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The Family Jewels, the début album from Marina & The Diamonds is out next week, and judging on the four (you read that correctly!) fantastic singles that have proceded the album, it’s going to rock. Hopefully I might find time to review it, but for now, here is a fabulous acoustic version of the most recent single Hollywood.
Greg
I’m a big fan of Hot Club De Paris, and I still play their greatly under-appreciated second album “Live At Dead Lake” on a regular basis. I’m pretty pleased then that 2010 promises not only a new record from the band but two stand-alone EPs, the first of which comes out tomorrow on 10” and download.
Entitled “With Days Like This As Cheap As Chewing Gum, Why Would Anyone Want To Work?”, the six new tracks show the band trying new things with mostly successful results. Opener Dance A Ragged Dance is the exception to the rule, deviating little from the band’s earlier sound, and perhaps as a result of this it’s the weakest song here. However, following track Fuck You, The Truth!, ushered in with a minute of percussive chimes and glockenspiel, is amongst the band’s best work to date with it’s catchy guitar line and infectious chants of “the carpet, the street, these hands and these knees”.
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? sounds unlike anything the band have done before, with it’s simplistic ascending riff and stripped back percussion, and is another great addition to the band’s catalogue. It’s closing track Extra Time, Sudden Death which is the real star here though. Clocking in at six minutes it’s Hot Club’s longest song yet and, to my mind, their finest. A marching drumbeat, glockenspiel chimes, group harmonies and more catchy riffs combine to create a song which just oozes perfection. The closing refrain of “We caught the start, We watched the rest, Extra Time, then Sudden Death” may not look that special written down but it’s been stuck in my head for the past four hours.
Not everything on this EP works but when the band succeed they do it in style, as shown on Extra Time, Sudden Death which is surely their best song to date. That alone makes this a record worth buying.
Altogether now: “We caught the start, We watched the rest, Extra Time, then Sudden Death, We caught the start, We watched the rest, Extra Time, then Sudden Death, We caught the start, We watched the rest, Extra Time, then Sudden Death, We caught the start, We watched the rest, Extra Time, then Sudden Death, We caught the start, We watched the rest, Extra Time, then Sudden Death, We caught the start, We watched the rest, Extra Time, then Sudden Death, We caught the start, We watched the rest, Extra Time, then Sudden Death, We caught the start, We watched the rest, Extra Time, then Sudden Death” (etc.)
8/10
Jed. x
I’ll just leave this here…
Marko
I’ve made no secret of my Los Campesinos! obsession in the past on this blog and with the release of the excellent Romance Is Boring today it’s only gonna get worse. Safe to say it was worth the wait - the second album proper from Los Campesinos! is everything I hoped for and more, so here’s a detailed track-by-track review of an album I’m already earmarking as potentially the year’s best.
1. In Medias Res - “On the back seat of your car because it wasn’t safe to start it, you were ‘far too fucked to drive’ were the words that you imparted”
The album starts off simply enough, with acoustic guitar and some background organ noise ushering in the first of many great vocal performances from Gareth, but with a creepy electronic midsection ushering in clattering drums, distorted vocals and a blaring trumpet outro it quickly becomes apparent that Los Campesinos! have “grown up”. It’s a great opener which segues seamlessly into…
“Think Before You Speak”, the début album from Morden four-piece Good Shoes, may not have been an original record but it was nonetheless an enthralling one. With the yelped vocals of frontman Rhys Jones and the memorable hooks of songs such as Sophia and Ice Age the band showed they had more to offer than many of their contemporaries. Three years later the band are back with “No Hope, No Future”, but after a long absence do the band still have the same power?
The answer, in short, is no. Rhys’ vocals sound for the most part flat and the songs here are nowhere near as catchy as those on the band’s first record. On a ten track album only half an hour long there is no room for filler - yet almost half the tracks here sound like b-side material.
On the positive side, Under Control and The Way My Heart Beats, both released as singles before the album came out, are as infectious as anything on their début, and the riff on Then She Walks Away is sure to burrow it’s way into your consciousness. However amongst these genuinely good songs and the merely average ones there are a couple of genuine stinkers. Everything You Do is a turgid mess, with Rhys’ languid vocals likely to induce a coma. I Know, meanwhile, is bogged down by overly earnest (an pretty awful) lyrics: “I think that if there’s a day of judgement then our leaders will be first against the wall”.
There’s some good ideas here, but considering how long the group have spent on this album it’s a shame that it sounds so rushed and unfinished. Hopefully Good Shoes will be able to release another album as good as their début, and they remain a great live band, but this is a pretty disappointing effort from a group which once seemed so promising.
5/10
Jed. x
RX Bandits today premiered (finally) their first promo video for a Mandala track, namely Hope Is A Butterfly, No Net It’s Captor, one of the best tracks from my top album of 2009. This is the first promo vid the band have released that isn’t simply them performing a song somewhere, but despite the slick production it still has that home-made feel that encapsulates Bandits (large parts of the last 2 albums were recorded in vocalist Matt Embree’s garage, aka The Elizabethan, which also doubles as the head office of his record label Mash Down Babylon).
The video features the band dressed as Tarantino-esque henchmen, but with cardboard weapons and paper-bag masks, rolling around a neighbourhood and stealing coloured shapes. Yeah, it makes no sense but then most music videos don’t, and it looks nice so fuck it.
Marko
I really wanted to like this. I’m a big fan of Eddie Argos and Art Brut, and when I first came across the EWITFR…N song Hey! It’s Jimmy Mack about a year ago I thought it was pretty good. Now they’ve finally got an album together, which should be cause for celebration, right? WRONG!
The gimmick behind EWITFR…N is that they write responses to pop songs they’ve taken issue with. Thus Avril Lavigne’s Girlfriend is taken to task in the interminable G.I.R.L.F.R.E.N. and Billie Jean becomes the puntastic Billie’s Genes. CAN YOU FEEL THE HILARITY? MY SIDES ARE BURSTING! There’s so much wrong with this record I really don’t know where to start. I’ll try though.
Music: Drum loops and some simple keyboard chords, almost every track sounds like it was recorded by a band who do bad covers for Karaoke machines - except they decided they should write their own material. Musically then, it’s pretty horrific.
Lyrics: Probably the best least bad thing about the album, but stuck within his self-imposed gimmick Argos shows only a shadow of the lyrical flair and wit found in your average Art Brut song. Most of the time he’s too busy tring to shoehorn in references to the songs he’s rebutting to write anything properly good.
Vocals: OK, so Argos has carved a niche as a pretty shit but nevertheless unique vocalist, but on this record he’s paired with Dyan Valdes who’s just…. well, average. Really, really mediocre. Their vocals really don’t work well together at all.
If I’m being generous, opening track Creeque Allies sort of works, and Hey! It’s Jimmy Mack (which for some inexplicable reason didn’t make it onto the album - probably to make way for the awful Kanye West-baiting Coal Digger) is actually good. Overall though, this is ill-thought out, poorly-executed and, to be blunt, shit.
2/10 - Come on Eddie! You can do better.
NB: I know this is very poorly written but I knocked it out in a flurry of sheer disappointment. It’s also representative of the shoddy quality of the album.
Here’s the new video from Blood Red Shoes, and it’s made my day. You may remember I wasn’t that impressed with “Colours Fade”, the first taste of the band’s second album Fire Like This, so I’m dead pleased that the record’s first official release “Light It Up” is pure pop-punk perfection. It boasts a proper shout-along chorus and may be the most infectious thing the band have written yet. The video’s pretty good as well.
The new album is out on March 1st and this song’s got me pretty excited. If the rest of the record is as good as “Light It Up” it’s going to be amazing.
Jed. x
Yesterday evening the new Gorillaz single “Stylo” leaked all over the internet, but just in case you missed it you can listen to the first taste of new album “Plastic Beach” here. Featuring Bobby Womack and Mos Def, the track is on first listen a relatively subdued affair, but it’s insistent bassline is certain to ensure it’s a grower.
Further details about “Plastic Beach” have also been released, and we can now confirm that the album will be released on March 8th. You can see the album artwork and a full tracklisting (including info on collaborators) below.
01 - Orchestral Intro (featuring Sinfonia ViVA)
02 - Welcome To The World Of The Plastic Beach (feat. Snoop Dogg and Hypnotic Brass Ensemble)
03 - White Flag (feat. Kano, Bashy and The National Orchestra For Arabic Music)
04 - Rhinestone Eyes
05 - Stylo (feat. Bobby Womack and Mos Def)
06 - Superfast Jellyfish (feat. Gruff Rhys and De La Soul)
07 - Empire Ants (feat. Little Dragon)
08 - Glitter Freeze (feat. Mark E Smith)
09 - Some Kind Of Nature (feat. Lou Reed)
10 - On Melancholy Hill
11 - Broken
12 - Sweepstakes (feat. Mos Def & Hypnotic Brass Ensemble)
13 - Plastic Beach (feat. Mick Jones & Paul Simonon)
14 - To Binge (feat. Little Dragon)
15 - Cloud Of Unknowing (feat. Bobby Womack and Sinfonia ViVA)
16 - Pirate Jet
Jed. x
Coachella’s line-up always has the best bits of all genres of music, and this year is no exception, check this out…!
Absolutely amazing. For more info check http://www.coachella.com/
Greg
