The Young Lovers - The Young Lovers

I first came across The Young Lovers by accident, as I downloaded an album sampler from RCRD LBL – having completely forgotten about what it was or where it came from, I was shocked and amazed when I found that these jazzy, funky grooves had come from Joshua “Hervé” Harvey, famous for his squelchy basslines and cut-up hoover sounds.

You Make Me Dizzy, the album’s opener, lays a dancing piano line over shuffling jazzy beats, slightly reminiscent of MJ Cole’s Sincere. The next track takes down the tempo, and for some reason it calls to mind those ubiquitous chillout compilations from about 10 years ago, with its simple bassline, swooping strings and mournful oboe solo, as a crackle of vinyl lends a further air of nostalgia to the proceedings. This is no bad thing – just recently I dug out the first disc of Pete Gooding’s Cafe Mambo compilation, which soundtracked warm summer days and nights, school trips to Greece and wintry bus journeys during which I longed for nicer weather. Elsewhere, Harvey dabbles in salsa beats and melodies, slow, smokey sax grooves, and even a hint of funky beach house. As he says himself on his Myspace blog, “it’s more for headphones and holidays than banging clubs.” This is indeed an album that begs to be played in good weather.

The first hint of Hervé’s usual style of production comes with Love You Madly, which kicks off with a beat that would fit in perfectly on his Machines Don’t Care album – if it was sped up a bit. More screeching sax follows, before a cut up voice repeatedly utters the words “love you madly”. It’s probably the only track that would fit in a club set, at least in one played by the sort of DJs who favour Hervé’s signature wonky sound.

The album’s inlay card doesn’t say much, save for a border that repeats the words “let me tell ya’ what da’ blues is” – and this makes all the more sense when one reaches You Got The Down South, a sultry number over which is spluttered a monologue about “what da’ blues is.” The blues is, apparently, not having any money, not having anything. But then, when you haven’t got anything, you haven’t anything about which to be worried. It’s all a bit reminiscent of Gershwin’s I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’, and believe me, that is never a comparison I expected to make.

I can only reiterate that this is a lovely summer album, one which will make most sense on balmy, sunny days. It’s a joyous affair, which I would hardly have expected from someone whose previous output has been so resolutely focused on the dancefloor. Check it out.

Malajube - Labyrinthes

How would you like your prog pop sir? Served slightly overcooked with a side helping of French lyrics? Well, then this might be the album for you. On their aptly third album Labyrinthes, French Canadian four-piece Malajube unleash the proggy tendencies that were just about kept under control on their previous effort Trompe l’oeil. Like the Super Furry Animals at their most self-indulgent, the songs on Labyrinthes come slathered in all sorts of odd stuff. Opening tracks Ursuline and Porté disparu are good indicators of what follows. The first starts modestly with gentle music-box pianos before morphing steadily into a Muse shaped hulk of bombastic melody and power-pop guitars. It’s faintly ridiculous but it’s carried off with such cheery bravado that it’s hard to dislike. It is followed by the somewhat slight-sounding single Porté disparu,which, with its obvious barroom stomp, sounds like a strained concession to people looking for something as immediate as their previous hit Montréal -40’c. The rest of the album swings between poppy immediacy and over the top theatrics, tricked out with plenty of gaudy flourishes and ornate instrumental passages like the whooshing coda to Les collembas. After a while, it all gets a bit much, like the ELO playing an interval show at Cirque du Soleil. In other words, probably not everyone’s cup of tea.

At this point it’s probably worth considering the fact that Malajube sing entirely in their native Quebecoise French, making them one of the few bands to achieve a degree of popularity among an English-speaking fan base while singing in a different language. Their lush instrumentation and easy way with a melody probably go some way to account for this success. As with other groups who break the language barrier, such as Dungen and Sigur Ros, there is enough interesting noise going on beyond the words for the album to work. In fact, Malajube’s French lyrics are probably part of their appeal. As any fan of Sebastian Tellier knows, there can be something inherently fun about the French language when sung.

For the record, many of the song lyrics relate to the Catholic religion and its place in French Canadian culture. Apparently the boys aren’t too fond of le church. But to be honest, because of the band’s extravagant music styling, you can’t shake the feeling that it would be hard to take such lyrics seriously. A bright, over-inflated balloon of an album.

Jinx Lennon - Trauma Themes Idiot Times

One of Ireland’s less grumpy musical poets Mumblin’ Deaf Ro once talked about disrupting the small set of perspectives that music deals in, by writing from new perspectives. The idea was that breaking up the cosy relationship between the self-regarding “I” and the imaginary female “you” would help little-respected song lyrics move forward, and be a little more like literature. On his fourth album, Jinx Lennon goes a way towards fulfilling that mission. Over beats that are sometimes surprisingly catchy, he writes songs about the Other side of modern life - not so much angry complaints, which are plentiful and pouring out of everyone from Green Day to Lily Allen, but “awkward and real” criticisms. Rather than shouting nihilistically, Lennon seems to simply shine a light on things-as-they-are and say “see for yourself”. It works.

Some of the “trauma themes”: The fact that a football team is not a satisfactory replacement for actually living a worthwhile life, in ‘The Men Who Saved The Face of Football’. A study of the “don’t get involved” phenomenon of the unconcerned modern world in the particularly Fall-like ‘Taxi Man Face’. Sticking a knife in the eye of a house invader in ‘Protect Thyself And Thy Home’. Anything is potential subject matter.

It’s also a little refreshing just to hear the voice of the towns - a guy who speaks in a fairly thick Louth accent and makes no apology for it. There is no secondarity about it, no effort to squeeze through some sort of US/UK/urbane mould. Who else would bother with ‘Folk Music For The Midlands’, as Lennon does on the tenth track of this album? Where else are you going to hear about places like Oriel Park, Dowdallshill, Delvin Co. Westmeath or the De La Salle school from Ravensdale Forest? Or “mormons on bikes and in pairs” or even “some bollocks from Jonesboro I did an electronics course with”?

I suppose part of Jinx Lennon’s project is to make poetry out of those places and those people. There’s nothing that says they’re not worthy, and Lennon follows in a proud line of Irish poets and writers from Patrick Kavanagh through to John McGahern and Patrick McCabe by writing about them. That’s the way to get to “modern Ireland”, you see. You can’t just work in generalisations. You have to dig a little, notice things outside Dublin 2. Jinx Lennon, as much as anyone else, is writing the story of this country. Romantic Ireland is long gone and all but forgotten. What’s there now is a “tape recorder/answering machine/type voice”, a blankness with “rusted Pope’s medals” and memories of Italia 90 keeping people linked to a time long ago, but little else to permeate the bullshit of housing estates and “selfish stupid automatons”.

It’s not just a gloomy State of the Nation address though. It’s also incredibly funny, in a very dark way. And its songs, some of which come complete with potentially shout-along choruses, are eminently listenable. Which is convenient, because it’s almost important that people listen to this record, so that they can have the proverbial “one good look at themselves” in Jinx’s nicely polished looking glass.

Fever Ray - Fever Ray

It must be fun being Karin Dreijer Andersson. If virtually any artist I can think of (apart from Björk; Björk can do anything) decided to sing about a friend they’ve had since they were seven and who they have conversations on the phone about dishwasher tablets with, it would probably come across as a sad attempt at being weird, quirky and avant-garde. But not our Karin. As one half of Swedish electronica ensemble The Knife, weirdness is de rigueur for her. In fact, the absence of weirdness would probably cause some kind of mass revolt among her loyal fans (myself included).

It should come as a relief, then, that for her debut solo release under the Fever Ray moniker Karin has remained true to weird, bread-and-butter The Knife material. Though now a happy mother of two young children, Fever Ray sees Karin make a welcome return to the bleak synth landscapes and relentless vocal effects that first brought her and her brother Olof to international stardom.

To be honest, the majority of Fever Ray’s tracks really don’t steer too clear of waters sailed by The Knife. The vocoder is still omnipresent, used for the vocal masculating effect that has become practically a staple of their sound. This can get tedious after a while, especially if you’ve already had Silent Shout on repeat for the last three years; it’s almost a relief listening to vocoder-free When I Grow Up and Now’s The Only Time I Know, for which Karin has allowed her incredibly unique, almost hauntingly harsh voice to reign free.

Across the album, extensive use has been made of instruments such as vibraphones and malletophones, or synthetic imitations of them. Many of the true synth instruments also have that same sharp-attack timbre, giving the overall impression of an aural assault from an army of musical drums.

A few tracks are refreshing for their surprising originality. Now’s The Only Time I Know veers into pop-like terrain in its form and melody, while Triangle Walks bizarrely might make you feel like you’re wearing an Armani power suit and eating a sushi lunch in an ‘80s L.A. restaurant. Don’t ask.

Stand-out tracks aside, what Fever Ray lacks as a whole is a general unifying structure. The concept of putting this on from start to finish is difficult to imagine; the songs aren’t really that distinctive when compared to each other and they all seem to involve variations of the same instruments and compositional flairs. I kept waiting for something drastic along the lines of We Share Our Mother’s Health to appear and make me go ‘Yesssss!’ but it just doesn’t happen. Everything seems to sound the same; even the aforementioned stand-out tracks don’t really stand out that much.

With that aside, there’s still plenty to appreciate in this album, even if this is your first foray into the Dreijer family music catalogue. However, despite the clear quality of the material, Fever Ray fails to explore territory that wasn’t already traversed by Karin’s work with her brother. Whether this will hold interest over time like Deep Cuts and Silent Shout have remains to be seen.

The Juan MacLean - The Future Will Come

From the opening moments of The Simple Life, it is clear what kind of album The Future Will Come will be. The driving beats, the relentless hi-hats, even the ubiquitous cowbell mark this well and truly as a DFA album. That is not to say it is indistinguishable from any other album on the label, more that it fits into this mould while affirming its own identity.

Each track on The Juan MacLean’s new album is captivating in its own right, as well as adding up to form a coherent body of work that can be listened to in bits or in one go.

The album’s title is ironic, given the nods paid to older tracks. The Station and new single One Day call to mind The Human League, as male and female vocals argue over throbbing beats, while No Time even hints towards Mylo’s Drop The Pressure. Conversely, A New Bot is the most awkwardly futuristic track on the album.

Tonight, the album’s centrepiece, drifts through on a host of melancholic instrumentation, as acid basslines are topped off with mournful trumpets and out of tune pianos, while Nancy Whang sings of “all the love in this place.” The curious balance of such contented lyrics and more elegiac melodies is maintained until the album’s closer, last year’s epic Happy House. This choice of finale is fitting, as its warm piano riff and joyful lyrics are lent an air of darkness, undermined almost, by the preceding Human Disaster.

While such regretful undertones permeate the album it is definitely one which will get bodies moving. It’s only April, but if a funkier album comes along this year I will be very surprised.

Hopefully Life Will….

Hopefully Life Will…. is the title of Dubliner Stephen Tunney’s debut album. Recorded with “a cheap karaoke microphone and a bad quality laptop mic” Tunney’s album is definitely a Lo Fi affair, lyrically and vocally reminiscent of early Elliot Smith but also brimming with Built To Spill-esq riffs and dynamics. While Tunney clearly wears his influences on his sleeves he also brings plenty to the ensemble, unabashedly pouring his soul into soaring songs about love, life and growing up.

Stand out tracks include ‘Niall’s Planet’, ‘Should Go’ and a stomper called ‘Nightlife (First and Last)’ which features additional musicians Ciarán Hoogendoorn, David Geraghty and Aidan Wall (aka Porn On Vinyl). While the production is a little patchy in places, Tunney is the first to admit that “recording on a budget laptop is difficult…” quickly following that up to humbly say - “I just hope the message got through.” For one listener, the message reads loud and clear, ‘Stephen Tunney is here, he’s written some fantastic pop songs and there’s plenty more where that came from’.

Download Hopefully Life Will…

Dan Deacon - Bromst

Dan Deacon
Bromst
Carpark records

Last year, Baltimore experimentalist Dan Deacon made it clear in an interview with the American music press that he isn’t comfortable with the label ‘wacky’, and that perhaps those applying it to him were more bothered with his physical appearance than his music. Well Dan, you make it hard for us, so hard. If we discount the fact that the man wears gigantic neon pink spectacles, backward baseball caps and garish t-shirts a size or three too small for him, there is the small issue of his music so far; a heavy feed of mangled indie rave dressed up with chipmunk voices and the odd sample of woody woodpecker going wa-ka-ka-ka-ka! From where I’m standing, ‘wacky’ never seemed a million miles off the mark. Sure, I always thought it was brilliant too. But it is definitely an acquired taste (more often than not acquired after one of his revelatory live shows), and well yeah, ‘wacky’.

When at the same time Deacon announced that his next offering would be ‘darker’ than Spiderman of the Rings, one might have imagined him dreaming up a negative of that album, a gloomy 8-bit cathedral of dying screams, stuttering beats and dying woodpeckers. Instead, we get Bromst, an album that is both technically and melodically stunning but about as dark as Michael Jackson’s milky bum bum. Songs like ‘Woof Woof’ and ‘Red F’ utilize Deacon’s familiar funhouse structure of building sonic chaos around addictive samples, but up the warm fuzzy stakes by using more analogue equipment. There is certainly a greater variation in instrumentation at work and a tricksier command of melody and tempo than we’ve seen before from the man, especially during the gentler part of ‘snookered’ and ‘slow with horns/run for your life’. But don’t let any of that fool you. For every slow bit, there is a bit like the end of ‘Woof Woof’ where you can hear synths, kazoos and voices saying ‘quack’ all at once. This album is, at heart, the usual big flashing primary coloured barrel of reprogrammed nintendos having sex with each other we’ve come to expect from Deacon. And it is mostly great. There’s just one thing though. What is the fucking story with the old Irish folk sample on “Wet Wings’?

Bromst is due out on the 24th of March. Dan Deacon plays Andrews Lane Theatre on June 3rd.

Women

Women
Women
JagJaguwar

From Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart’s hometown Calgary, Canada comes this frequently intriguing slice of obscurant pop-noise. Women co-opt freak folk rhythms, but their lo-fi style of presentation keeps everything distinctly claustrophobic. Given that the record was recorded in the “basement, outdoor culvert and crawl space” of fellow Calgarian Chad VanGaalen, it’s not surprising that the overriding mood is close and pressured.

It’s an oeuvre that is never adopted for its own sake, however, and the ominous closeness serves the set of songs exceedingly well. The guitar motif in Lawncare is hypnotic and almost reassuring against the harsh, unfamiliar, reverb-soaked background of insistent drums and hidden vocals that spans the whole album. Black Rice, conversely, lands somewhere between Liars and Jefferson Airplane, and the echoes that obscure its melodies simply add to their mysterious charm.

It’s not a stretch to say that Women synthesise the wildly differing elements of the contemporary sphere of indie-and-beyond. There are elements of things in play here that couldn’t but be the result of a vast record collection taking in everything from 1950s melodrama to the latest Deerhoof record. The breadth of styles that appear under the common theme of the claustrophobic make this an album that diffuses its charms slowly but surely over multiple spins.

Merriweather Post Pavillion

Animal Collective
Merriweather Post Pavillion
Domino

Chemical or natural? There is a single moment on Merriweather Post Pavillion, after a few lush, watery minutes of introduction, where the music reaches out of the speakers and cracks open reality so that you can see inside, in a way that only Tibetan boddhisativas and LSD-devoted professors usually experience. That moment, called forth with an invocational ‘if I could just leave my body for a night…’ is a genuine landmark in the winding path of music’s history. There is a level of transcendence, of originality, of genius present in that moment on In The Flowers, and on Merriweather in general, that elevates it instantly to the realm of hushed tones. So, is it chemical or natural?

It doesn’t matter. It’s easier for once to talk about this album in terms of what’s it not, rather than what it is. It’s not a retread of anything that has come before. It’s not difficult to engage with, but it’s also not populist in the least. It’s never dull. In fact, over eleven tracks, it comes off as almost too short and leaves a small but inescapable feeling of disappointment that it’s over, in the way that all great albums should. But that’s not to say that it’s unfinished, or imperfect. It’s not. This is Keats’ well-wrought urn manifest, an album genuinely without low points or flaws.

But even out of this consistent brilliance, there come peaks. Besides the aforementioned In The Flowers, My Girls is stunningly beautiful and layered in Panda Bear’s signatory reverb-drenched harmonies, erroneously attributed to the Beach Boys. Lyrically, it’s an affectingly earnest account of the responsibility of providing for family. The evident singalong qualities of the refrain create a strange feeling of intrusion into Panda’s ‘four walls and abode slats’, but the ability to get such basic, instinctive emotions into a song this catchy without coming off as cheesy must be marvelled at.

Summertime Clothes recalls the lyrically-evocative Animal Collective of the days before Panda Bear was a significant songwriting influence, painting a picture of happy and naïve summer days over a seriously danceable pulse. But the next track proves exactly why it was a good idea to give Panda equal air-time. Daily Routine grows out of individual organ squeaks into an arpeggiator-based piece of everyday escapism that dissolves eventually into a slow repetition that’s almost shamanic in texture. Which then gives way to the golden melodies of Bluish. Which then give way to… you get the picture.

It doesn’t let up. The album closes with Brother Sport, tropical and trance-inducing in a way El Guincho could only dream of. After a mid-section of ever-building rhythms and a screaming Avey Tare, the tumult reaches saturation point. The clouds part and a new day dawns. With one of the most smile-inducing melodies you will ever hear, Animal Collective give you two minutes to dance and forget your troubles before the album finally ends. Merriweather Post Pavillion is an album that effects emotions in a very real way, pulling you headlong through nostalgia, hope and the forty shades of joy. I can’t think of another album that is as perfectly executed, as plain perfect as Merriweather Post Pavillion. I would be extremely surprised if this didn’t turn out to be the best album of the year. Or the decade. I’ll stop at that before I say something I might regret later.
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Zomby: Where were you in 92?

Zomby
Where were you in 92?
Werk

Where were you in ’92? Erstwhile chip-tune loving Dubstep producer Zomby has just released a remarkable album based around this rhetorical question. Of course, the implication is that ‘you’ were mashed out of you brain at 4am in the middle of a field in England while a churning hardcore piano motif melded impossibly with the rising sun. There is no doubt that Zomby’s album is meant to play as a homage to such halcyon reminiscences. But, thankfully, the title is disengenous. There is a lot more at work here than mere revivalism.

For sure, Zomby has grabbed the glowstick of early ‘90s hardcore and run with it to a demented chorus of klaxons. Even if we disregard for a minute the explicitly druggy titles of songs such as ‘Pillz’ and ‘Euphoria’, the overall gleeful, sinister and deranged throb is so reminiscent of the work of Joey Beltram and 2 Bad Mice that listening to parts of the album is like getting stuck in an episode of Doctor Who where the Tardis lands somewhere off one of those fabled M50 raves in 1992.

Yet, there is such a ridiculous abundance of other riches going on here. There is also enough quality drum’n’bass to qualify the album as more than just a doffed cap to A Guy Called Gerard circa ’95, and, on various later tracks, Zomby’s Dubstep day job comes to the fore, anchoring us to the present and cockily reminding us of his prodigious talents. Here is a rare thing, an intelligent producer exuberantly paying homage to dance music’s recent past whilst hinting at a potential way forward. Oh, and did I say? It is seriously fucking fun.

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