27 posts tagged music

1. Windows 7 Advert. Nothing you’ve done is genius. Snap? You can see two windows at once, or a minute amount of two windows? Dude buy a bigger monitor you fucking dork. If you were a genius you’d have jumped ship fucking years ago, you fucking little prick. Oh you’re walking away with your genius now? Really mate, do us a favour, go walk it into a shallow bath, and lie there face down for two minutes. Ta.

2. Nandos. Nandos, you are without doubt the most loathsome restaurant chain in the entire world. And yes I’m including TFI Friday and… Chiquitos. Charging people for that “food” is tantamount to fraud, because it is not food. The type of people who like Nandos are people who describe Subway as “the healthy option”.

3. Kesha? Who is Kesha? Why should I care about her — and her apparently awful, awful music. I thought the main shtick with your advertising was that it was targeted? What about my music tastes would ever make you think I’d like to listen to some chart RnB? Okay that one time… But doesn’t everyone like M.O.P?

4. Job site, or job 101, or whatever the shit it is. Just because I’m at home in the day listening to Spotify does not mean I’m jobless. And thanks, but having worked in various call-centre shit-pits nationwide I’d rather push a moped down my cock than go back to one. And not you, or fucking David Cameron, or fucking anyone can make me go back to one.

5. “Hi and welcome to Spotify”. Dude I’ve been using this thing for months. If it’s so successful why are you having to make you own adverts for it. Look I love what you’re doing, but that doesn’t help your cause, it makes you look desperate. And lonely. And fat. And stupid.

Sign up, you’ll say — if it’s pissing you off that much! NO! Because that’s what they want me to do. (I’d like to pretend that’s the reason — but actually it’s because I’m poor. Really poor.)

Their’s is an inspiring story: Four Brooklyn-born brothers, by blood or marriage, united by a love for the Kinks and Elvis Costello, buy a derelict hotel and turn into a practise space/gig venue, get plucked from obscurity by prog-goth muppets And They Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead (although replacing “dead” for “40-year-old chin-stroking denim clad lameos” might be more apt - it would admittedly make a proposterously long name even longer) to support them on their UK tour.

The indregients are there right? This band should be ace! But they’re not. They’re really quite crap. Part of the New York garage scene which has produced preeminent underwhelmers The Virgins. The So So Glos, follow in the same twangy, telecaster, 4/4, palm-muted vein. The same vein that The Libertines tapped in 2002 and had mastered by 2004.

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Jazz is a much maligned genre, and often, not together unfairly. Staunchly unprogressive and esoteric, Jazz seemed to have folded in on itself, owing to, or maybe because of, its anorakish image. And Jazz wasn’t something I gave two-hairy-hoots about until I heard a band called Polar Bear lead by drummer Seb Rochford.

Rochford, pretty much, single-handedly changed the face of UK Jazz. Polar Bear’s seminal second album Held On The Tips Of Fingers changed everything: Their inclusive attitude and startling musicianship produced an overwhelming record - fast and grinding with spasming breakdowns, but still very much Jazz, it marked a c-shift in the genre.

And with the likes of F-IRE Collective, British Jazz is in the midst of somewhat of a renaissance and Portico Quartet are touted as one of the genre’s rising stars.

The London four-piece look vaguely like a proper band - two of them have stubbly beards - and the promise shown on their first album, Knee Deep in The North Sea, was rewarded with a Mercury nomination, though some in the Jazz fraternity (a wily and inconspicuous breed) claimed it was a token nomination.

Their second Long Player Isla, shows a pronounced shift, while building coherently on the more successful elements of the first album. The awesome use of the hang is back, reappearing with deft and haunting precision seconds into the opening track, ‘Paper, Scissors, Stone’, which is a minor masterpiece of understatement and variation.

Waning brass trills strain out over bars and bars of incredibly precise, misty, sweet percussion. The hang’s brilliant, almost imperceptible support provides the most haunting undertone to a wonderfully atmospheric song that shows influences from Ali Farka Toure to Boards Of Canada and Brian Eno.

‘The Visitor’ and ‘Clipper’ are considerably more “Jazz”, but still bounce around with the kind of appealing World Music aesthetics PQ have made their hallmark.

Things occasionally stray into the sickly-sweet with instances like the weird tinkly wind chime sounds on ‘Dawn Patrol’. I can’t be alone in finding wind chimes nauseating in exactly the same way sun-damaged, organic-munching, divorcees don’t.

Redemption lies in wait though, in the blissful shape of ‘Life Mask’, a languorous achievement of mellifluous refrain - (utterly wanky but completely apt sentence) John Leckie’s effortlessly organic production helps to shape and dissipate strains of melody that tangle and interject while harmonising perfectly. A song that sounds like a dream your dream might have.

The title track ‘Isla’ and ‘Shed Song’ (Impov One), beautifully round off an album that anyone who really loves music will appreciate and enjoy, a lot.

4.5/5

Pavement are curating ATP. If I’m not there I will explode. 

Get on this sheet.

New York two-piece Black Gold have been causing a stir stateside, the duo of  Eric Ronick (lead vocals, keyboards) and Than Luu (drums, guitar, percussions, vocals) formed in early 2006. Their debut album Rush was released in the US in February of this year and will see its British release this month.

Opening with their debut single, Detroit, Rush gets off to a none-too-convincing start with a wincingly predictable baseline designed to evoke the the likes of Boyz Noize and HEALTH, but falls woefully short. And just as your toes start to unfurl the vocal comes in - the cringingly awful vocal. After this everything starts to sound distinctly like an horrendously over-produced tumult of turd.

One track in and you’re worried, and track two, Plans and Reveries, serves only to convince you that those fears are well-founded. So stringently middle of the road, it doesn’t sound like much of anything at all, something even your Gran would call dull.

And the album unfolds in much the same vein, like a crappy version of The Cooper Temple Clause, sans melodies, hooks and riffs.

More precisly it sounds like a GCSE composition, predictably predictable in the most predictably predictable way predictable. It’s heartless, not vindictive or cruel, but emotionless and directionless.

Shine, Silver, The Comedown, What You Did, all sound like the same song, a song that you were happy to forget the first time. What becomes worringly apparent is that neither Ronick or Luu, know what it is that makes a song successful. The fundamental instincts of what we mythically refer to as, “musical talent”, seem lacking. I don’t mean to sound wantonly scathing, but nothing in this album ever suggests that its composers have any form of “musical talent”.  

Confused as to the hype surrounding the pair, I contacted a stateside collegue who informed me it was owing to their record label, Red Bull Records, chucking money about like no one’s business.

Black Gold are described on the Red Bull Records website thus:
“Black Gold is the feeling when it hits your bloodstream, the unease at five a.m. after staying up all night doing things you regret but will do again and again. Black Gold is the taste of blinding white (crikey! Do you think they mean cocaine?), the numbness on your lips and throat (oh right, yes they do). Black Gold is the corrosion you’ve swallowed, with comforting warmth tempered by unease.”

How do you like your drugs references? Blatant? Incoherent? Childishly designed to give a band a sense of credence they sorely need? All of the above?

The worst thing is, Black Gold are nigh-on the antithesis of “the feeling when it hits your bloodstream”, they’re more like “the feeling of finding your onken biopot has curdled” i.e… mundane and annoying.

After listening to this album my itunes asked me: Would you like to import this CD. Sadly, it only asked me Yes or No, had it given me the option “Turn CD into puff of dust,” I’d have taken it. 

Don’t call Japandroids minimal - says the CD case spiel. Is that a threat? It sounds like one. But much as I’d like to take the bait, I can’t, rationally speaking the angsty two piece aren’t minimal but neither are they as maximal as they’d clearly like to be.

The third release from the Candadian duo shows a clear progression from their promising and hype stirring EPs. The production is neater, though odd lapses in the drum tone still crop up and jar badly. The wall-ly shoegaze sound remains though chord changes are more marked and crisp, yeilding a melodic edge and combinded with something joyfully naive and innocent in the big major chord melodies and lyrics, Post-Nothingleaves you feeling like a loved up 17-year-old stumbling home from your first girlfriend’s house in the dead of night, through the gentle suburbs of middle class youth.

They could be better musically, if they added a few more members, they could be larger, more sonically grandiose - and something in their songs suggests that that is what they dream of - stadiums stages full of instruments with odd tuning and impractical time signatures.

It’s a dream, that selfishly, I hope they never realize. The thing that makes the JPNDRDS good, really good, is that they sound like all your best friend’s bands when they were ace before they stopped swearing and started listening to Monks and Wagner too much and went all weird.

‘It’s raining in Vancouver/ but I don’t give a fuck/ because I’m in love with you tonight’

  Big. Stupid. Brilliant.

7/10

4ortherecord 

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