Less is more?

I have been blogging here for nine months now and this is my 54th post. Time flies, as it does inexorably, but it amazes me that I've actually written that many in so short a time!
In that time I have also contributed only two customer reviews to <amazon.co.uk> but they have been amongst the most favourably regarded that I have posted in the last couple of years. Writing the blog has helped with this - but one of them was actually that which made me take the leap into the blog community in the first place!

Heartland

One good thing about buying albums completely unheard is the anticipation of listening for the first time. When you get something by an artist or band that you have never even heard before, and it exceeds all expectations, that is the best discovery of all.

The stupid thing is that I dithered about buying this album for over a month; the reviews I had read were very mixed and, aside from a few totally negative reviews that I ignored completely, one reviewer's favourite tracks seemed to be the least favourite of another! In the end I just bought it anyway. I first listened to it at home one evening because the postman had left it after I went to work and that is just as well as had I been listening to it in the car I would probably have driven into almost every stationary object en route.
If Heartland is not in my top ten albums of 2007 then it is going to be one hell of a year!
The reason for the disparate reviews may, I think, not be too hard to find. If you measure electro-pop in the terms of Goldfrapp and other 21st century albums, including the even more recently released album Trip The Light Fantastic by Sophie Ellis Bextor (I have this too; it is good and I might well review it later), Heartland will come as rather a surprise.
It is in a rather icy style and the music is much more stripped down to basics. It is a modern take on electro-pop as it was in the period 1979 - 1984 but with one important difference... Client is an all female band.
As for the music, you either get it or you don't and although they have borrowed much more in style, rather than substance, from that era there is one exception; track 5 is a cover version of Zerox that was released in July 1979 by the original line up of Adam and The Ants before they released their first album Dirk Wears White Sox, on 'Do It Records', later that year. It was released again as a single in January 1981, reaching #45 in the UK charts. It did not appear on an Adam and the Ants CD until 2004, when Dirk Wears White Sox was finally released with the earlier singles as bonus tracks.
Be that as it may this cover version is absolutely spot on (the "misspelling" on both albums is probably deliberate - Xerox® is a registered trademark) and it sounds as good as almost any cover version I have heard this year - and it is proving a vintage year for those already!

Stand-out tracks for me are:

• The opener Heartland, which is given a short reprise at the end, a trick that works well on this album.
• The irreproachable Lights Go Out. It may be derivative, according to some, but I simply don't care - just turn up the bass and volume and enjoy it for what it is! It is track 3.
• Someone To Hurt - track 6 - a rather slower one but none the worse for that.
• Köln - this is track 9 and if you like it but can't see where it is coming from I suggest the album Vienna by Ultravox (1980) to see how Germanic electro-inventiveness moved into UK chart music.

To be honest there is nothing even remotely mediocre on this album - the whole album is pretty much pitch perfect.

New President, new music?

The title is actually questionable! France does indeed have a new President, promising to make real the winds of change. The music scene in France seems to have beaten him to it - by a long kilometre - but both outcomes are probably symptomatic of a certain sea change.
Born long after the first wave of punk, and too young even to remember the US, Nirvana led, punk renaissance they wisely decided to go back to basics.

The Plasticines do punk, with an intellectual edginess (any self-respecting French band would), but also with the pop sensitivity and brevity that few bands since The Clash have been able to muster in the last twenty five years.
What is more, when it suits them, they can do in French too! The really surprising thing about it all is that The Plasticines are actually four 19-year-old Parisian girls who met at a Libertines concert and decided, apparently there and then, to form a band.
It is an odd story but a good call; as well as writing and singing punk they are now signed to Virgin (France) .

For more info see the following link. (btw it is in French.)

The nearest recent UK equivalent that I can think of is The Subways. It is a fairly good comparison I think although The Subways are a three-piece. Their female co-vocalist, Mary Charlotte Cooper, also happens to be their stunningly good and inventive bass guitarist and co-writer. The 2005 album 'Young For Eternity' has more than a little of the more thoughtful, yet still often bitter and twisted, end of the original punk era about it.

Down Memory Lane... my 'want to listen to' list - part 3

My 'wants' list gets no shorter but I have got used to that now. Here is one more:

Fireworks Night - 'As Fools We Are'
(Kartel Records/Organ Grinder, 2007.)

Usually, and like the example above that falls in the acoustic/lo-fi category I guess, it is new or at least recent items that get added but last week there was an exception or actually two.
On Friday a work colleague and I became involved in a conversation that, one way or another, ended up turning to the influence that late 1970s German electronic music had on Ultravox in the Midge Ure era. I'm sure this is exactly the kind of thing that everyone discusses at work on a Friday afternoon but it was diverting anyway :-)

At the time Midge Ure was recruited to Ultravox he was touring with Thin Lizzy as a stand-in guitarist on their tour of the album 'Roisín Dubh - Black Rose - A Rock Legend', so something of a change of style there!

We both agreed that this was the period 1980-4, and that the 1986 album 'U-Vox' was utter cr*p. I even had the misfortune to pay good money to see Ultravox tour this album live at Wembley Arena and it remains as probably the worst concert I have ever endured. That left us with four albums, of which we could both remember the names of the first two (but own usable copies of neither) and also most of the tracks on them. These are:

• Vienna (1980)
  
• Rage In Eden (1981)

As for the second pair, although I knew I had owned both on vinyl for at least twenty years, I couldn't for the life of me remember their titles! We did however, during the course of the afternoon, correctly remember several of the singles that were taken from them! These albums are:

• Quartet (1982)
• Lament (1984)

Clearly it was time to dig these out and listen once again, which I did that evening. The problem with the first pair is that I only ever owned them on cassette tape and it was a unreliable Chrysalis "Two on One" edition at that. I decided to buy both again - on CD this time as these releases include some bonus tracks (including several of the tracks sung in German) - but in the end I didn't. While investigating the possibilities I made a very interesting discovery and thus, to keep my long-standing vinyl albums company, I have ordered them as the original vinyl releases instead. It cost little more than the cost of the CDs in any case.

Note added: 10th May 2007.
The above artwork for 'Rage In Eden' is not that of the original UK LP release by the way - thanks to the people that e-mailed me about this. The two LPs were waiting for me when I got home from work this evening so next week maybe I'll try and review all four albums together.

Something I learned today...

I very rarely buy compilations and when I do it is usually because I want to get a cross-section of the popular output of an artist or band. Almost inevitably it is therefore one of some antiquity and of which I am insufficiently interested in obtaining all the albums that they released.

I made a rare exception this week and bought a compilation CD that consisted entirely of tracks by new artists and it arrived this morning. What a good idea that turned out to be!
'Something I Learned Today' is a compilation album, released by UK independent label Dance To The Radio, devoted entirely to new artists in the Leeds/Bradford area.

There are more than a few excellent tracks on it; The Grammatics - 'The Shipping Forecast' is one that was quite new to me, and something of a revelation, but while many tracks on the album are pop-rock-indie driven there is one truly remarkable exception. That is Coast - written by, mostly played by, and entirely sung by Laura Groves - because it defies any easy attempt at categorization and is totally acoustic and truly wonderful.

The Besnard Lakes - what, where & who...

The Besnard Lakes are, rather unsurprisingly I suppose, lakes. They are situated somewhere in Canada and are apparently incredibly beautiful. I can't tell you for sure because I have never seen them. I expect it is true but for once Google isn't proving too helpful...
So successfully have Jace Lasek and his wife Olga Goreas made 'The Besnard Lakes' (TBL) the name of their band that the natural feature that inspired them has all but disappeared from the map!

Firstly two apologies:

• The whole musical world does not actually revolve around Brighton (HSCS release 'The Death of Nightlife' next Monday and it too is available on 12" vinyl) and Canada but in this blog it might seem like it just at the moment!
• I'm going to review two perhaps "difficult" albums in succession.

The album 'The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse' has some features in common with my previous review, one being that it takes a bit of patience to see where it is going. It is about the same length, but only eight tracks long, and while 'No Shouts, No Calls' is 'atmospheric' this one falls more into the 'epic' category and even, dare I say it, induces a certain nostalgia.
In some ways it is even easier to make a comparison with Arcade Fire here, but equally unwise to take it too far!

Yes, they are from Montreal, have a husband and wife team at the front, and have a liking for lush instrumental arrangement but then the differences are apparent. TBL are a five-piece but make ready use of other artists on this album, notably Sophie Trudeau - of Godspeed You Black Emperor - on both violin and cello.
TBL however make much more ready use of Olga Goreas on female lead vocals (she predominates overall and particularly on the decidedly heavy numbers that owe much to the influence and use of techniques taken more obviously from 1970s prog-rock and even heavy rock) and while the lyrics are almost always gloomy the songs often still sound remarkably cheerful. The opening track Disaster, which she mostly sings, being a good case in point as it starts off sounding like a lullaby before Jace takes the thread and it gets complicated. It is followed by For Agent 13 that is also sung by Olga but there is much electronic distortion, particularly on the vocals, which gives it a slightly creepy edge and the lyrics are rather more urgent. It is pretty obvious by now that something strange is going on as the percussion is sometimes quite deliberately at odds with the rest (a trick Charlotte Hatherley also uses on her 2007 album 'The Deep Blue').

By the start of track three the album is in full flow and for the next four tracks it is quite unstoppable.

• And You Lied To Me
• Devastation
• Because Tonight
• Ride The Rails

They rock in every sense of the word. Only the last is less than five minutes, and then only by a few seconds, and two are well over seven minutes long. This section of the album is 'epic rock' done properly and not just a pastiche. It takes 1970 'space-rock' and firmly anchors it on planet earth.
And You Lied To Me is sung by Jace and is a fine track with a particularly good finish - even the more subdued TBL tracks tend to build to a finale. If Disaster was light-hearted then Devastation dispels the myth; Olga returns to vocal duties backed by a rhythm section consisting of three bass guitars (one of which she plays herself) and three drummers. There is usually no excuse whatsoever for this kind of indulgence but, without a shred of doubt, it works here!
Because Tonight starts rather like Agent 13 but this time more slowly and with a choral section and some strings, backed by continuing radiophonic garbling, before the track once again turns serious and the guitars make themselves known. This the most "spaced out" song on the album and Jace and Olga sing in harmony. It then ends surprisingly suddenly.
Ride The Rails is another fine track and it is more obviously down to earth than those that came before and the nearest that this album comes to narrative.
Some people have suggested that the final two tracks are "weak". I think that is a relative: while I agree that On Bedford and Grand is the weakest track on the album it is not one I would be bothered to skip. The final track, Cedric's War, I really like. It sounds that the band are just having a lot of fun but as usual the lyrics aren't in the least bit cheerful.

No shouts, but a very good call!

I mentioned this album in my "want to listen to" list last week. It is released Monday 30th April but thanks to the great folks at Boomkat Records I had the vinyl version arrive in the post on Friday. I have already listened to it at least half a dozen times and it is quite something.

Let's just start with the LP itself: it is two very well pressed discs of heavy vinyl, as there is no attempt to cram the 44 minutes on to a single one, each in its own illustrated slip cover and both contained in an outer sleeve (as illustrated above, with the logo in glossy foil rather than merely printed), plus there is also an A3 poster/lyric sheet. All this for £2 ($4) more than the regular CD - no contest I'd say! It is the most beautifully designed and executed LP package I have seen in a long time. To be quite honest if I didn't actually like the music, and since I had never heard anything from it or indeed either of Electrelane's previous output it was quite possible, it wouldn't have mattered too much!

Now for the music: It is actually quite difficult to describe because it mostly relies on textures and the creation of soundscapes quite heavily, indeed four of the eleven tracks are entirely instrumental and the and lyrics don't tend to be an overpowering element on the others. The result is best described by that often double-edged term 'atmospheric'.
To me it reminds me of walking through a familiar landscape on a very foggy day, or perhaps a vivid dream that has that strange feeling of being real but somehow distorted. I suspect that it will split opinion as I can see that if it doesn't in some indefinable way "make sense" on first listening then it is going to prove hard going. [Writing this review certainly is proving hard going.]
I won't suggest anything it sounds like because I can't think of much that will help in that way. Although in no way the same it is worth noting that Electrelane supported Arcade Fire on the UK leg of their recent tour and if you are a fan of the less "chart-orientated" end of indie then you might find this is well worth a listen...
...and also another album that will baffle your friends with when you play it in the car!

2007 so far, and my "want to listen to" list (Part 2)

I better finish this topic pretty quickly because the list of things I want to listen to is getting longer faster than I can possibly add them to this blog or - importantly and also much more expensively - to my music collection!

The first is a Brighton-based band, Electrelane, that has recently come to my attention due to the fact that they supported Arcade Fire on the UK leg of their world tour. That I had not heard of it is rather inexcusable as they have been together for the better part of a decade and are to release their fourth studio album on 30th April.

No Shouts No Calls will be available on 12" vinyl.

The second is also Brighton-based; in this case an eight member collective that I had already heard of although perhaps maybe most people haven't! In 2006 Shoreline released a brilliant 5-track 10" EP, From Eden, Home And In Between - on vinyl only - on 'Yesternow Recordings' (YES001) .
Their début album, Time Well Spent, should follow fairly soon, also on 'Yesternow Recordings'. I say "Brighton-based" advisedly; the leading lights in Shoreline are main vocalist Beatrice Sanjust di Teluada, who is from Italy, and Tom Cowan who hails from Burton on Trent. What does their music sound like? Well I've seen it described as 'acid folk' a couple of times but how much does that help most of us? It is however certainly not 'alt-folk' either...
Entirely acoustic, it has a indefinable child-like quality. Often dream-like the lyrics sometimes seem to make sense and sometimes they don't, but they are a source of wonder and their actual meaning utterly unimportant. Most strikingly, Sounds Like may not even have any meaning at all but these are truly musical nursery rhymes for adults.
The reason that I have not made any comparisons between Shoreline and other acts is because, at the moment, I quite simply can't think of any!
Last but not least is this one:
Laura Marling - London Town (EP)

This was released only on 7" on Monday 9th April, by WayOutWest Records. If you can still find a copy available - and don't even think about quizzing Amazon about it - then it is well worth having!
She is not actually a 'Londoner' at all but comes from Eversley, on the fringes of Reading. Her music sounds more like alt-folk than acid-folk, but does it also overlap with anti-folk? I think so - and the problem with all these so-called 'genres' is that they are so numerous as to be quite meaningless. Almost as numerous indeed as the new generation of (mostly) guitar-wielding UK singer-songwriters, that are variously so labelled, and with whom I have no problem at all!

"Britain Has Talent"and we certainly don't need Simon Cowell's latest reality TV idea (of that name) to prove it.
From the ever-so-delicately picked 'hardly there' sound, to the full punk-rock blast of bands such as Glasgow's 'The Hedrons', it is already a fact; Maxïmo Park even provided an apposite summary with the track 'Girls Who Play Guitars', which features on their new album 'Our Earthly Pleasures'. Long may it remain the case!

A strange beast called Anniemal! Those 2005 albums... (part 3)

This time it is not rock, which has typified the previous parts of this occasional series, that is in the spotlight but pop and it is good to be reminded from time to time that, for all the rubbish that it brings, it has still has a shimmering diversity. It sadly also goes to show that good albums don't necessarily sell well regardless of the reviews they garner. These were three that greeted this:

• An astonishing debut - The Sunday Times
• Brilliant spiky electro-pop - NME
• Life affirming in every sense - Q Magazine

I find it very hard to disagree with the above comments and that is why it appears again here - in fact I'm a serial reviewer of this album!

Imagine a very strange pop cocktail:
Start with a large shot of new millennium Kylie, (Who knows what will she do on her forthcoming album? That, for now at least, is still anyone's guess and maybe Dumfries' Calvin Harris, producer and songwriter, simply isn't telling and who could blame him!), a shot of Rachel Stevens at her best and finally fill up the glass with quirky fizz, that of the kind that has made the Scandinavian countries legendary for producing more good music than their small populations might suggest reasonable. If you can then you might just have some idea of what to expect from 'Anniemal'.

Annie is from Norway and this is her début LP but you would never guess. Although neither conservative nor self-consciously weird in style or content it is very listenable from start to finish and it only gets better with repeated listening. That it is far more than a competent début is quite obvious it but it is also a stunningly confident one. It combines a mixture of electronica - both new and old - with pop of many kinds, touches of R'n'B and rock, and a noticeable dance sensibility in a way that is somehow quite lacking in both self-consciousness and pretension. It is one of those rare albums that gives the impression of actually being created, rather than merely planned, perhaps helped by the fact that she co-wrote and produced the majority of the tracks.

It starts with 'Intro', which has Annie talking over a variety of bleeps and electronic anniemal noises. This is followed by the Richard X produced 'Chewing Gum'; he also produced the quite different sounding 'Me Plus One'. As he produced Rachel Stevens' 'Some Girls' the connecting influence is certainly there.
Another outstanding track is 'Heartbeat' again co-written and produced by Annie. Many a well-established artist would kill for a track like this, while on the other hand the rather happy dance influenced 'Greatest Hit' (this is slightly reminiscent of Faithless tracks featuring Dido, if she were on Prozac) samples 'Everybody' by Madonna, who is undoubtedly a big influence on Annie's music.
The title track 'Anniemal' seems to me to be a subtle parody of Abba's 'Money. Money. Money.' with the opening lines, " She's a locked up girl, in a RICH MAN'S WORLD" and so it goes on, but it is far too clever to ever be crass. It is very hard to find a filler track on this album, or indeed even a predictable one.
There is also the wonderful 'Helpless Fool For Love' that is as near to perfection as a pure pop song gets and, towards the end, the epic disco pop of 'Come Together', which runs to a little more than seven minutes. Buy it - these days almost nobody makes albums like this!

Why buy foreign language music?

My first response, I have to say, is simply "Well why not?" and to be honest I'm quite happy with it.

It isn't, unfortunately, always a sufficient answer to a question that I'm asked surprisingly often and sometimes even by friends that I might have suspected knew better! I think this is actually mainly a matter of perception - that such music will somehow be "difficult" therefore, by default, it will require a special effort to appreciate.
There certainly is music that falls into that category, and I can understand why many wish to avoid the effort it entails, but is just as likely to be sung in English. As far as I'm concerned music is for fun and sometimes I give up on artists that I thought I might like for no better reason than the fact that, when it comes to decision time, I decide I simply don't care for their music; but I don't find that foreign language music is overwhelmingly likely to fall into this category if it is of a genre that I generally like.

I say this for two reasons:

• We have all known each other long enough to be happy to take what comes and only to opine that "This album is utter s**t!"if that is what really needs to be said, because it blatantly crosses some unspoken boundary (and we even tend to be fairly forgiving about those) without giving or taking offence. It happens rarely but, as we have all been on both the 'giving' and the 'receiving' end at one time or another, so there there is a certain equity too.
• They are generally quite aware of most of my musical foibles (but clearly not this one) - however some of them also secretly like Rachel Stevens' solo albums. I know exactly who you are and of your irrational, entirely self-inflicted, guilt - that's why the CDs tend to be in the car when appropriate!

The same suspects however generally profess not to listen to song lyrics, but if I play a foreign language album regardless of how non-foreign it sounds, you can be pretty certain that it will be commented on before the end of the second track at the latest. The first track might sometimes get away with it, I suppose, due to inattention or possibly the thought that it might have been merely some artistic "experiment" but clearly lyrics do matter as part of the song as a whole (which perhaps makes some people's equally negative attitude towards modern instrumental music understandable) but maybe not particularly as regards their actual meaning?
I own quite a lot of music, whether whole albums or just individual songs, sung in a variety of mostly European languages from Icelandic and Welsh to French and Spanish. The obvious question now is which is my favourite?
When it comes to studio albums, and for start to end listening pleasure it beats Camille - Le Fil into second place, there is still only one real contender:

Dónde Están Los Ladrones? Shakira, 1999.

It was also the first album that I purchased without ever having heard so much as a single track taken from it (something I now however quite often do without thinking twice about it) - so the fact that it was sung entirely in Spanish hardly seemed relevant at the time . I then reviewed it almost five years ago. How time flies - it was one of my earliest efforts at reviewing and the first to tackle a foreign language album - but I still wouldn't change a thing I wrote then and that is surely the sign of a really solid album; one that has staying power.
Here is that review, complete and original, as it is still to be found on amazon.co.uk. It has dated in the meantime, but the ways are an interesting reflection on the passing of five years in the story of pop music...

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
An album not to be dismissed!, 27 April 2002

I like 'Laundry Service', and happen to think that 'Suerte' the Spanish version of the [UK] hit single 'Whenever, Wherever' is way better than the version in English. On the other hand I think 'Objection (Tango)' is magnificent! I don't speak Spanish, and therefore wondered if a whole album might be too much. I bought 'Dónde Están Los Ladrones?' anyway, and I'm very glad I did! Please let me digress for a moment. Shakira has often been compared to Britney in the popular press, but that is unfair to both of them. Britney sings songs written for her, and usually does so well. Skakira writes her own lyrics and music, so she can set her own musical agenda, and her albums therefore comprise many influences without seeming disconnected. Without the added distraction of two languages, this is perhaps more obvious on 'Dónde Están Los Ladrones'. It may seem a strange comparison, but it is the same sort of accomplishment that Dido achieved with 'No Angel'. Both are brilliant, but not directly comparable! My favourite tracks on the album? Dónde Están Los Ladrones (up-beat, as summer beckons), and the bitter 'Inevitable'! Both made me reach for a Spanish-English dictionary. My least favourite is 'Ojos así' which appears in two versions on this album, and again in English as 'Eyes like yours' on the album 'Laundry Service'."

I know what you are thinking, and I was sceptical too.
I like 'Laundry Service', and happen to think that 'Suerte' the Spanish version of the hit single 'Whenever, Wherever' is way better than the version in English. On the other hand I think 'Objection (Tango)' is magnificent!
I don't speak Spanish, and therefore wondered if a whole album might be too much. I bought 'Dónde Están Los Ladrones' anyway, and I'm very glad I did!
Please let me digress for a moment. Shakira has often been compared to Britney in the popular press, but that is unfair to both of them. Britney sings songs written for her, and usually does so well.
Skakira writes her own lyrics and music, so she can set her own musical agenda, and her albums therefore comprise many influences without seeming disconnected. Without the added distraction of two languages, this is perhaps more obvious on 'Dónde Están Los Ladrones'. It may seem a strange comparison, but it is the same sort of accomplishment that Dido achieved with 'No Angel'. Both are brilliant, but not directly comparable!
My favourite tracks on the album? Dónde Están Los Ladrones (up-beat, as summer beckons), and the bitter 'Inevitable'! Both made me reach for a Spanish-English dictionary. My least favourite is 'Ojos así' which appears in two versions on this album, and again in English as 'Eyes like yours' on the album 'Laundry Service'.

2007 so far, and my "want to listen to" list (Part 1)

Perhaps 2007 got off to a slow start, or maybe it was mere impatience on my part, but about a month ago it finally seemed to be getting in its stride. Now it is much like the M4 on a Friday evening - a huge queue, and getting longer by the minute, for which neither love nor money offers any possibility of a quick solution!
On a more positive front it is threatening a whole crop of wonderful prospects , which I think could be very interesting, that are naturally receiving far fewer column inches than the second albums by 'The Arctic Monkeys', 'Maxïmo Park' and 'YOURCODENAMEIS:MILO'. It is interesting that the last two are both bands from the North East [of England], which at least to me seems to have been rather under-represented in the last few years though 'Field Music' is another band very worthy of a mention.

Much of my "want to listen to list" is music from abroad but there also is plenty to be found in it that isn't. The problem is manifold - not only is it a very long list but is a quite disparate one; some of the items are already released and merely newly of interest to me, or at least they have a release date, while others are not and some of the artists don't even have a recording deal.
I won't generally mention any artist release that I have already covered in this blog (you can count them in by default) unless it is new since the last post on that artist. Here goes...

These first two I should have in my paws by early next week at the latest - possibly even tomorrow if Royal Mail is feeling well disposed toward me - and as soon as I have listened properly I'll be reviewing them here.

The Besnard Lakes - The Besnard Lakes Are The Dark Horse
CD and vinyl album, Canada, Jagjaguwar Records, 2007.

Birds of Wales - Fall of The 49 EP
CD EP, Canada, Invisible Hands Records, 2007.

There are also a few more electro-pop surprises in line for release fairly soon and, despite the so-so popularity of the genre in recent years (well about twenty-five years to be honest), there seems to be growing major-label interest .
Here are two, both released on 'Universal', that I certainly want to listen to:

• Sophie Ellis Bextor - Trip The Light Fantastic (Universal) 21 May 2007
• Dragonette - Galore (Universal) 16 July 2007

For those like me that can't wait that long, and also remain mystified why Annie - Anniemal was not a huge success (it is to be the next in my occasional series of reviews of 2005 albums that I still regularly listen to), I'm planning to get Robyn - Robyn (Konichiwa Records, 2007) ASAP. From the various descriptions of it that I have read it probably sounds like something that might have happened had Gwen Stefani and Annie (with possibly a little help from Goldfrapp) decided to gang up on Courtney Love and Pink but, before anything ugly happened, they all reconsidered the wisdom of a feud and melded into 'Robyn' instead. It just has to be worth a listen... and it is already released.

Another forthcoming release, again on a major label, is Siobhan Donaghy's second solo album, Ghosts, which is to be released on 25 June 2007 (Parlophone). Her first, Revolution In Me (WEA - London Records, 2003), arguably sounds even better now than it did then, but sold woefully at the time, not least because it was given next to no marketing push by the label.
Most of Europe unfortunately can't pronounce her name, or even recognise it when it comes on the radio, but few who have heard the blistering and slightly unhinged pop of the single 'Overload', which in 2000 catapulted 'Sugababes' to #1 in the UK singles chart and then to pop stardom, is likely to forget it.
She not only wrote this song (and many of the others on the album One Touch) but also sung most of the lead vocals, including those on 'Overload'. She then left the group quite suddenly, part way through their first tour of Japan, and shortly before super-stardom arrived. It is not hard to see why: in a 2003 radio interview she was asked what her favorite magazine is and and the answer, without any hesitation whatsoever, was New Scientist. To say the least this floored the interviewer good and proper. It also rings very true and celebrity is quite simply not what she is about but honesty is; they make poor travelling companions.

There Is A Light That Never Goes Out...

The 1980s haven't generally been held in particularly high musical regard for the last fifteen years or so, but it would be very wrong indeed to deny their existence.
For one thing the decade had its indubitable highlights - even if they were sometimes accompanied by miserablist lyrics, such as those of the track of the title of this post - taken from The Smiths 1986 album "The Queen Is Dead". Although I never much cared for their music at the time, sure as hell it was to prove an incredibly influential combination that released four albums of which this was the third. Stephen Patrick Morrissey wrote the lyrics for the most part while Johnny Marr kept the whole show from drowning itself in melancholy by dint of his inspired, and actually amazingly (before such things were really recognised as such) pop-hooked guitar parts. In fact their influence has if anything increased exponentially with the passage of time.

Another thing that makes the 1980s interesting again is that it is the last decade that current teenagers can't actually remember at all - and that in itself means that it is worth a retrospective if only so those of us who can are able to say "I told you so." with a meaningful degree of authority! Perhaps even more interesting still is that some of the bands spearheading the revival are also too young to remember it first time around, so they are able to take a fresh look at what it had to offer and just how best to interpret it twenty years later. Like all decades the 1980s didn't begin or end with the simple turning of calendar pages, but took influences from the preceding one and then ceded its own to the next.

If Debbie Harry were thirty-something years younger and happened to have black hair, which would however have admittedly missed the point of the 'Blondie' image, she [and the band for that matter] might now have looked like this...

For those of us old enough to remember, or even perhaps own, Blondie vinyl releases, or young and dedicated enough to still have the energy to search them out in flea-ridden second-hand record stores, the evidence in the artwork only becomes more compelling.

Written, with Georgio Moroder, for the film American Gigolo this was a huge hit in 1980.

Thinking along "Parallel Lines" the image below, adapted from the artwork of the US release, is the proof in black and white.

The band is Stefy and the four-piece hail from Orange County, CA (the real life OC but the fourth track on the album seamlessly blends the real thing with its small-screen alter ego) and is signed to US independent Wind-up Records, whose byline is the almost too-cheesy-to-be-true 'developing career artists' and their début The Orange Album was released in the US in late 2006.
Their first single Chelsea, a light-hearted and very catchy blast through early 1980s electro synth-pop territory, is out now in the UK and The Orange Album will be released here a fortnight tomorrow (23rd April - and distributed by Sony BMG) .
It is a timely reminder that the 1980s were also great fun musically and I for one can't wait...

...luckily I don't have to!

It might not be genre changing - and perhaps that is actually why it is so appealing - but if you hanker after more "new 1980s reminiscent pop electronica" then I suggest the following:

Client and their new album Heartland; it is gloriously unreconstructed but, very unusually, sung and played by an all female threesome 'Client A' , 'Client B' and 'Client E'. They are something like The Pipettes, and the circumstances of their formation are not so dissimilar, but they play and sing rather than sing and dance. Their influences are also quite firmly rooted in the music of twenty years later!
Dragonette (also www.dragonette.com) is an equally valid contender and the first single "I Get Around" is lead vocalist Martina's utterly wanton, yet also quite inadvertent, electro-pop riposte to Nelly Furtado/Timbaland's multi-million selling 2006 US #1 single "Promiscuous".
They aren't doing too badly for a Toronto couple that met randomly just over a year ago at a gig in their home city. They married four months later and, in the meantime, decided that London might just serve their joint musical ambition better! They soon recruited the other two band members once they arrived in the UK and it seems to have worked out quite well. For most of April they are on tour as the main supporting act for Sugababes - the biggest selling UK female act of the 21st century.

I Am Murdered.... Music and Politics

Music and politics have an extremely long and very close association.
When print medium of even the most basic sort was solely the preserve of the rich, and almost all of the populace would have been unable to read it even if it were available to them, songs and the travelling singers that sung them were both a way of spreading political information and also of fomenting dissent. Music was also an ideal medium for disguising, often by allegory, messages that might have been treasonable if spoken in public and many examples survive in the canon of folk music.
In general three circumstances, which often occur together, seem to lead to a rich legacy of songs of a socio-political nature: repression, resentment and hardship. This is why there is such an extensive collection of songs, particularly from Ireland and Wales, dealing with these themes and also a large collection of songs documenting workplace hardship and catastrophe. Not all songs however: Lilli Bulero is probably a good case in point as it seems to have started life as exactly the opposite!

Not that much has changed: forty years ago the Vietnam War spawned a resurgence in the genre - though obviously particularly in the US - and they generally became known as 'Protest Songs' but if George W. Bush (a self-confessed fan of Country music - a penchant to which he is of course quite entitled) leaves a musical legacy of his Presidency then it is the huge upsurge in the depth and breadth of political song writing worldwide.
I'm sure that, for the truly cutting edge music sociologists, there are plenty of folk collections to be made in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. ...
It is almost enough to make the original London 'punk scene' look quite feeble by comparison but all things need foundations and quoting Sir Isaac Newton, when explaining the basis of his achievements in a letter to Robert Hooke on 5th. February 1676, and not the rather later Oasis lyric:

"... it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Modern (UK) folk and traditional music often get slated, rather unfairly I think, for their tendency to focus on bucolic themes to accompany the largely traditional sounds. I happen to like much of this too, but I don't see why the particular sounds and the lyrics should be so closely tied together.

Very occasionally they are not.

Spencer Perceval (1762-1812) is the only British Prime Minister to have been murdered. His assassin was John Bellingham whose grievance was the UK trade policy instigated by the above (Bellingham had lost his fortune in trade with Russia) that he believed was ruining him and which, eventually, drove him to the deed. He did the job himself; on 11th May 1812 in the lobby of the House of Commons, when Perceval was on his way to attend an inquiry into Luddite Riots.
Bellingham was apprehended at the scene, confessed and was hanged within a week. No contemporary account of the incident seems to have survived in song but it is however a very unusual theme for a 2007 single!

Spencer Perceval c/w I Am Murdered is a single at that bears little resemblance to anything ever normally found on the format. The 'A' side is an account of the lead up to and execution of the murder itself from the perspective of the murderer, while the 'B' side is the response of the murdered to the crime. Only one band I can think of at the moment would even attempt it and that, of course, is iLiKETRAiNS.
It is not a topic to take lightly, and certainly not one to try and cram into a four-minute 7" single, so they simply didn't bother with convention and of course one advantage of the CD single format is that this is no problem. So no vinyl then?

Fear not - there is a full-length 10", 45 rpm, heavy-weight vinyl version that could be a murder weapon in its own right. The quality is great, from the music and the pressing right down to the packaging, but as it is all dark a picture would hardly do it justice. The two tracks together run for over fifteen minutes and echo each other - the first being 'angry' the second 'reflective'.
It is brooding and dark but there is nothing folk about it whatsoever. In fact the "accusation" - "reply" format of the two songs even has faint echoes of the hip-hop duelling of a few years ago!

The murdered Perceval reflects on his lot which, even before he was murdered, was not a politically happy one. At the time of his assassination he was, as well as holding the post of Prime Minister:

• First Lord of the Treasury
• Leader of the House of Commons
• Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
• Chancellor of the Exchequer (he asked six colleagues and they all turned the post down!)

As the song lyric [I Am Murdered] goes:

If truth be told I've had a lot to contend with.
I've kept the French at bay
In Portugal and Spain
As our King went insane.

Not the run of the mill (don't even mention the Luddites) but quite typical of iLiKETRAiNS

Perceval himself was a master of the sound bite and during a debate on electoral corruption he came up with the following memorable rejoinder when asked for his comment on the forgoing speaker:

"I have nothing to say to the nothing that has been said."

Help She Can't Swim...

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water along comes the return of Brighton-based Help She Can't Swim (HSCS) with 'Hospital Drama', the first single to be taken from their forthcoming second album The Death of Nightlife.
Released like the first, Fashionista Super Dance Troupe (2004) of which there were just 200 vinyl copies, by label 'Fantastic Plastic' it means a further feast of limited vinyl! Since the first album, and several 7" singles c/w non-album tracks, they have released two vinyl-only EPs:

• Committing Social Suicide (2005)
  
• Secret Garden (2006)
  

There are two 7" versions of 'Hospital Drama' available:

A picture disc c/w 'Wake Up' and a black 7" (and also CD) c/w 'Wretched'.

A five-piece for their first LP outing, their second LP sees them return as a four-piece and with their sound still evolving naturally. The current line up is:

Tom Denney - voice, guitar, keys
Leesey Frances - voice, keys
Tim Palmer - bass, keys
Lewis Baker - drums

The album Fashionista Super Dance Troupe is mostly fast, furious and often quite angry. It is where indie-pop with clever lyrics meets shouty-punk; that would be a conveniently lazy way to describe it.
In slightly less than 25 minutes Fashionista Super Dance Troupe romps its wilful way through eleven quite varied tracks, often with biting lyrics. Only the last one exceeds three minutes and that is 'Apples', which hints at something rather different. This nascent diversity becomes ever more obvious on the EPs mentioned above and it is certainly not something of which to be ashamed for a band that has never really fitted comfortably in any particular genre.

The latest single 'Hospital Drama' is still recognisably the HSCS of old, only better. The really surprising track of these three is 'Wretched' - a song that puts many similar attempts at the territory, including many by far better known artists, to shame by its sheer simplicity.

Canada returns...

It has been clear for several years that the music coming from Canada - and particularly Toronto and Montreal - has to be taken very seriously indeed. When Roughtrade Records released 'Funeral', the début album from Montreal seven-piece Arcade Fire, in the UK in the spring of 2005 things happened very fast indeed.
Within weeks every newspaper and magazine that you picked up would have a review of it and the tickets to their tour dates, mostly taking place at small venues as when they were arranged nobody had heard of them, suddenly became rarer than golden eggs.
Then the reviews of these live performances appeared and the frenzy moved up a gear - here was a band that not only make a completely new style involving many classical instruments put to the ends of rather apocalyptic indie rock, but were so good at doing it that they swap their instruments among themselves while performing. The only thing rarer than live tickets, even after two years in which Funeral has continued to sell strongly, is a review that dares say a bad thing about it or their live performances!

What everyone wondered was what would they follow it up with? It is a rock on which many artists have foundered, hence the often heard phrase "difficult second album". Some bands do it by taking a huge sideways step, which is hard to pull off convincingly, others by progressing with the sound of the first album. Given the acclaim that their first was accorded and were they even minded to attempt such a thing, could it be anything other than a hollow shell in comparison to Funeral?

If this bothered the band they were not telling anyone, and certainly not giving any clues as to what the sequel would sound like, while touring in the summer of 2006. Then all of a sudden, about a two months ago, they revealed that Neon Bible would be released on their own SonoVox label and the fact that it was largely recorded in a number of churches in Québec, not least for their acoustics and a requirement for real organ. This hinted that Neon Bible would follow on where Funeral left off, which it does.

Did they pull it off? A couple of listens will soon give only one impression - that they did and with quite a lot of room to spare. If you liked Funeral then you'll will almost certainly love Neon Bible. It has everything that was good about its predecessor - only done with more scope and ambition and, well basically, done better. Win Butler's voice has less of the tortured half-scream it once had (but when it matters it still has just enough) and, while still only infrequently employed, the vocals of Régine Chassagne appear just when most they are devastatingly effective (remember 'Haiti' on Funeral). The instruments - and there are a great number and variety of them - pile up in complex and dizzying layers that somehow miraculously never collapse in to chaos.
It is largely in this skill in composing and then arranging the many improbable threads that the secret lies - it is what makes Arcade Fire sound like they do and not very much like anyone else!

Not big, quite clever? --- Despot Chic.

Maybe it is just a UK thing, maybe it is not, but "shouty-punk" is still something of a phenomenon and it comes in various guises - it can be angry, cajoling, or even surprisingly dispassionate - but all are still quite recognisable as "shouty-punk"...

This 2006, six-track, CD-R by South Wales band King Alexander remains one of my favourites in the genre and not only for the wonderfully un-punk sentiment of the lyric near the end of track 2, We Are A Good Egg:

Do you respect us?
Will you buy our T-shirts?

It smacks of capitalism but as King Alexander is still unsigned the band can hardly be said to have sold out and it might better be regarded as cheerful optimism, something they seem to have aplenty. It would also be easy (and very lazy indeed) to say that their music is not in fact particularly original but, even if that were true, it still manages to be surprisingly addictive listening as it is lyrically nothing if not tongue in cheek! The vocals are nominally shared between the somewhat laconic lads and Laura Bryon, who thus actually sings most of them.
She did the EP artwork too and is clearly something of a dilettante, in the older and strictly non-pejorative sense, and a busy one at that. A quick search shows that she has variously contributed songwriting, vocals and also guitar to a surprising variety of musical projects in South Wales in the last couple of years.

Regina Spektor - 'Songs'

She is a classically trained pianist, of Russian background and New York sensibility, who might prove a surprise hit in 2007. UK radio (not least the once unmentionable BBC Radio 2) has been playing, mostly by popular request, her new single 'Fidelity'. Released on 5th March 2007, both on 7" vinyl and CD, it is taken from the album Begin To Hope (2006) on the cover of which she appears kittenish.

She was not so coy on the cover of her first studio album. Soviet Kitsch was released in 2004.

This was not her first CD release either!

In the 1980s the US was the source of many a female singer songwriter, and they made a big impact on the UK charts as well, but almost all of them primarily wrote on guitar.
More recently they have rather been few and far between, but some have written on piano and still reached the UK charts. The track 'A Thousand Miles', a huge hit in the US and UK from her 2003 début album Be Not Nobody, makes Vanessa Carlton a good case in point. Some songs on Songs have a resonance with those but equally fellow New Yorker Vanessa Carlton's second album, the hugely under-rated Harmonium (2005), indicates that the influences might actually cut both ways.

The tracks on Songs are not accompanied by complex orchestrations...
On Christmas Day 2001, in New York and with Joe Mendelson as recording engineer, Regina Spektor recorded seventeen tracks. Every one was done in a single live take and they were originally intended to be an archive session but in 2002 she was persuaded to release many of them, exactly as they were recorded, on a CD that was however only available at her live shows in 2003/4...

... Songs (2002) is amazing - it is well worth any effort it takes to find.

It consists of twelve tracks; about half of them are piano led and most of the others are largely constructed around judicious overdubs and in that respect she is quite reminiscent of Camille Dalmais - and neither of them suffers one bit from the comparison.

There is a very diffuse genre of music currently known as 'anti-folk' and these two artists both seem to represent it. So does Rose Kemp and I can see that this is indeed true as she, while largely guitar led, is also a user of self-made overdubs. On the other hand, while quite obviously related in her use of vocal overdubs, KT Tunstall never seems to mentioned in this respect but both Lily Allen (who doesn't for the most part) and Kate Nash (who very often does) both seem to be included as a matter of right! Some reviewers say that Regina Spektor has abandoned her anti-folk past on this album, but I don't hear it.
'Samson', the third track on Begin To Hope, is also the first on Songs and while she has certainly moved on it would be hard to claim that she has sold out. She is now signed to WEA, and yes the production is rather less lo-fi, but I'd say that her new (major) label have made most of the compromises because the new 'Samson' is still quite recognizably the same song.
If anything at all defines 'anti-folk' as a distinct category - and I have no problem with any of it - its subtle derivation from punk, mostly in terms of lyrical narrative rather than the music itself, is perhaps the key.

KT Tunstall applied many of the same ideas and tools to the modern folk-influenced scene, which was a different achievement entirely, and her début album Eye To The Telescope released in December 2004 sold over a million copies in the UK alone in 2005!