Posts written by jed howlett

Album of the Week (Track by Track)

Very few bands succeed in releasing records that are consistently good. Yet since their 1996 debut Fuzzy Logic, Super Furry Animals have released great album after great album. Unfortunately, ninth studio album Dark Days/Light Years appears to buck this trend.

As the title suggests the album is conspicuously one of two halves, and at first all seems well in the Super Furry Animals camp. Opening track Crazy Naked Girls, all distorted guitars and falsetto vocals, is an appropriate introduction to the riff and groove heavy first section, segueing into the effortless glam-stomp of Mt. and its gleefully childish lyrics. Moped Eyes is the most stripped back track on the album, built around a bass riff and a single piano chord, but is all the better for it. Track four, lead off single Inaugural Trams, sees Gruff building a town in the image of a loved ones face, and promising that “the streets of your hands will never feel a recession.” Factor in a rap (in German) by Nick McCarthy of Franz Ferdinand and the track becomes an album highlight.

Following track Inconvenience is the first sign that something may be up. It’s not a bad track, just underwhelming, and disconcerting coming from a band whose quality control has always been excellent. The fact that this is followed by the 8 minute long Cardiff in the Sun, a track of epic, coma-inducing levels of mundanity, does nothing to assuage these fears.

Thankfully this is followed by the excellent The Very Best of Neil Diamond, which despite, or perhaps because of it’s resemblance to No Doubt’s Hella Good, stands out as the record’s high point. With lyrics envisioning a radio playing Sweet Caroline “as the bombs rain down from the crystal sky,” the track is reminiscent of the best songs on the Furries’ excellent Phantom Power.

Sadly, the album’s remaining tracks are for the most part exercises in mediocrity. The MOR-pop of Helium Hearts, all swooning strings and glossy production values, is saccharine sweet and instantly forgettable, while White Socks/Flip Flops, Where Do You Want To Go and Lliwiau Llachar are similarly inconsequential. Last song Pric is a passable stab at techno which nevertheless manages to sound like a bad cover of their earlier, and much better track Slow Life.

Maybe Dark Days/Light Years will be a grower, but the immediacy with which tracks like Mt. and The Very Best of Neil Diamond grab the listener suggests otherwise, with repeated listens only highlighting the vast differences in quality between the album’s first and second half. There are great tracks on this album, and songs such as Pric and Inconvenience are not necessarily bad. From a band as consistently excellent as SFA, however, the album seems like a creative miss-step.

Out today on physical formats. 

6/10

Jed Howlett

Sounds like The Lonesome Crowded West… check. LOUDquietLOUD dynamics… check. Hell, chuck in some lazy Pavement comparisons too. And that is Cymbals Eat Guitars.

So goes almost every review of the debut album by the New York-based quartet. And yes, they do sound like the records Modest Mouse used to make. They do play music that suddenly veers from squalls of feedback to fingerpicked acoustic guitar. For fucks sake, the barely coherent mumbled vocals of lead singer Joseph Ferocious even sound like Stephen Malkmus.

Much more important than any of this, though, is the fact that Cymbals Eat Guitars have created, in Why There Are Mountains, an almost perfect record, and one of the best debut albums I have heard in a very long time.

Album opener …And the Hazy Sea is a mission statement of sorts, kicking off with a chorus of woah-aahs and coming to a close six minutes later with squalls of feedback. In between Cymbals Eat Guitars create an overwhelming ocean of noise with semi-audible vocals that speak of “business men in starched collar shirts who peered out windows that would fog faster than you could wipe them.”

Some Trees (Merritt Moon) seems to consist of about five different song parts crammed into less than 3 minutes, while album centrepiece Share builds from a single organ line to raucous white noise. Wind Pheonix, recently released as a single, sees the band expanding their palate with glockenspiel and horns, while Ferocious engages in Beck-style word play, singing about “Exotic vision permanently red-light squinting for hours natural American spirit doctorate make love to inanimate objects pasteboard decked out in Ikea finery.”

When the album reaches an end on Like Blood Does, with only a single acoustic guitar and Joseph Ferocious’ cracking voice, it’s hard to think of any other album released of late that has sounded so coherent, and so meaningful. It may only be March, but this album is already a contender to be the best of the year.

9.8790/10

Jed Howlett

Cymbals Eat Guitars - Wind Phoenix

Album of the week…

Explaining why Klang, the third full-length from the Rakes was recorded in East Berlin, Alan Donohue claimed that the London music scene is “like wading through a swamp of shit.”

Thankfully, the Rakes have managed to drag themselves out of that swamp, and away from the memory of their poorly received second album, with this release. No song outstays it’s welcome – the album clocks in at under thirty minutes and the longest track at less than three and a half.

There are no clumsy attempts to tackle the subject of terrorism here – Instead songs about house parties and warnings that “if you hang around bitchin’ in the kitchen, you’re not gonna have a good time.” Lead-off single 1989 finds Donohue taking inspiration from his new surroundings, visiting cemeteries in East Berlin and “half expecting to catch a sight / of the dead Russian soldiers marching into the night.”

Meanwhile The Light From Your Mac is an art-rock ballad which manages to overcome clumsy references to Apple products to become an album highlight, alongside the preceding track Shackleton and the lead singer’s anguished cries that “we’re all pawns baby, we’re all pawns.”

On album closer The Final Hill, Donohue sings that he’s “just had a revolution.” On Klang, though, his band have stuck to what they do best, and crafted a great collection of indie sing-a-longs, and it’s gratifying that while many of their post-punk contemporaries have fallen by the wayside, Donohue’s gang have succeeded in crafting their best set of songs yet.

7/10

Jed Howlett

PS; This album is actually out next week but with another album filling our March 22nd ‘Album of the week’ slot, and with half decent albums few and far between at the moment, the best you can do is get on amazon and pre-order this instead!