By Scott Creney

Hey, it’s a new Fall album. Mark E. Smith (the E is for edutainment) has learned the trick to avoid writer’s block — never stop moving. Keeping pushing through the rough spots and you’ll eventually end up making some kind of breakthrough.

Re-Mit isn’t a breakthrough by anyone’s standards, but it’s something. It’s another book in the bible of The Fall. It may not be the gospels (let’s hope it doesn’t end up being Revelations), more like Acts. There’s nothing here we haven’t heard before — say what you will about Ersatz G.B., it wasn’t what you were expecting. Personally, I liked its darkness, the muddled, muffled, frustrated despair.

But Re-Mit finds the workmen in the band more workmanlike than ever. They lope even as MES rages, the unhinged screams on ‘Victrola Time’ pass unacknowledged as the band just continues to plod. Which is a shame because the charisma of MES is still palpable, still making the case that a life lived under the influence of lager and speed is not without its benefits — may in fact actually be superior than a life lived on treadmills and free-weights, seltzer and arugula.

Just check out the main section of ‘No Respects Rev’. It’s little more than a toothless version of Your Future Our Clutter’s title track.

‘Sir William Wray’, that’s about Billy Ray Cyrus, right?

‘Kinder Of Space’ is such a great title. There’s more going on in those three words than any musician alive, and it’s why The Fall continue to be relevant, why they still matter.

Hell, the minute-long static-squelch of ‘Pre-MDMA Years’ would fit seamlessly onto The Conet Project boxset.

35 years in and they still inspire, still retain a sense of mystery, still offer glimpses of what music can be rather than what it has been. MES has never allowed himself a nostalgic or sentimental moment, and it’s a great source of his strength as an artist. Even when he’s lost, he keeps charging ahead. At this point in his art, MES’s closest comparisons are people like Johnny Cash or James Brown. No one outside of hip-hop rages and rants with the fury and ass-kick of MES. Still. After 35 years. Even on a record that’s probably never going to make a list of the 20 best Fall albums, he still exerts more personality, more force, than 99% of his fellow travelers in the world of guitar-driven rock.

But then again, some people think that Youth is one big endless party filled with limitless amounts of money, beautiful love, easy sex, and the knowledge that the world is a 24-hour theme park built to satisfy your every desire.

I digress…

So it’s tempting to say that 2010’s Your Future Our Clutter might turn out to be the last great Fall album, but MES has been counted out before. Who knows? I’m willing to admit that MES knows things that I don’t. Maybe six months from now I’ll think Re-Mit is the best thing he’s ever done. At the very least, I’m going to keep listening. The Fall’s discography rewards close listening as much as any group ever. Like the best literature, no matter how much you get out of it, you’ll never reach the bottom.

By Erika Meyer

Brook, 17, and I were cruising around SE Portland listening to KNRK, a radio station which, since The Donnas incident, has vastly improved. They now play some local music, and they also play some newer music.

A song came on that caught the our attention. A little bit Dandy Warhols, but not too much. We both liked it enough to later find the band by googling the lyrics to the chorus: “I love you. I love you. I really really love you.”

Turns out the song is called ‘I Love You’, the band is called Said The Whale, and they are from Vancouver, B.C. There are several albums on their bandcamp page. It looks like they’ll be releasing a new EP (called ‘I Love You’) in June.

The message of ‘I Love You’ is profound. It’s an anthem. It’s nonsense. It has all the parts: verses and choruses and a bridge and a break-down and a rave-up ending. Guitar, bass, backup vocals, tambourine and synth. It’s dangerous. It’s processed. It’s pure. It’s two minutes and 47 seconds. It’s stupid. It’s perfect.

By Justin Edwards

Melbourne’s Super Wild Horses bring their Crosswords Album Tour to Brisbane’s Black Bear Lodge, with support from Day Ravies and The Kramers.

By Scott Creney

The power of twins, the deepest and closest of possible human connections.

The Breeders are on tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of their best-selling album Last Splash with record’s original line-up. Let’s go ahead and put it right here at the top of the article for easy reference:

It’s never been my favorite Breeders album — Pod wins by a landslide. Maybe because of my personal circumstances when it came out (I was homeless at the time, a story already covered in detail a year-and-a-half ago) LS wasn’t angry enough for me at the time. Too whimsical, too vague, too unfocused, too sunny.

After seeing the show, I’m able to admit that I was wrong about all of these things. Maybe not wrong exactly, but let’s just say that a lack of visceral rage in a work of art does not mean that art is deficient. Sometimes the deficiency is in the listener. And god knows I had my share of them around that time.

I usually get it wrong when it comes to reunion tours. Either I’m too cynical and don’t bother seeing a show that everyone afterwards tells me is amazing (Gang Of Four, I’m thinking of you), or I get overly sentimental and talk myself into seeing a show that turns out to be totally mailed-in (what’s up, Soft Boys?). But there was no real question whether I’d go see The Breeders — especially with fellow CB writers Brigette Herron and Mike Turner coming along, plus members of Tunabunny and Muuy Biien. Shit, at times it seemed like there were more Athens people there than Atlanta people.

Deerhunter hopped on the bill at the last minute as an act of selflessness — they probably could have filled this venue on their own given enough notice. Mike was seriously bummed to have to stand through their set, but I liked their new album so I was okay with it, though we both agreed that an annoying Bradford Cox spiel about how he was the biggest Breeders fan in the world was inevitable.

A few songs in we got a story about how Bradford’s mom bought him LS for his 11th birthday (which was exactly 20 years ago — HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRAD!), which was really sweet. Then he told us how a year later he went and bought Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine. Because he’s just that cool. Anyway, there’s something endearing about all this, like he can’t help himself. So I’m rolling my eyes when I write this, not telling him to eat shit. Even when he tells us LS is his favorite album of all time, and I’m thinking wait, I thought Pylon’s Gyrate was your favorite album of all time. Or was that the first B-52’s album? Does he know what the phrase “of all time” means?, I still find it kind of funny. Unlike Mike who is sending angry text messages to us on his phone.

So in person, Deerhunter’s pretty much your standard polished professional rock band. They’ve been doing this for 10 years now, and for better or worse it shows. They can be catchy, or they can be experimental, but they seem incapable of being both at the same time. Or more specifically, they can’t combine these impulses without losing something in the process. The sum is less than its parts. 2 +2 = 3. Anyway, Deerhunter’s experimental tendencies manifest them live as everyone turning up their delay pedals and making five-minute twinkle noises at the end of a song. It’s pretty enough the first couple of times they do it, but it gets old real quick. So when Bradford tells us again how much he “can’t wait to see The Breeders” while tuning up for yet another song, I can’t help shouting “Apparently you can!” back at him.

Anyway, eventually they finish. Jesse from Tbunny leans over and tells me he liked the little guy’s songs better, referring to the two songs led by other Deerhunter guitarist Lockhart. (Note: there’s a third guitarist who is more or less inaudible and looks like Michael Cera only sadder — if such a thing is possible. When he switches over to tambourine for one song he becomes the saddest tambourine player I’ve ever seen. Dude looks like he’s just about to start bawling.)

I can’t help myself. There’s something about Deerhunter that makes you want to pick on them, but let’s give them credit — Deerhunter are one of the good guys. Bradford even helped Kim find a sampler and a mini-moog to replicate the eerie pulses in ‘Invisible Man’.

Speaking of that song, now would be a good time to listen closely and appreciate all the different off-kilter counter-melodies — especially that violin.

It’s a minor song on Last Splash, probably not the first one you’d think of, but still it swoons and drones. And notice Kim Deal’s totally unique songwriting gift — the ability to use odd meters and indeterminate keys in her songs and make it seems totally natural and seamless. Just check out ‘Hag’. Unlike, say, Soundgarden, or some similar band whose sheet music is filled in unusual fractions, you’d never notice the changes in ‘Hag’ unless you bothered to count.

In this sense, she has more in common with Burt Bacharach than any of her so-called alt-rock peers.

It can take 20 years to fully unlock the mysteries of a song like ‘Mad Lucas’. Seeing it performed in person was like watching someone solve a puzzle in front of you. The Breeders are magicians.

So the show starts and they come walking out and waving in a way that’s so simultaneously dorky and cool that it makes both those terms absolutely meaningless (which it turns out is part of The Breeders genius and why we should worship them, but I’m getting ahead of myself).

They play the album in order, starting with ‘New Year’, and I can’t begin to describe how bright it sounds, how the music hits your body when they go into the thrashy part and we instantly learn that Kelly Deal has spent the past 20 years becoming a fearlessly passionate guitar player. It may be due to standard headliner/support sound guy protocol, but The Breeders sound like a charismatic jet engine taking off after the Deerhunter slog.

I use the term “casual genius” as the highest compliment, an antidote to the grim, tortured po-faced modernist male. The Breeders show that one can be brilliant and still be approachable, still smile, still not take one’s self too seriously even while crafting art that is strikingly original. The secret to LS’s brilliance lies in its tension and paradox (even the title, Last Splash, blends fatality and enthusiasm). It tightropes its way between attraction & repulsion, joy & despair, darkness & light. Even a song as seemingly straightforward as ‘Do You Love Me Now?’ ricochets between questions & demands, unable to settle in one train of thought.

Enthusiastic songs about stasis, agitated songs about wanting to get along, heartbreaking melody mixed with ungodly noise, LS is a series of schisms: Male/female, hetero/non-hetero, love/hate, shallow/deep, excited/despondent, kinetic/paralyzed. It goes on and on. And seeing the band in person only heightens the effect. It’s goofy and silly one moment, raging the next.

And let’s just talk about a line like “Idiots & palsied/Blink in corners we leave”. Kim Deal may be one of the finest poets of the late 20th Century and fuck anyone who never noticed because of their own inbuilt conventional wisdoms. They parrot received ideas as their own in the hope that someone will give them a cracker and I won’t rest until they’ve been plucked and served over a bed of fried plantains.

After they finish playing the album, the band takes a short break before returning to play some B-sides and some stuff from Safari and Pod. And when the band kicks into the loud part of ‘Safari’ or Kim screams over and over in a very odd meter “I’m in the Lime House, I am/In the Lime House” there’s not a single damn goofy or silly thing about it. And the grain in her voice when she screams “Tarrr-BABY!” makes me think of planes crashing and babies dying and all the awful things in the world, and it occurs to me that this may be the greatest band ever. That 300 years from now, when women and men rule the planet in harmonic co-existence, people will look back on The Breeders, and their album Last Splash in particular, as harbingers of our triumph, evolutionary signposts on our road to enlightenment, and the only thing that kept me realizing it up until now were my own personal hang-ups and blindness.

Then the song ends. And they all make funny faces at each other.

This is much more than a band; this is a lesson in how to be human.

It still seems almost inconceivably strange that this album went platinum — and incredibly comforting, a reason to be hopeful. Sometimes the damndest things happen on this planet. That in itself is a reason to keep trying, to keep banging on the closed door until it opens.

I’m telling you, one day they’re going to build statues of The Breeders. And if the band members are still around, they’ll be the first to knock them over — because they know what’s important. And so should you.

I’m still not sure I’ve said enough about how great a show this was.

By Wallace Wylie

Within the fires of adolescence all great/dubious rock and roll mythologies are forged. In moments of loneliness, music makes some unlikely connections and lives change as a result. So it goes with me. As a lonely 15-year-old I had read about The Doors but never actually heard them. For some reason my mum had bought some musical encyclopedia that had entries on every major, and most minor, bands and performers up through the late 80s. I read every entry. Twice. Three times. Untold amounts of times. The writing wasn’t exactly stellar, but it filled a need. Some entries I read more than others. The entry on The Doors was one of them.

I began to imagine what the music would sound like based on the descriptions. Soon enough movie trailers began appearing on TV advertising The Doors movie. To my young mind the clips seemed wild, the snippets of music scintillating. With money saved from my paper round, I bought a cassette of the first Doors album and rushed home. I retired to my room and slapped on some headphones. When ‘The Crystal Ship’ came on my hair stood on end and my whole body seemed like it was about to float away. “This must be what drugs feel like,” I thought to myself. I was giddy. I was gone.

The Doors are easily the most hated ‘classic rock’ group, yet they remain one of my favourite bands. They left behind a flawed but extraordinary back catalogue whose marriage of garage rock, experimentalism, performance art, and pop has no comparison in music history. They sound like nobody on earth. A large part of that uniqueness came from Ray Manzarek, the bands’ keyboardist who died on May 20th 2013. Ray Manzarek, as a human being, sounded unbearable. He peddled the “Jim was a shaman” garbage to anyone who would listen. He all but credited himself and The Doors with inventing the 60s. When Doors drummer John Densmore refused to allow a Doors song to used in a Cadillac commercial, Manzarek sued Densmore and attempted to paint him as a communist and an eco-terrorist. His ego knew no bounds. Yet his musical legacy with The Doors is untouchable.

From the churning intro of ‘Break On Through (To The Other Side)’ to the rock n roll piano of ‘Roadhouse Blues’ he seemed to possess an instinctive knowledge of what was right for each song. His musical ego knew when to take a back seat and when to surge to the front. The lightness of his touch on ‘Love Street’ makes the song skip along like a daydream. He took the riff from soul standard ‘Tramp’ and turned it into ominous funk on ‘The Changeling’.

Some bands from my youth have fallen by the wayside, but not The Doors. I always return to them and each return pays back my youthful devotion. With such a connection, the news of Manzarek’s death stunned me. From somewhere deep inside a great sadness heaved. Suddenly every story I’d ever read of his monstrous ego seemed unimportant. For a few days, forgive the man his foibles and let his musical contributions be the focus. Despite what some would have you believe, there are many intelligent Doors fans who ignore the ‘shaman’ nonsense, who do not worship at the altar of the Lizard King, who enjoy a chuckle at the groups eccentricities and pretensions, but still recognise something remarkable and vital in their music.

For those fans, and for my 15-year-old self who experienced genuine awe upon hearing the music of Ray Manzarek and The Doors, I write this tribute. RIP Ray Manzarek.

By Victoria Birch

If I was playing one of those word association games and someone said ‘Scout Niblett’ these are the things that would pop up in my head:

1. A Careless Talk front cover. Scout on a carousel horse. The page is packed with gilt and enamel. Niblett leaning on the twisted pole skewering the horse’s back. I think she’s wearing knee-high socks but I know she’s wearing a pair of flat black Mary Janes and the widest grin.
2. A messy, pebbled beach (Brighton?). Niblett is engaged in full scale fucking about. Falling over in the surf, dayglo construction vest splattered with foam. It looks bloody cold. I assume she must be drunk. Why else would you dick around at the water’s edge on a frigid English night and laugh like a drain when you topple over into the icy wet.

So basically fun is my first thought when in comes to Scout Niblett. Not death or darkness or how “lonely, introverted and anguished” her music is (as Pitchfork described it) – e.g. I get that life is hard on ‘Pom Pom’ (from Kidnapped By Neptune) but look, Niblett is asking for a cheerleader to give her an S give her a C etc etc as she trudges on – that’s a funny image, right? Or the way she goes on and on about how we’re all gonna die on ‘Your Beat Kicks Back Like Death’, to the point where it’s like a kid who keeps asking ‘why’ (after the 15th question they no longer care ‘why’ but it sure is fun winding the big people up). My second thought is this:

3. My kid playing her toy drum – it always reminds me of Scout Niblett. My daughter isn’t trying to create a thing. She’s hitting something and it feels good. She’s hitting something and it sounds good. She carries on until it doesn’t feel that way any more. How she hits it depends on how she’s feeling. If she’s pissed off at me she’ll belt the plastic skin like it’s my face. If she’s tired she’ll trace the stick around the edges and gently tap the sides. If she’s full o’ beans she’ll rat-a-tat-a-tat-tat with noise and glee.

(Not my kid btw but you get the idea.)

I like to think this is how Niblett makes music – as a child. Not in the way people point at a Pollock and go, “Pfft! My two-year old could do that”. In the way she is in and of the moment, unguarded, sometimes inappropriate and occasionally irritating. In the way kids display extreme violence, joy, boredom; whatever they’re feeling whenever they’re feeling it. I imagine Scout Niblett feeling things and getting them straight down onto record with a minimal amount of faffing in-between.

With It’s Up To Emma there’s more ‘serious’ and ‘grown-up’. This is an album where you can hear the writing. There are strings in ‘Can’t Fool Me Now’, ‘My Man’ and ‘What Can I Do?’. These don’t feel at all of the moment, they sound like a lot of hard work went into making them swell and recede around a knackered old electric guitar. The cymbals shimmer just so and Niblett sings (not half shouts) with nuance and contrast and consideration.  These are proper torch songs with big noisy endings and Niblett almost getting into diva territory.

There’s still bags of distortion and basic drum patterns. Still moments where I just want to say “Oh fuck it, it does sound like early Cat Power” and yes that feels like the laziest comparison given reviewers have been banging on about it for the last 10 years. The change is a shift in the way the stories are told. There are points where the album is reminiscent of Chess Records’ artists and their tales of personal tragedies that belong to everyone.

There’s not much room for ‘fun’ though. No room for pom poms and a nihilistic refrain chanted ad nauseum like it’s a game. It’s straight down the line fucked upness, which is appropriate given the album is wedded so tightly to a heart that’s been badly burned. Revenge fantasies abound in ‘Gun’, “I think I’m gonna buy me a gun, a nice little silver one”. False resilience, wishful thinking, dejection, bone rotting jealousy, self-pity dressed up as catharsis – the mourning fills every available space. It’s a claustrophobic grief chamber. Even Niblett’s take on TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ fits the narrative. In her version the protagonist is too maudlin to match the original’s feisty smackdown. The rejection is heavy with the tiredness brought about by too little sleep and too many tears.

At first I felt the album needed Niblett’s version of Janet Jackson’s ‘Nasty’ instead of ‘No Scrubs’ (where was my fun?!).

This would have added the fun. Even the video with all beardies hamming it up and Niblett pulling the best pouty face when she gets pulled into line by a cop. It would have added levity but I suspect that would have been very much beside the point.

By Carmen Juarez

One moustache, one mop, one pair of boots. The three surfy punk kidlets that make up Thigh Master kick things off, Aussie accent shiiiinin through. At times melodic, at times rough sounding, almost always a little 70s sounding. Admittedly, I get bored halfway through the set and find myself staring at the amps sat on milk crates, until the frontman knocked me out of my not-so-daydream by mocking a screaming audience member. While the drummer takes off his glasses to wipe the sweat from his brow with a denim vest, the band admit to having made at least one of these songs up yesterday. As they attempt a guitar-shredding start that doesn’t quite work out resulting in a restart, well, I believe it.

Screaming Match’s Drea Lam puts in a special request to have a fan blow her luscious locks back as she brings the doomy bass, while drummer/singer Sarah Byrne stands behind her kit for the set. The show doesn’t really start until ‘$40’, which sees everyone in the room go a little mental, including the music critic responsible for creating this here online magazine.

“GET OVER IT!” ugh, ‘Heavy Depp’ RULES. The vocals are honey and it’s all bass everything. The band is obviously having a ball, which I’m sure you know is something that most bands like to keep a secret. The dual/duel vocals are so right with that “falling down the stairs” bass on ‘Mess’. A false start finish and two babes having a screaming match close it all off, and I must say, I’m sick of basic men too.

Cannon are pure, dirty, En-Ar-Gee. They’re all “let’s break things and get drunk and yell at each other”, not necessarily in that particular order. Chest thumps and dry humps, it’s pub music for the masses. Crowd favourite contenders ‘Girls’ and ‘I Hate Everything’ prove exactly why this band has played almost every show I’ve been to in the past year. Viva Kenmore!

As King Tuff jump up on stage I hear someone make a terrible “the 80s called, they want their hair back!” joke. Mo’s all ‘round and sporting blinged-out denim vests (tonight’s theme, perhaps?), the Tuff instantly have the punk kids up front ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the guitar mastery on display. In fact, there are more guitar solos throughout the set than you could poke a twirling drumstick at. ‘Keep On Movin’’ is more like ‘Keep On Dancin’’, and I guess you could say that King Tuff sound like garage hillbilly metal, grounded by a bassist who looks like he came straight out of a 70s porno.

At this point some guy in the crowd grabs me and makes me dance to KT’s new song, ‘She’s On Fire’. Not going to include a bad stop, drop and roll joke here. ‘Bad Thing’ closes the set before we all run for the last train home.

By Wallace Wylie

The narrow-minded reckon their experience of history can’t be surpassed; that there’s no point in drawing inspiration from the past because it was better IN THEIR DAY. They murder people’s vibes because they’re buzz-killers. They criticise young people for being unoriginal and lazy because 58 years after Bill Haley And His Comets’ ‘Rock Around The Clock’ charted, idealistic, rebellious teens haven’t evolved beyond simple pleasures like first crushes, guitar strums, pop hooks and leopard print. This disappoints buzz-killers immensely.

Buzz-killers will use songs such as London quartet Kula Shaker’s ‘Tattva’ – about intellectual abandonment and smelling the incense – to lambast uncomplicated singers like Crispian Mills for cooing “Acintya bheda bheda tattva” over an updated version of the refrain from Pink Floyd’s ‘Shine On You Crazy Diamond’. They’ll demand something more sophisticated – a unique way of saying “I love you”, perhaps. You can safely assume buz-zkillers are no longer in love, detest romantic gestures and are cautious of hype bands with hippy names.

More fool them, because fans who’ve witnessed Kula Shaker touring 2012’s EP ‘Summer Sun’ or opening 2013’s NME Awards Tour believe they’re Britain’s best live band. The band’s gigs have been an appetising cocktail of trouble-free sitar songs such as ‘Sleeping Jiva’ mixed with sprawling danceathons like single highlight ‘Grateful When You’re Dead/Jerry Was There’. So when people attack Kula Shaker it’s because of a supposed lack of sonic direction. But every live moment is immediate. Kula Shaker feel it all, every second. They’re so impulsive that at NME’s Awards Tour after-party Crispian got a new swastika tattoo without warning. What a dreamer.

This spirit is committed to K perfectly. Because here’s the life-affirming, naysayer-defying news: Kula Shaker are songwriting naturals. This is an album on which juvenile innocence gives way to new experiences – a rush of hormones here (‘303’), someone else’s culture there (‘Govinda’). You can taste the bright vitality of wild adventure. Yum. If there isn’t a tear in your eye by the final “ooh”s and “aah”s of psychedelic lullaby ‘Tattva’ (“Well the truth may come in strange disguises, never knowing what it means”) your heart is a swinging brick.

Those with one foot in the past may view Kula Shaker with scepticism, finding them over-familiar. Alright, the psych opener ‘Hey Dude’ reminds us of The Charlatans’ ‘The Only One I Know’ as organs swirl through a Technicolor wash of dirge. Admittedly, the generic ‘Start All Over’ blasts off like Red Hot Chili Peppers or Oasis before hammering a Gallagher lyric of “Make me feel, make me real”. Yes, ‘Grateful When You’re Dead/Jerry Was There’ is laced with Herculean drumming and could’ve been by Deep Purple. Indeed, ‘Into The Deep’ is one-dimensional, employing riffs that fizz like sherbet Flying Saucers. Totally, you can sing The Monkees’ ‘Pleasant Valley Sunday’ over ‘Smart Dogs” feral chorus. BUT ENOUGH WITH THE BUZZ-KILLING.

So long as teenagers exist, there’ll be eternal value in rock’n’roll this spectacular. It has no sell-by date. If K lacks depth it’s because it’s too busy being wide-eyed with marvellous wonder, thrilled by its own discoveries. Even the hi-hats are epic. Kula Shaker are intoxicated by their own youth, and all that matters is that they’re happening NOW. “If it tastes like honey/Don’t swallow it all,” sings Crispian on ‘Hey Dude’ before an escapist chorus about getting away from life’s pressures: “Don’t lean on me man/Cause I’m losing my direction/And I can’t understaaaand”.

Point is: music can reflect the past and still be valid. Some may see it as history repeating itself, for others it’ll be brand spanking new. If you don’t think Kula Shaker are as rejuvenating as a wash of zesty orange juice over a crushing hangover then you’re beyond help. As Britain suffers from youth unemployment and economic crisis, our greatest currency is the chime of a golden tune. Kula Shaker have delivered 13 of them. So what if they’re a bunch of pirates and not pioneers?

This is their time.

By Scott Creney

I know plenty of people who will never, just based on the annoying dipshit band name alone, ever listen to this. Wampire traffic in moustaches, stringy hair, wacky outfits, and they live in Portland — there is an entire subset of US humans who are going to roll their eyes, who would rather pay $15 to see these guys get punched in the face than pay $15 to buy this record.

I mean, just look at that cover. Jesus Christ on perpendicular popsicle sticks, how much whimsy are we expected to consume?

And oh yeah, one of them is named Rocky Tinder. Didn’t we just do this with Foxygen?

But here’s the thing. Check out first song ‘The Hearse’. It’s a song of yearning mystery that talks around a subject/secret without ever divulging it. Only Johnny knows what I’ve done wouldn’t mean shit on its own, but taken with the music — its heart-in-the-throat surges coupled with the pauses, the gasping for breath — you can imagine all kinds of not good things happening. A high school quarterback has hired the singer to kill the QB’s abusive stepfather. They ride in the funeral caravan together, two cars behind the hearse. The singer remembers running from the house through the woods, the crunch and snap of leaves under his sneakers, the cold wind burning his eyes, and all he can hear is a screaming hiss in his ears.

Aside from the song’s ubiquitous production, there’s nothing easy, nothing wacky, nothing trendy about it. For 4:40 Wampire has caught a bone in their throat, a Eucharist skeleton. Imagine Joy Divison’s ‘Disorder’ crossed with Ariel Pink.

And even if the rest of the album is kind of a letdown it’s still easy to listen to. ‘Giants’ takes a walk through OMD’s early years without embarrassing itself. ‘Outta Money’ moves with a song-and-dance top-hat-and-coattails strut that sounds like it should be performed by a troupe of animatronic stuffed penguin dancing off the edge of the icy coastal shelf. The minute-long synth drone at the end of the song is the sound of the Earth going supernova. Will the last lemming to leap off the cliff please turn out the light?

I feel compelled to mention that ‘Spirit Forest’ is the worst kind of pointless chilled-out Steely Dan-like meander through nothing.

‘Magic Light’ shuffles wearily off into the distance, closing out the album on a contemplative moment. Wampire uses their pro-tools well. Even as the singer channels Julian Casablancas, affecting the demeanor of the world-weary romantic slut, the band always know their way around the contemporary sounds — even when there’s nothing fresh, at least there’s nothing ultra-cliched.

The rest of the Curiosity is pedestrian enough that you reach the end wondering if ‘The Hearse’ was really that good. And you end up putting it on all over again to find out.

So yeah, Wampire. Next week I’ll be reviewing Rigatoni Bennett. Or Nirvanarama. Or Garanimal Collective or some shit.

A review of Primal Scream’s new album More Light based on a quote.

“We’re living in very extreme times, but that doesn’t seem to be reflected in the music that I hear or the art that I see. It seems that people are kind of asleep or they’ve been anaesthetised or they just don’t care” – Bobby Gillespie, 2013

Oh great. Another 50-something going on about how today’s generation of kids “don’t know how lucky they were to be born”. How is this different from all the old hippies going on about how shit music was during the time of punk in the late 70s, Bobby? If you really think that’s the case, perhaps you should stop listening to the same three Rolling Stones, David Holmes and Andrew Weatherall albums then.

A review of Primal Scream’s new album More Light based on a photograph (see above).

Low on cash. And ideas.

A  review of Primal Scream’s album More Light based on Bobby G’s favourite Nirvana album.

It’s no In Utero. Innovation and pain being top of the list of reasons why not.

A  review of Primal Scream’s album More Light based on the video for ’2013′.

Edgy, like pulling the wings off butterflies.

A  review of Primal Scream’s album More Light based on previous experience.

“Just what is it that you want to do? We wanna be free. We wanna be free to do what we wanna do. And we wanna get loaded. And we wanna have a good time.”

A  review of Primal Scream’s album More Light based on the music.

Yeah, sure. It’s fine. (Shrugs) If you like that sort of thing. You can fill in the words yourself… sprawling, epic, psychedelic, beats-based, bluesy, horns-led, edgy, innovative, iconoclastic… and you’ll know that while all these words have a kernel of truth in them, it is just a kernel. And you already know what to expect: more of the same, only less so, or perhaps (deliciously) less of the same, only more so. I have an inbuilt distrust of any music you need to take drugs/alcohol to truly appreciate (music has ALWAYS been my drug) but (shrugs) sometimes Primal Scream do have the ability to hit a groove and keep on it. (As they do here, on ’2013′.) And I appreciate the way Bobby Gillespie still courts controversy, still speaks up against the system. (How could I not? I come from the same school.) More Light is no Spiritualized, and we should be very grateful for that. It’s no (first three albums) Saints either, but that’s OK. Little is.

Primal Scream are a classic example of how, for decades, rock’n'roll has provided the illusion of rebellion in place of rebellion itself. Perhaps this amounts to the same thing. I have never had any real way of knowing.