Music Review August 2014

My favourite albums and songs from August.

Albums

5. Green Language - Rustie

It's inconsistent, and lacks the titillating, razor-sharp ferocity of Glass Swords, but Green Language has more than its fair share of bangers to compensate. Some of the best bass-drops from electronic music in ages.

4. Bill Bruisers - The New Pornographers

A Pop group famous for their elaborate-yet-catchy tunes, Bill Bruisers just happens to be the gang's best album since 2005's Twin Cinema. It's loud, brash, and dissonant, but it's also very cool.

3. LOSE - Cymbals Eat Guitars

One of the best Indie-Rock records of the year, LOSE isn't a massive step forward for CEG; they're still as frenetic, complex, flawed and ingenius as ever. But, it's possibly their most focussed, and most personal (a moving eulogy for a dear friend).

2. They Want My Soul - Spoon

Spoon are admittedly one of my favourite bands, their Indie-Pop compositional wizardry matched only by their pervasive, laidback sense of fun. They Want My Soul shows them at their most serious and urgent, yet it works. It... it just works. They're great.

1. LP1 - FKA Twigs

Yeh, it's the cop-out choice as album of the month. Yeh, it's a major contender for AOTY for almost every single music criticism institution. So, it's hardly an original choice. But yeh, it's also an incredible journal of sexual neuroses and intimacies and deserves (nearly) every superlative tossed its way.

Songs

10. Manipulator - Ty Segall

9. Champions of Red Wine - The New Pornographers

8. Figure It Out - Royal Blood

7. New York Kiss - Spoon

6. Video Girl - FKA Twigs

5. Problem - Ariana Grande

4. Jackson - Cymbals Eat Guitars

3. Tuesday - Makonnen

2. Attak - Rustie

1. Two Weeks - FKA Twigs

'Get Hurt' - The Gaslight Anthem Review

The Gaslight Anthem’s critics have always painted them as a glorified Springsteen tribute band; a description I’ve always deemed unfair, until Get Hurt. Judging by their cavalier pre-release interviews, the band believed that the record would be their Kid A; it was ‘completely different’ from their discography and must consequently be progressive. In reality it is a concept album about Brian Fallon’s talent and utility which inversely suggests that TGA are a one trick pony, that they are at their best as a Springsteen tribute band.

The frenetic riffs and towering adolescent urgency of The 59 Sound-which is almost indisputably their best album-is extinct, replaced by thudding 80s hair metal guitars and lame The 1975-inspired synths. The song structure is equally generic; traditional verse-chorus-verse sing-alongs compose the vast multitude, although there’s one or two quieter ballads; also in verse-chorus-verse. The title track and lead single embodies this. It trundles on with Fallon mumbling some masochistic furrow about embracing love’s misery, supported by some truly insipid guitars. ‘Stay Vicious,’ another single, opens and expands thunderously, before its inevitable soft bridge discordantly implores sensitivity. The album’s all very loud but equally hollow. It just doesn’t work. For all its aggression and self-assurance it’s cartelised by a facetious lethargy. One track, ‘Rolling and Tumblin,’ even evokes Nickelback; just about the worst thing you could ever, ever do.

It doesn’t help that Fallon seems to have lost his sincerity; quite ridiculous considering he’s singing in first-person and that this is his ‘divorce album’. Although more composed vocally, Fallon is still the forlornly earnest romantic. He laments heartbreak, decries exes and venerates the pantheon of True Love. So far, so atypical Gaslight Anthem; his pleaful (slightly morbid) croon for a lover to ‘lie underground’ in ‘Underneath The Ground’ purports him at his most ironically idealistic; on ‘Ain’t That A Shame’ he has ‘tears in his eyeballs’ and ‘wine on [his] lips’; there’s a song called ‘Break Your Heart’; you get the picture. It’s lyrically inane, surprisingly two-dimensional, and is unsubstantiated by bland, technically clunky hooks. It’s nothing we haven’t heard before, especially when his mawkish dirges flirt with his overt yarns of love-tinted Americana, where the Springsteen references really come into their own. It’s the same ‘losing my virginity to my highschool sweetheart underneath the moonlight beside a Minnesota lake’ narrative we’ve been fed since 2007, only this time without Fallon’s tireless assiduousness to power it convincing. Less Gaslight Anthem more post-2009 Kings of Leon covering The River.

There are some good songs. ‘Helter Skeleton’ sells the band at three-quarters kineticism. ‘Underneath the Ground,’ although snortily soppy, is sweet, and a pleasant interval from the garage-done-poorly which surrounds it.

Hopefully this will soon be an irrelevant misstep, because ultimately Get Hurt is over-produced and under-written, a barely glamorous vacuum. I’m not saying Fallon shouldn’t try something new, whether musically or thematically; he most certainly should, but he shouldn’t lose his unbridled energy and ferventism in the process, even if it is rooted in States-specific nostalgia. After all, the Springsteen schtick still works for Frank Turner.

Music Review July 2014

My favourite albums and songs from July.

Albums

Honourable Mentions: The Voyager - Jenny Lewis, Complete Surrender - Slow Club, Futurology - Manic Street Preachers

5. Wild Onion - Twin Peaks

Some garage-tinged power pop underscored by a heartfelt sincerity. The quality of their punkier efforts varies wildly, but the melancholic slow-burners display a collage of teenage emotiveness woven by a surprising compositional maturity that is really quite delightful.

4. Alvvays - Alvvays

Lo-Fi pop evidently inspired by the likes of The New Pornographers. Alvvays are a little rough around the edges; but their unperturbed urgency, carried by Molly Rankin's kinetic vocals, shine.

3. 1000 Forms of Fear - Sia

After years of commercially-unsuccessful-but-still-great LPs, writing great pop songs, and featuring on great pop songs, Sia is finally emerging into the foreground on a great pop album. The instrumentation on 1000 Forms is hardly introverted, with its rousing synths and cacophonous strings, but Furler's voice is gloriously gargantuan.

2. Lese Majesty - Shabazz Palaces

One of the most endearingly odd groups in Hip-Hop are back, and Lese Majesty is possibly their best work yet. The production is naturally idiosyncratic, pummelled by discordant beats and helter-skelter hooks, and the social satire remains as biting and entertaining as ever.

1. We Don't Have Each Other - Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties

This Folk-Punk blockbuster, the first thing to emerge from Wonder Years lead singer Dan Campbell's side project/alter-ego, Aaron West, is one of the most emotionally resonant albums of the year. A traumatising diary of depression, it is a sensationally powerful account of modern disconnection and loneliness. Lyricists don't come much better than Campbell.

Songs

10. The Voyager - Jenny Lewis
9. Fair Game - Sia
8. Marry Me, Archie - Alvvays
7. You Ain't No Saint - Aaron West
6. Suffering Me, Suffering You - Slow Club
5. Ordinary People - Twin Peaks
4. #CAKE - Shabazz Palaces
3. Divorce and the American South - Aaron West
2. Chandelier - Sia
1. No Black Person is Ugly - Lil B