THE BEATLES. WHAT IS IT WITH YOU AND THOSE GUYS?

R: ‘Those guys’ are the benchmark.

RZ: WHATEVER. ANYWAY, THAT’S CRAP. FIRSTLY, THE BEATLES ‘AUTHORIAL VOICE’ FROM DAY ONE WAS LENNON & McCARTNEY WRITING THE BULK, HARRISON CONTRIBUTING A SONG AND RINGO SINGING ONE. THAT’S HOW THEY WORKED AND THEY KEPT THAT GOING WITH THE ONLY DIFF BEING THAT HARRISON GOT MAYBE A COUPLE MORE SONGS IN TOWARDS THE END.

THE STROKES STARTED WITH CASABLANCAS AS IT’S SOLE AUTHOR. THE ‘IS THIS IT’ SOUND: THE MIDI SOUNDING DRUMS, THE 8TH NOTE RHYTHM WITH ONE GUITAR, BASS THAT CARRIES A MELODY & ANGULAR TELEVISION-LIKE LINES PLAYED BY ANOTHER GUITAR. LYRICS THAT WERE LIKE DIALOGUE DRENCHED IN A LOU REED-LIKE STREETWISE ENNUI. IT WAS HIS VISION & HIS BAND MATES HELPED HIM REALIZE IT.

R: Didn’t AHJ write the solo for ‘Last Nite’, vibing off some Albert King part he heard off JP Bowersock or something? *squints eyes as he tried to remember where he read that tidbit from*

RZ: YEAH. BUT THINGS TRULY GOT COLLABORATIVE ON THE SECOND WITH THE NEW WAVE STYLE GUITARS THAT, FROM THE SOUND OF HIS SOLO STUFF, IS VERY AHJ.

R: Yeah, ‘Room On Fire’ has, like, one song that isn’t a 100% JC song, ‘Automatic Stop’ which was co-written by AHJ and could easily fit into his first album.

RZ: WHAT I WAS HEADING TOWARD WAS WHEN A BAND CHANGES THEIR AUTHORIAL VOICE IT’S SUCH A CHANGE THEY’RE ALMOST A NEW BAND. E.G: WEEZER, PETER GREEN/BUCKS & NICKS FLEETWOOD MAC, GABRIEL/COLLINS GENESIS, PINK FLOYD WITH SYD BARRIET & WITHOUT.

R: Ah! I get you now. The Beatles music progressed but their creative process remained the same. Whereas The Strokes, I’m guessing, moved from benign autocratic to a diplomatic & collaborative one?

RZ: SO IT WOULD SEEM.

R: Even though it is more of a team effort now, ‘Angles’ & ‘Comedown Machine’ are not that far off from JC’s first solo LP than the other members solo stuff.  After seeing AHJ live it would be awesome if he and the other members could consolidate all their awesomeness under The Strokes umbrella, right?

RZ: I’M HAPPY EITHER OR . ANYWAYS, IT WAS A SICK GIG NONETHELESS.

R: I loved it except for the people. Riddle me this though, I started going to gigs in the 90s so wouldn’t know, but is it 20th century to wild out & dance at gigs instead of being static & on your phone?

RZ: LOL

R: There’s nothing wrong with chilling and basking to music but, for me,

RZ: KEY WORD, ‘FOR ME’

R: Yes, it is, but for me I can comfortably luxuriate in the music at home but at a gig with the music loud and coming through you – you can actually feel the vibrations in your body – wouldn’t you want to dance and get lost in it and be a living human being caught up in something so primal and magical as music instead of grandstanding? We’re all going to be dead, don’t you want to wring out every bit of exuberant energy out of Life while you still can?

RZ: YOU’RE ON A MORBID TIP TONIGHT, AIN’TCHA? LOL IS THIS REALLY ABOUT THAT GROUP OF STATIC HIPSTERS WHO SNIGGERED AT YOU FOR FANBOYING THE FUCK OUT LIKE A CHILD?  LOOKS TO ME LIKE YOUR PROJECTING THAT HURT INTO A SELF-RIGHTEOUS TIRADE

R: I suppose you’re right but does that make what I say less true?

Check out these two quotes from gig reviews, first is a London Grammar one from The Guardian:

image

LINK: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/feb/02/london-grammar-manchester-academy-review

. .and the other is a Sky Ferreira one from The Line of Best Fit:

image

LINK: http://www.thelineofbestfit.com/reviews/live-reviews/sky-ferreira-the-basement-edition-hotel-london-300114-145136

It reminds me of a quote from a Guardian feature about the London Modern Art scene called ‘Are Audiences Killing Art & Culture?’

image

LINK: http://www.theguardian.com/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2013/oct/25/are-arts-audiences-killing-culture

and to push the point even further how about this Aziz Ansari clip about the effect that texting has had on dating:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFR4PPxp2z8

Maybe as a world culture we spend so much time in the passive mesmerizing gaze of technology we can’t help ourselves from experiencing analogue things in a digital way. We stare at people like we’re looking at a screen and punctuate every song with polite applause or even spend the whole show viewing the experience sporadically through our phones.

It’s messed up. Truly.

Why can’t we talk to each other or get lost in the communion of music like humans have done for centuries.

As The Rapture said in the middle 8 of ‘Whoo! Alright-Yeah…Uh Huh’ back in 2006:

People don’t dance no more, They just stand there like this, They cross their arms and stare you down and drink and moan and piss

So I unexpectedly got to see Albert Hammond Jr play last night (thanks to my amazingly gracious pal Romana) and as a crummy old Strokes fan - I say ‘crummy’ because I’ve never seen them live despite loving their stuff to bits and being a walking Strokes encyclopedia - but, yeah, so I went in with...

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Over three years James Mollison photographed fans outside different concerts for his project The Disciples. ”As I photographed the project I began to see how the concerts became events for people to come together with surrogate ‘families’, a chance to relive their youth or try and be part of a scene that happened before they were born.”

Oasis 

Morrissey

Björk

The Cure

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St Vincent is, as Azealia Banks might say, a smart ass bad ass betch.

The first two St Vincent albums see-sawed between the light and the dark inside Annie Clark:

Light: her choral, ethereal Classicism expressed in baroque, honeyed vocals that are often imbued with a sense of the gruesome via unsettling lyrics.

Dark: her brewing volcanic emotions which she vents out in violent eruptions of screeching, distorted guitar shredding.

Those first two records I admired a lot but save for a clutch of terrific songs I could not get truly nuts about them. ‘Strange Mercy’ changed all that.

It was weird: that floaty robotic gargling at the end of ‘Chloe In The Afternoon’, that super compressed solo in ‘Surgeon’ that’s like Van Halen meets Daft Punk’s ‘Aerodynamic’ barrage of riffs that climaxes to fading synths like a post coital comedown, or ‘Northern Lights’ which solo sounds like the most spastic laser battle ever. It was heartrendingly confessional:‘Cheerleader’ and title track ‘Strange Mercy’ – and it had one humdinger of a knock-you-off-your-perch Art Pop Rocker of a single in ‘Cruel’. That song is infectious, macabre (‘Bodies, can’t you see what everybody wants from you?’) smart and has this really fun bouncy Afro-beat-y guitar line that runs through it as well as this great woozy, scuzzy mini guitar solo that sounds like a drunk chainsaw lol It’s an album to embrace with your whole quirky heart and I totally did.

If ‘Strange Mercy’ was a break from what came before then ‘St Vincent’ is the leap forward.

What hit me a couple of days after being on a massive St Vincent binge (waaay better to do with music than TV shows, alcohol and drugs) was that not only could the creative leap Clark made from her first two records to ‘Strange Mercy’ be likened to the one that David Bowie made from his first two albums to ‘Hunky Dory’ (nitpickers count in Bowie’s super dodgy 1967 self titled album in his canon but the fact that he followed it up with a second eponymous album two years later was a statement I think, in the words of critic David Buckley ”[1969’s self titled release was] the first Bowie album proper”) BUT also the leap from ‘Strange Mercy’ to ‘St Vincent’ is very much like the one Bowie made between ‘Hunky Dory’ and ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’. Let me explain in:

#1: ‘Strange Mercy’ like ‘Hunky Dory’ was album numero trios in their respective artist’s discography, those third records both came after (despite their merits) two overwrought albums. These two daring, brainy and imaginative musicians then came up with third albums that were a quick change tour de awesome which dropped their previous singular stylistic abstractions in favour of a mix bag of styles and something that was catchy and deeply felt.

#2: I bet many Bowie fans did a double take when they saw the cover to ‘Ziggy Stardust’. The long haired folkie in a dress that they knew was suddenly now a pixie-cropped Art rocker in a jumpsuit. Annie Clark has gone through a similar transformation. For three albums she was a raven-haired artsy chick that you could easily pass by in the street, now we’re graced with a gunmetal grey Einstein frizz on top of an austere but beautiful face, decked out in a flowing synthetic dress and sitting on a baby pink three-tiered pyramid plastic throne like some futuristic deity meets MoMA exhibition. Like Ziggy Stardust did for Bowie, the St Vincent moniker has gained a strong visual element to go with it - it has now gone from a stage name to a fully complete persona.

This image birth does not feel contrived at all because if you listened to her four records chronologically, her latest feels like the culmination of an artist’s metamorphosis into a musical icon.

Yes, I put together the words ‘musical’ and ‘icon’ like an X Factor judge but mine is not a throwaway show biz platitude but an Honest-to-blog description. It really does sound like a step by step musical progression that has now permeated through into her visual aesthetic to create something that is now as imaginative to the eye as it has always been to the ear. St Vincent is now complete.

The new look is Conceptual Arty but not the tawdry red carpet avant garde of Lady Gaga whose brazen Reblog/Retweet/Share referential approach to appropriation smacks more of a parroting of contemporary Art & fringe culture for sensationalist ends rather than putting old ideas into a new context or even having something to actually say with them other then ‘TADA!’ - or, one of my favs, Karen O whose bombastically sexual Party Monster Punk Kabuki show outfits captivates and sweeps up her audience in a whirlwind of fiery, feline carnal energy and Pabst beer. St Vincent’s look is none of those things but a mesmerizing exercise in art-house elegance.

Okay, I’ll stop digressing now and actually talking about the record.

‘St Vincent’ is a super imaginatively bold Art rock album that’s packed with smarts and pop hooks a plenty but what hits you most is how confident it is. Not that her previous musical outings have been coy or unsure of themselves but this one is confident in how Clark has fearlessly jumped into groove and Pop melodies, playing it with such uplifting verve and deft that throws out so casually like she’s been funking it up from day one.

I think the inciting incident was making a record with David Byrne (2012’s ‘Love This Giant’) as well as taking part in that album’s rollicking live show which notably boasted an exciting dancing brass band that moved and played in surprising formations reminiscent of a marching band and Broadway choreography. That experience really lit a fire inside Clark: ‘’People would dance at shows! Like, dance! So I wanted to make sure the new record had a groove’’.

And boy does it! If ‘Strange Mercy’ was about ugly truths then ‘St Vincent’ is all about joyful Pop abandon. Gone is the airy, baroque-ness of the other records (except maybe for the initial verses of ‘Huey Newton’) leaving guitars and keys centre stage.

I can’t not talk about St Vincent records without going into her nutbar imaginative guitar solos – especially on this LP.

The classic rock guitar solo is traditionally not only an interlude in the song where the guitarist can show off their musical virtuosity and physical dexterity to actually physically pull off playing those notes but it’s also been a gross vehicle for male machismo – the showy, musically verbose, masturbatory chest beat moment that it (d)evolved into being definitely in the hair metal Sunset Strip days. Clark who does echo those archetypal rock solo gestures and sounds but subverts them into something freakish yet still recognizably bad ass. She recently said on the BBC radio:

‘’What constitutes a weird guitar solo, for me, is something that takes a little left turn out of the classic pentatonic Rock solo of the Ages. You just make a couple substitutions for the notes that you’d expect.

I’m not aiming to be weird. I’m just aiming to put a little something,  a little kink in the process that makes it unpredictable and that unpredictability can be cool sometimes.

One of the fun tricks that I like to do if I’m ever stuck on a guitar part is to just tune my guitar to something really bizarre, not the standard tuning, and just play licks how you’d normally play and you get all these variations. Essentially it’s an analogue randomizer.

I was playing a solo in the song ‘Northern Lights’, the guitar was in a strange tuning to begin with, and I was just riffing if you will, and then my producer John Congleton was pushing on the strings in between the tuning pegs and the nut, and we were getting all these really bizarre variations, random notes, really crazy and unpredictable’.

Now let me get back to actually reviewing the album.

First up to bat is ‘Rattlesnake’ which has a beat and a groove not too far off from a Beyonce jam and tells the funny story of someone coming across a rattlesnake whilst skinny dipping. The character in the song doesn’t see the snake directly but discovers traces of it’s existence ‘’I see the snake holes dotted in the sand. .’’ and makes a reference ‘…as if Seurat painted the Rio Grande’’ I’m no Art history buff so I looked it up and Georges Seurat is a French Post Impressionist painter who devised a style of painting called ‘Pointillism’ where he’d use dots of colour to create an image which reminds St. Vincent of the many snake holes on the beach. This cheeky dance song then launches into a wigged out kooky Robert Fripp ‘Scary Monster (and Super Creeps)’ era style guitar solo that really fits the groove because as Clark noted‘the guitar line at the end of ‘Rattlesnake’ was a vocal melody first. It felt a little too musical theatre to sing it but it worked really well as a guitar line’ and she’s right.

This song really sets the tone for the whole record. The music is gonna be fun and melodic with smart wordplay and unusual storytelling. It’s Pop music filtered through Clark’s penchant for quirky music the literary in her lyrics. She’s the missing link between Robert Fripp and Lorrie Moore. The contagious hooks makes the song more attractive but the lyrics are not simple enough to be accessible by all (more on that later).

What follows is a steady stream of awesome: ‘Birth in Reverse’ despite it’s musical quirks is essentially a Country song about a desperate (bored?) housewife locked in the banal everyday routines of suburban life (‘Oh, what an ordinary day. Take out the garbage masturbate’ – best opening line of 2014, anyone? lol) ‘Huey Newton’ bored me until halfway through when a ridiculously ‘fuck yea!’ guitar hook crashes in and the song completely changes to a bad ass, sign-of the-horns rock song. This is followed by the horn blaring funk swagger of ‘Digital Witness’ which has the sexy stomping big band funk pomp of a 90’s Prince song that at it’s heart is actually a pretty brilliant critique of social media but it’s so much fun you don’t really notice. The chorus asks‘’Digital Witnesses, what’s the point of even sleeping? If I can’t show it, you can’t see me, what’s the point of doing anything?’ which I take to mean if a fun time is had but nobody instagrams or tweets about it for their followers to witness it digitally, did anything really happen?

Then there is ‘Prince Johnny’ and ‘I Prefer Your Love’.

I have a quibbles with these songs.

The most popular and only swipe that this record has gotten from critics is that her songs though wonderful, can feel too meticulous, like these very beautiful but airless dolls houses. I personally dig how well designed they are but I do think that when it comes to her ballads her penchant for the literary in her lyric writing does take away from the emotional power of the song because ballads, as the 60s folkies and 70’s singer songwriters showed us, gain more emotionally impactful the more simple they are lyrically. The less simple the language the more distancing the song can become.

Prince Johnny is a sad tale about the narrator consoling a lost friend - a philandering coke-head by the sound of it. Clark spins a tragic yarn rich in allegory and metaphor – the royal title is to sardonically identify his exalted status that he’s a celeb (rock musician probably) -  ‘You traced the Andes with your index and brag of when and where and who you gonna bed next’ is probably the most eloquently put way of saying ‘you fingered a heap of cocaine whilst bragging about your next lay’ ever.  I also liked ‘Prince Johnny you’re kind but please be careful. By now I know just when to stand clear when your friends and acolytes are holding court in bathroom stalls’  which I think is ‘Dude, chill. I know now not to go in the bathroom when catch your pals and hangers on play lookout coz I know you’re doing icky lines’.

I don’t think Clark was going for the heartstrings with this ditty but I think she definitely was with her provocative torch song to an ill parent ‘I Prefer Your Love’.

This song comes from the same origin and tells the same story as Oasis’ ‘Don’t Go Away’. Noel Gallagher, like Clark, wrote the song after a family member had a health scare. They’re interesting songs to compare lyrically because Gallagher’s writing, though crude, reads like the unfiltered, unaware and clichéd way that everyday people talk whereas Clark’s verses are packed with the literary devices and games(wo)manship of poetry which takes a while to decode, but because its told in an elaborate way you feel removed from the sadness of it.

Noel Gallagher isn’t 6% as deft a wordsmith as Clark (he isn’t even 2% of a guitarist she is either) but his limited vocab fits in well with the layman diction a pop or rock lyricist. The power of pop/rock song writing is it’s simplicity means it can bypass the brain quicker than most genres and zero in on the heart or as the film director Stanley Kubrick said of The Beatles:

‘’an Alabama truck driver, whose views in every other respect would be extremely narrow, is able to listen to a Beatles record on the same level of appreciation and perception as a young Cambridge intellectual, because their emotions and subconscious are far more similar than their intellects.’’

Also author CS Lewis said this that I don’t argee with when it comes to prose writing but agree with in songwriting:

Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”

I personally admired the song’s storytelling and use of language and it’s great melodically – the pre chorus and chorus are BAD ASS - but found it too knowing and glib to pull my heartstrings. Still a great song, though.

‘Regret’ is a really fun sing-along with a Led Zep-y head nodding guitar line and solo. ‘Bring Me Your Loves’ is THE MOST BAT SHIT BANANAS FREAKOUT DANCE TUNE EV-ER!!!!!!!!! SUCH a gas! It’s about, I think, two messed up lovers who are trying to exert their control over each other. ‘I thought you were like a dog’ Clark sing, ‘but you made a pet of me’. Dog = loyal, unconditional lover, Pet = tamed animal or bird kept for companionship or pleasure, Conclusion = like Mylie Cyrus, Annie Clark can not be tamed.

‘Psychopath’ reminds me of a Garbage song ‘cause it’s kooky and hooky with a soaring chorus and shiny, computerized production. ‘Every Tear Disappears’ subject-wise is like a 21st century take on the stuff The Stone’s were talking about in ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ but where Jagger in part sings about being frustrated by the carrot and the stick of 60s advertising & consumerism, Clark’s character is fruitlessly chasing the mirage happiness and phantom connection that modern technology purports to provide. ‘Severed Crossed Fingers’ is a lovely lighters/phones up ‘n’ sway ballad that has the touch of the Seventies about it. I’m getting Todd Rundgren vibes but I dunno why lol

In the summation ‘St Vincent’ is a fucking fantastic record. It has all the left field arrangements, twisted/kooky sounds and intelligent lyrics that made her the critics choice and beloved by adventurous music fans with a hungry ear for boldly inventive takes on the Rock genre but this time she’s gone up and added groove, irresistible Pop melodies that are all buoyed up by a confident exuberance. When asked in interviews why she chose to self title this record she answered that she was inspired by a Miles Davis quote she came across that said that the hardest thing a musician can do is sound like themselves and she feels that her new record really does sound like her and I must say it does sound like she’s found her voice and groove on this LP.

Miles Davis also said ‘’the thing to judge in any Jazz artist is, does the man project and does he have ideas’’, Clark isn’t a Jazz artist but…

Q: Does ‘St Vincent’ by St Vincent have any ideas?

A: Boatloads.

Q: Can she project them?

A: Like a fucking lighthouse.

St Vincent is, as Azealia Banks might say, a smart ass bad ass betch.

The first two St Vincent albums see-sawed between the light and the dark inside Annie Clark:

Light: her choral, ethereal Classicism expressed in baroque, honeyed vocals that are often imbued with a sense of the gruesome...

[fancypantshoodlum]

Warpaint are back with a second album that is packed with rich, sensuous, bewitching grooves.

On this new eponymous offering the band have combined their characteristic spellbinding elixir of haunting vocals and Post Punk guitars & drums with hip hop beats, dubby basslines and synths. Unlike some bands these new sounds don’t usher a genre 360 but they have taken these new elements and adapted them to fit their own musical personality by making them just as wistful, mesmerizing and sublime as their guitars and drums. In fact these new additions help them create the most lush soundscapes they’ve ever conjured.

Another big change is the free-flowing chameleon nature of their previous work, (‘Beetles’, ‘Composure’, ‘Elephants’ and ‘Warpaint’) songs that moved in a serpentine route across different tempos, tones and melodies have gone. Excluding ‘Intro’, these new songs stay within a conventional song writing structure but this containment doesn’t make the music sound stifled or feel stagnant but instead more intense because the music and the listener get to luxuriate on one idea instead of three. This gives the idea the full space of a song to breath, letting us and the band bask in its vibe entirely.

The band enlisted the legendary Flood to produce the album and Radiohead’s producer Nigel Godrich behind the mixing board and together with the band they’ve created a sumptuous, ethereal pristine record that has a mysterious, after-midnight vibe to it whilst also retaining some rough edges, for example, the stop and start again of ‘Intro’ (after what I assume was a gaff) is very ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream‘, as well as some studio chatter left on the record which reminded me of the off-the-cuff, almost demo tape sounding Nelly Furtado album ‘Loose’ which lent Furtado’s, as well as Warpaint’s, an air of spontaneity and rawness.

If there was a central theme of the record, moving the bouncy Hip Hop posturing funk of ‘Disco/Very’ to one side, the rest of the songs on the record centre around the subject of love. ‘’I feel like we didn’t know that there was a particular theme to the album until we heard all the songs we had chosen in succession’, drummer Stella Mozgawa told the NME, ‘’and I definitely heard a very generic theme of love , it kinda washes over the entire album in different forms, it’s not typical.’ It certainly isn’t typical because the band find new ways of expressing timeworn emotions in abstractly precise lyrics and the music itself is atypical in its approach like the icy Gary Numan-like synths at the start of ‘Biggy’, the trip hop style breakbeats that kick ‘Hi’ into motion and that creepy combination of tense hi-hats, dramatic percussion, menacing pulsing electro and spooky cooing vocals that usher in ‘Love Is To Die’. These give the songs an interesting edge, making a common theme sound fresh.

The originality just keeps going, ‘CC’ has to be the most ominous love song ever recorded (the 2nd lead vocal by bassist Jenny Lee Lindbergh no less) but‘Drive’ is classic Kokal – a coy melody atop a bubbling, minimal beat that builds and builds until it bursts, taking a startling emotional leap – the feeling now too big to be repressed. It reminds me of early Bjork in how emotionally brazen it is as well as its melodic peaks and valleys of passionate emotion. The whole thing wraps up with ‘Son’ an achingly tender ballad from Wayman, which from the title I assume is a maternal love song and also a perfect coda to the album.

As ever this new release will be as difficult to peg as the other ones and even the band themselves. Everyone has their own interpretations to describe their sound, which I get a huge kick out of hearing because it’s like the musical equivalent of ‘The Mirror of Erised’ from Harry Potter, every individual reading reveals more about the person than the music itself. If I wanted to get grandiose I’d say ‘’the abstract and free-form nature of their music evades capture in words and refuses to be coerced into a criterion as reductive as Genre’’ but honestly, for me, Warpaint, like whale song, is more a feeling than a sound. It holds me transfixed in it’s raw, unabashed soulfulness, taking me to a place where words fail to grasp what my heart holds comfortably. A place beyond Reason that lies deep within the most primal, instinctual core of all of us.

There’s a great moment in Joni Mitchell’s live album ‘Miles of Aisles’ where she kicks off ‘Circle Game’ by going into a tiny proto-Kanye West stage rant about how when Van Gogh presented a new painting nobody said to him ‘’That’s great, Vincent but why don’t you paint Starry Night again?’’. Repetition isn’t something Warpaint can be accused of. Every release, despite having a connecting thread of musical idiosyncrasies that could be labelled as ‘The Warpaint Sound’, has been a very distinct statement of its own and this new album is another exciting facet of a band that aren’t afraid to explore themselves in new contexts.

Warpaint are back with a second album that is packed with rich, sensuous, bewitching grooves.

On this new eponymous offering the band have combined their characteristic spellbinding elixir of haunting vocals and Post Punk guitars & drums with hip hop beats, dubby basslines and synths. Unlike...

[fancypantshoodlum]

WARPAINT: 'LOVE IS TO DIE'

Famed for their loose, free form song structures Warpaint have returned from their two years away with a more conventionally shaped song. That being said 'Love Is To Die' still bears all the hallmarks of their sound - eerie, soulful, passionate harmonies awash in a enchanting bed of Post-Punky, Psychy soundscapes that can induce any receptive music lover into a blissed out trance. Roll on album # 2.

OMAR SOULEYMAN: 'WENU WENU'

When I first heard this track online I greeted it with an incredulous laugh for it was like the music of my parents culture was re-verbalized to me in a musical generational vernacular that was my own but wasn't so chopped up that they couldn't enjoy it too. I mean, M.I.A. did something similar on her second album with 'Jimmy' but she went all out Bollywood on that jam, plus there was a big dollop of tongue-in-cheek about it too but this song is a legit Middle Eastern folk pop song of the type I used to hear at weddings and pumping out of cheap stereos when I was dragged market shopping with my Mum as a kid - the only diff is they didn't have SICK electro instruments on them. Producer Kieran Hebden a.k.a. Four Tet emulates folk instruments whilst being inventive with it. Timbaland is the earliest example of this type of musical appropriation but he mixed it with an R&B flavor whereas Four Tet keeps shit Middle Eastern but has fun with the flourishes.

What makes this song extra cool is that with all the horrific stuff going on in Syria politically right now, that Souleyman & Four Tet, like Paul Simon & Joseph Shabalala for South Africa, are showing, through music, the beauty of a culture which in this case is often painted in a barbaric light, or as Arab intellectual Edward Said so wonderfully put it:

''So far as [the West] seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density and the passion of Arab–Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world, presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.''

LOS CAMPESINOS!: 'AVOCADO, BABY!'

Whenever I think of Los Campesinos! I'm immediately at Uni again, Snakebite fresh in my mouth and it's Indie Disco night and we're all singing (shouting along more like) to 'We throw parties, you throw knives!'. What I loved about them was Tom & Gareth Campesinos! combined incredibly addictive pop hooks with lyrics that were as witty as a Morrissey box set but the jokes were very much geared towards British Indie kids and met outsiders with blank stares. The Wombats who were a more streamlined and 'cross over' version of their Welsh forefathers/mother - BUT for this British Indie dork, what Los Campesinos! lacked in mainstream concerns they gained in originality and imagination and their new single 'Avocado, Baby!' shows that they've lost none of that in the last 7 years - in fact they write with a keener pen and their playing is more accomplished.

DUCKTAILS: 'TIE DYE' (From 'WISH HOTEL EP')

CHILLWAVE! like 'ElectroClash' had it's moment in the sun but a lot more acts survived it's implosion. 'Tie Dye' overall is a ephemeral wave of musical cool breeze floating out your speakers to sooth you with it's laid-back shuffle that's peppered with some quirky sonics and a really schweeet Theromin-like guitar solo that comes out of nowhere.

CULTS - 'I CAN HARDLY MAKE YOU MINE'

''It's like Tracy Ullman fronting The Stooges'' tweeted BBC Radio's Lauren Laverne which caused a wry smile out of this fellow lover of 80's female comedians and proto-punk but to my crazy ears it sounded like a Shirelle or a Crystal singing over the soundtrack to a late 60's - Early 70's European thriller(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_dr8dE3zb4&feature=c4-overview-vl&list=PL9E16D1FE27851321). It's tight rope walk between cute and heavy makes it a fun listen - not as good as the singles off their 1st album but respectable I say.