Eat. Drink. Party. Sleepzzzz
The Cast (Albums) : Blood Orange, Catt, Ezra Feinberg, The Futureheads, Jim's Twenty-one Rialto, Rival Consoles, Sven Wunder
The Cast (EPs, Singles and Songs) : Too much eating, drinking, partying and sleeping going on for new songs.
Daybreak : Sven Wunder
Best for : Anyone who needs a pleasant soundtrack for wasting time
I was in two minds about this album and, initially, had no plans to review it. However, it's made a couple of appearances in the lower reaches of year end Top 50s. Mojo, for example, described this album as "expansively orchestrated, meticulously realised scores to imaginary movies that were way too classy to be mere pastiche."
I don't disagree with the first half of that description but it isn't enough. Rather than soundtracking films, this feels a lot more like the soporific yet curiously addictive music that accompanied the BBC's Test Card in the days before 24/7 TV. It's the kind of music a thoughtful business might provide to listen to while keeping you on hold for 40 minutes on a phone call you cannot terminate.
It's a lush listening experience that, like Ferrero Rocher chocolates, promise much but prove unsatisfying in the end. It's the soundtrack to an Open University film that asks you to pay attention to something impenetrable and hopes to make it less boring. Sadly it fails. This feels like music that suspends life itdelf.
That said, when your world shrinks you begin to find new things pique your interest. There's a nice jazz inflection to the muffled woodwind of 'Take A Seat' and tiny drum rolls on 'Warmer Air' that catch the ear. It's also refreshing to hear an instrumental collection that is not reliant on electronica. That's so rare as to almost qualify as a novelty record.
The critical reception elsewhere may mean that I'm missing something. I hope so because it sounds lovely in its way. The issue for me though is that rather than energising, and uplifting this goes the other way. It sedates and stultifies. And that's not good enough.
Taster Track : Scenic Byway
Landscape From Memory : Rival Consoles
Best for : Lovers of intelligent, ambient music
Few can construct their own sonic universe as well as Rival Consoles. He gets under the skin of electronic music, exposing its textures and the wonders of its structures. It's like the diagrams in a medical textbook, showing the arteries and sinews that hold it all together and create something marvellous.
In its quiet, usually melodic way it heightens awareness and anticipation like a dog hearing an unexpected but welcome sound before it reaches human hearing. Landscapes From Memory is at its best when it combines danceable rhythms and ear worm tunes, as on 'In A Trance'. There's a basic four note motif that's flipped around, handed to another part of the keyboard and turned on its head. In under five minutes it's playing with you as your new best friend.
It's not perfect, but it's always worth diving into. The tunes become less melodic and more glitchy as the album approaches its mid-point, descending away from the light on, say, 'Known Shape'. Of the fourteen tracks, only 'Tape Loop' feels overly fragmentary. There are also places where it sounds as if the ideas behind the songs are being allowed to come out as the tunes progress, rather than brought to the studio fully formed. That's not bad, but a sign of spontaneity and improvisation.
There are many highs along the way. 'In Reverse' is a strong beginning setting out the album's stall as intelligent dance music with atmosphere and tunes. 'Catherine' exemplifies how such music can be imaginative and substantial, while 'Drum Song' shows how it can be immersive and hypnotic. 'In A Trance' brings the dancier tones to the fore, with a shifting melody to make it work. It's clever, inventive and fun, showing electronic music's capability for infinite variety.
'Landscape From Memory' shows that In the end, this may be music made by machines but it's never coldly mechanical or programmed. It's filled with warmth and imagination.
Taster Track : In A Trance
A Different Life : Catt
Best for : Fans of mature, thoughtful, lovingly created pop.
I've held off reviewing this album because I found that her last album, 'Change', was so good I did not want to break its spell. I shouldn't have worried, As sportsmen are wont to say, form is temporary but class is permanent and Catt has class oozing from every groove on the record.
'Change' leads to 'A Different Life'. You can see a consistent theme at work but also a progression. As she sings in the opening line of the opening track 'Nothing Changes' "Nothing changes if nothing changes". That's musically true as well. I loved 'Change' for its surging swells of tear pricking pop. 'A Different Life' is more subdued. It's mature and thoughtful with songs that are full of experience but undamaged by it. The tone is confiding and conversational, a session with an exemplary life coach.
I could listen to this for hours. Catt is a musician who loves music and understands the potential for mainstream pop to change lives. Given that, she won't settle for investing anything less than her best in every song. It's a back handed compliment to describe music as tasteful but here it means a collection of songs where the emotion is shorn of its raw, distraught edges to make it more understandable and relatable. What it loses in volume, it makes up for with affecting sincerity.
This is still an excellent pop album. She's unchallenged for the best use of brass in pop today. Its use is always perfectly judged and never overdone. The calypso shimmy of 'Jungle of Abundance' is pure delight, a single that in earlier times would have taken up residence in the charts for the entirety of a long hot Summer. Her vocals lift and soothe, ebb and flow to make a connection with the audience that is spellbinding. In the closing track 'A Different Life' she offers some final thoughtso cling to as she fades away into the ether.
Catt is someone to love for the quality of her music, not for its genre. For me, she's an under-appreciated secret to store with Villagers, Bell X1, Ron Sexsmith and the Leisure Society. If you're lucky enough to know their music you'll need no further recommendation.
Taster Track : Nothing Changes
Neon & Ghost Signs : Rialto
Best for : Those that like excellent soap opera pop with a little sleaze underneath.
Rialto were caught up in the second Britpop wave of the late 90s and early 00s. It was an easy label that didn't reflect their metropolitan sound. They were probably best known for their biggest single 'Untouchable' and the compelling jealousy song 'Monday Morning 5:19'. They released a comeback album earlier this year. It's very good.
'Neon & Ghost Signs' is a pop album of the kind that isn't often made any more. It's closer to a lust album than a love album, exposing the venal feelings that persecute every unattached, lonely man who haunts the clubs and stays out too late. 'Car That Never Comes' captures the sense of music for the hour of night that is fraught with imagined dangers.
Louis Eliot sings songs as if he were the man you met in a club who seems OK but quickly reveals an uncomfortable undercurrent that you can't break away from. The power of the songs comes from setting hints of seediness and sleaze in the context of lovable, friendly pop. It's an odd marriage where the opposites repel but are kept in check. For example, 'Cherry', 'Put You On Hold' and 'No One Leaves This Discotheque Alive' rely on good time, cinematic disco grooves to spread their slightly sinister tales. Elsewhere it's the disreputable glam riffs of songs like 'I Want You' that lodge in your ear.
There are other like minded performers out there - Matt Johnson of The The, the early incarnation of Marc Almond, Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy and Pulp's Jarvis Cocker. Rialto fit right in with that crowd.
Most of all, this is a record that is unfashionable in a very good way. It's full of one hum along epic after another, an album where every song has the immediacy of a hit single.
Taster Track : No One Leaves This Discotheque Alive
Christmas : The Futureheads
Best for : Anyone looking for a new, energetic and enjoyable Christmas album.
If there's one thing you want from another Christmas album, it's a belief that the band in question have taken the commission seriously. There's nothing worse than a tired collection of songs, recorded in a few hours as an excuse for spending time in an exotic location.
I know. You're waiting.
The Futureheads' take on Christmas is sincere and well made. It's the sound of a boisterous gang that loves the season, a band that will do everything in their gift to prevent the Christmas party from winding down.
This is an album that gives Christmas back to ordinary people. In that way it's a very Dickensian view. One of three original tracks, 'What's This' is all about peering through windows at magical festive scenes, marvelling at what you see and feel. It's an approach to Christmas that brings everyone together with the common aim of enjoying themselves, loudly and without a care or any intolerance.
You can't avoid the inevitability of a Christmas album filled with covers. That doesn't matter in the least if it offers a different slant on an old faithful. If covers of 'In The Bleak Midwinter' and 'Wonderful Christmas Time' feel like a well rehearsed community choir, they also achieve the prime aim of any festive album of allowing you to feel Christmassy.
With this release The Futureheads have moved from post punk to punk folk. It's the perfect setting for their songs. Not many Christmas albums manage to sound as thrilling as they do with 'Carol of the Bells'. Their roistering folk rendition of 'Stop The Cavalry' is pitched somewhere between The Pogues and The Levellers. It's a lot of fun. A punky 'The Twelve Days of Christmas' is delivered at pace, allowing only two of the gold rings to be counted.
Christmas with The Futureheads is an energetic and breathless blast, focused on having a very good time.
Taster Track : Stop The Cavalry
Essex Honey : Blood Orange
Best for : Those who relish spending time with an album to understand it fully.
Dev Hynes has a history of not following expected paths. His early bands, Test Icicles and Lightspeed Champion, were both a few steps away from the indie mainstream as it was in the early years of the century. As a producer and writer he's worked with everyone from Mariah Carey and Kylie to Philip Glass and Ryuichi Sakamoto. On this album he calls in help from like minded collaborators including Tirzah, Caroline Polachek, Durutti column and Ben Watt.
On Essex Honey he takes snippets of every genre he's worked in, throws them up in the air, carefully watches where they land and makes songs out of them. Sometimes they all fall together in the same song. 'Viva Light' is representative, featuring a fragmentary mix of indie, hip hop beats, cinematic free form jazz,, ambient and soul. It's both exhilarating and a little confusing.
This is an album focused on grief, triggered by the death of his mother. It hits you from the start, in 'Look At You'. Its sonorous tones, and its movements between disconnected thoughts capture the struggle to understand and how to move on.
"How can I start the day (all over the place)
Knowing the truth
About love and the loss of youth?"
It's a song that wilfully points you the wrong way, its opening threatening briefly to break into a dance anthem before flipping into a sparse, sombre and internalised reflection on his feelings about grief.
There's a beauty in the chaos that is picked up in the lyrics. Take this from 'Somewhere In Between'
" Light was just for hope and it keeps flickering"
It's a challenging listen until you hear an accessible melody that comforts and embraces you. That's what happens in 'The Field' and it's a gorgeous moment. A few more such moments would have been welcome as helping hands into the murkier songs. Persevere though. The power of the album hits home on about the third time you hear it.
It's exciting to think that the Blood Orange may have shown us a template for the future that is free from generic boundaries. Was it artistically satisfying to make? I hope so. Is it an important album? Probably. Is it a tour de force? Certainly.
Taster Track : The Field
Nadine : Jim's Twenty-one
Best for : Those who like their music raw, authentic and piercingly loud!
There's no algorithm in the digital world that could link the music I usually enjoy to the glorious onslaught contained on this record.
I loved it. Why? I'm a sixty four year old, retired civil servant who reviews music in the very early morning to avoid disrupting the household routine. I'm happy with how my life and musical choices have panned out but this…… this opens a wormhole back to the days when I was a nineteen year old student and allows me to explore what Robert Frost called the roads not taken.
There's no gentle introduction to the record. It opens with the fast and furious, crash, bang, wallop of 'That Means Nothing To You'. It's gone in under two minutes leaving you reeling breathlessly in its wake. This is music that sounds loud, even at low volume. It features proper, fully distorted and screeching feedback on 'Knowing You' - the kind that thrills you even as you recoil. The howl of guitar that opens 'It Frightens Me' is revelatory.
There's a deliberately under-produced feel that calls to mind early Postcard records. Songs tumble over themselves with an attractive and natural raggedness. At its toughest, the music is gloriously chaotic, sparse and raw. That's not a production choice, it's a sign of complete authenticity. You hear it particularly on the live versions of songs. There's a strong case to be made for preferring these to the studio versions.
If you withstand the aural assault you'll find C86 melodies beneath the surface of a song like 'I Want To'. They're wrapped in fierce energy, distortion and fuzziness but they are there. Heavens, there's even a hint of an impossible Silent Night in the live version of 'Something's Going Wrong'.
Assuming the band's intended audience isn't limited to the silver pensioner, any student with an ear for exciting music is going to find something here that goes down a storm in Union bars. Back in the day, Jim's Twenty-one had support from John Peel and Janice Long. Nowadays you can imagine it appealing to Steve LaMacq's audience.
Jim's Twenty-one. And thanks to them, many others will feel they are too.
Taster Track : I Want To
Soft Power : Ezra Feinberg
Best for : Anyone searching for gentle jazz that delights and pampers.
After the bracing onslaught of Jim's Twenty-one, Ezra Feinberg is the gentle recovery session, the checkpoint hotel after a particularly arduous leg of Race Across the World.
This is gentle, instrumental jazz that treats everything you might fear in a gentle and accessible way. It doesn't play safe but it feels carefully managed for your immediate pleasure rather than to indulge the musicians. Pianos tinkle rather than crashing through your consciousness. Guitars are strummed rather than tuned into a pyrotechnic power display.
Is it too safe, even boring? No. Never. It can be languid, as in the extended opening to 'The Big Clock' but it's reminding you that there doesn't need to be any hurry. As the music dips into something with greater urgency, it's still gentle, like an able concierge discreetly handling an issue.
These are tunes that wander from melody to melody, trying them out like different flavours at an exotic buffet, encouraging you to take your time as if exploring a new museum dedicated to your life's passion. 'Future Sand' shows this to be warm music, bathed in soft, safe sunlight with the happiness that comes from being up earlier than everyone else to watch marsh birds stir in a glorious dawn.
The strummed guitar of 'Soft Power' is a delight taken straight from indie pop. 'Pose Beams' is gently hypnotic while its minimalist flourishes are a joy. In 'Get Some Rest' - excellent advice at this time of year - you'll feel caressed by flute and harp. As the album progresses the early simplicity gives way to something more textured, but it retains the album's defining characteristic of gentle warmth and accessibility.
Soft Power is appropriately named. Like the sun overcoming the wind in Aesop's fable, it will warm and seduce you. You'll want to spend time in its company.
Taster Track : Soft Power