(Domino)

There’s something utterly – if ineffably – British about McGuinness‘s songs and perhaps that comes from his belief that “a bit of ruthless optimism is what it’s all about”. This sentiment seems to power this third album – a cocksure, jaunty blend of art-rock strut and rockabilly jangle. He’s a nimble lyricist and a cheerfully wordy raconteur of contemporary nightlife, mixing bathos and sentimentality on songs such as Sugarplum, which urges his sweetheart to heedless, happy drunkenness tonight, “for tomorrow we will rush and crush on the underground”. There’s a similar message, and even more clout, to the irrepressible Videogame.

Rating: 3/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/12/eugene-mcguinness-invitation-to-voyage-review

(Search and Destroy)

While a best British newcomers award for While She Sleeps from metal bible Kerrang! was predictable, an 11am airing for the band’s thunderously heavy single This is the Six on Fearne Cotton’s Radio 1 show was not. But the Sheffield quintet want to reach beyond traditional metal audiences, and it’s an ambition at least partly realised on their debut album. This is no craven bid for the mainstream; sludgy, distorted guitars, breakneck drums and larynx-shredding vocals predominate. But the ringing guitar lines of Seven Hills and chant-along refrains of Love at War will cut some way across musical allegiances.

Rating: 3/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/12/while-she-sleeps-six-review

(Full Time Hobby)

Born of the decision to go and live in the isolated town of Húsavík on the north coast of Iceland, Tunng frontman Mike Lindsay’s solo album draws on different sources from the folktronica group’s default palette, using local musicians, and whatever was available instrument-wise, before a final polish in Reykjavik from Icelandic experimentalist group múm’s Gunni Tynes. The disparate elements combine to create a folky feeling of warmth, pastoral isolation and otherness, while the vocals, largely male, nearly all in unison, immediately recall the Beta Band (though there is a brief bit of Icelandic on the second number, Showdown, which makes you think they may have let the Sugarcubes’ Einar out for the day). At times I’m also reminded of that other island man Colin MacIntyre aka Mull Historial Society. Pretty string arrangements vie with acoustic guitar, xylophone and marimba throughout, Attack has almost jazzy clattering drums, glitches and percussion while, fittingly perhaps, the brass section on Strain brings to mind Paul Giovanni’s soundtrack to The Wicker Man.

Rating: 3/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/12/cheek-mountain-thief-tunng-review

(Fiction)

Like a particularly hopeless dame in an especially repetitive melodrama, indie rock, so the story goes, is perpetually in need of saving. It’s a strangely persistent narrative, one that makes the British music press seem like some poor old eschatological crank – forever raving about the second coming, then excusing and revising our predictions when they fail.

Is there something in the sound of guitars that fires up the sentimental and fatalistic wiring of our brains? And why do the bands heralded as saviours always sound as though they have listened to little more than that dread troika of the Killers, Kaiser Chiefs and Kasabian?

Spector, a sharply suited Dalston five-piece fronted by 24-year-old Fred Macpherson and his statement spectacles, are not the saviours of rock’n'roll, but it’s not their fault that they’ve been anointed as such. This debut arrives in the wake of headlines as overblown, dumb and appealing as their music, for which Chevy Thunder is a calling card: chugging lad rock, plus sweeping new romantic flourishes and all dials set to “anthemic”. That’s not necessarily as bad as it sounds and that sanguine album title (which sounds like a homage to the Strokes’ Is This It? – a debut more deserving of the messianic hyperbole than most) indicates the knowing humour in Macpherson’s lyrics and delivery.

When he sings the opening lines of Celestine – “Self-esteem, my self-esteem is at an all-time low” – it’s with the kind of expansive sweep that sounds like the opposite of low self-esteem. Macpherson has expressed admiration for Kanye West, but unlike him and his puppyish earnestness, Macpherson’s bombast comes mixed up with an arch facetiousness. In describing this record, he’s said: “It’s about the misery of trying to have a good time”, the sort of statement that prompts the question: “Are you serious?”

And the answer is no: the whole record, in fact, has a sense of karaoke to it, which is not so much down to the music itself often sounding like that of past, not necessarily irreproachable bands; rather, it’s down to his singing: debonair and often half-shouted or spoken, as though he doesn’t really mean it.

The karaoke quality is at its worst on Friday Night, Don’t Ever Let it End, with its pints-in-the-air, swaying sing-along chorus of “Friday night/I don’t wanna wake up alive”. But, just as a bar rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody demands you either leave or join in, repeated exposure to this record sees a kind of pessimism attrition sets in: there are worse things in the world than big fat hooks and easy, widescreen choruses.

The last track on the record is also their first single and encapsulates their blend of hubris and humour: why not, indeed, end your much-hyped debut album with a song that repeats the words: “You know I’ll never fade away”?

Rating: 3/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/12/spector-enjoy-while-lasts-review

(Domino)

Three stars feels a bit churlishly ungenerous to James Yorkston, a man with a vision so defined and individual that you feel compelled to take him entirely on his own terms, or not at all. His fifth album of original material – and his first for four years – rolls by like a river, all finger-picked guitars and delicate arrangements, and atop it all Yorkston’s tremulous voice, quavering through lyrics that are poetic in intent but often just too dense to parse. I Can Take All This, for example, manages to cram 600 words into three minutes: this is not a man who lives by the maxim: “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.” Sometimes the phrasemaking is devastatingly simple – “I am slow at crossing borders/ But once there I try to offer unconditional love,” he sings on Two – but often it whispers by without sinking in its claws, and you think: just slow down, and speak up. But if he did, would he still be James Yorkston?

Rating: 3/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/09/james-yorkston-cat-book-review

(O Genesis)

Despite being, in a sense, born into the US music industry – his father Bob was one of 50s/60s Nashville’s top-tier session bass players – R Stevie Moore has spent his strange and rather wonderful career firmly outside it. Since 1968 – and to this day – he has been busy in his basement home-taping an endless stream of eccentric, off-brand pop, apparently trying to copy the hits he heard on the radio and getting it all just a tiny, lovely little bit wrong. Much of it is utterly lo-fi and wildly, kaleidoscopically elaborate at once, and this terrific compilation herds together some highlights of his unknowably vast discography (by some counts more than 400 albums strong). And there are real treasures here, from the thrumming, Neil Youngish The Winner to oddball power-pop gem Why Should I Love You? (recently covered by the Vaccines). An outsider hero whose cult seems to keep growing with each generation, Moore could hardly be a better advert for going your own way.

Rating: 5/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/09/r-stevie-moore-lofi-review

(RCA)

Like many an X Factor contestant before him, Blackpool’s Aiden Grimshaw – ninth place in 2010 – now avers that the show was a blip on the way to something more musically respectable. Typically, though, the “real” him is entirely conventional, with influences ranging from Damien Rice to Moby. But within those parameters, Misty Eye is a pleasant surprise, setting up Grimshaw as a rival to Paolo Nutini and Alex Clare in the soulish-pop leagues. Even if credit for the downtempo electro soundscapes goes to producer Jarrad Rogers (who has form with Lana del Rey), Grimshaw is consistently fine and nuanced. This Island, for instance, is an emotional meander through drum’n'bass, with an ambiguous co-written lyric (“That’s why this island is suicidal”), while a cover of Sia’s heartbroken Breathe Me is stripped of everything but piano, clicking percussion and Grimshaw’s gently anguished voice. Poacher’s Timing, meanwhile, is a James Blakeish foray into bass and open space. Who’d have thought a spawn of Cowell could produce something so interesting?

Rating: 4/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/09/aiden-grimshaw-misty-eye-review

(Full Time Hobby)

In 2006, Tunng‘s Mike Lindsay visited Iceland, falling in love with a girl and the small, snow-covered northern fishing town of Husavik. Four years later, having lost touch with the girl and drifted back to his old life in London, he felt the pull of that “mythical wonderland”, and travelled back to Husavik to rekindle the love affair with town and resident. This lovely album documents Lindsay’s new life, songwriting sensors heightened by romance and discovery. Recorded in a cabin with local musicians including the local school’s marimba band, and finished in Rejkjavik, the songs are as beautiful and occasionally challenging as the landscapes, as military drumbeats and Arcade Fire-type walls of sounds and cries mingle with wind instruments, violin and wistful, poignant moods. Lindsay’s lyrics drip with tales of ghosts, melting snow and great unknowns. “With the sun in your face you see a question mark in the mountain,” he whispers in Spirit Fight. It’s a departure from Tunng’s folktronica, but anyone who loves that band’s Bullets will find a wealth of similar treats here.

Rating: 4/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/09/cheek-mountain-thief-review

(PIAS)

Anastasis: the Greek word for resurrection. Before you even press play, you’ve understood three things about Dead Can Dance’s first album in 16 years: it’s erudite, portentous in its introspection, and finds a band whose back catalogue is a kind of musical world tour swimming around in the Aegean sea. Actually, the most exquisite music here could be Anatolian: it feels more ancient than modern, equally Turkish and Greek. On Anabasis (a word denoting journeys), Lisa Gerrard‘s voice wisps and curls like smoke from a hookah; on Kiko she wails like a high priestess over drums that suggest a march to a sacrifice and a rembetika riff. Best of all is Agape (love), whose melodramatically keening violin line reeks of the port of old Smyrna. Add Brendan Perry singing of memory and restless spirits in a voice so deep it seems to come from the foundations of buried temples, and this album could be hypnotic – if only it plodded less and soared more.

Rating: 3/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/09/dead-can-dance-anastasis-review

(Heavenly)

Stealing Sheep’s debut album is a delightful bag of pick’n'mix. You can hear the twang of a Velvet Underground guitar here, a buzz of Ladytron synth there, often atop their fondness for creepy Wicker Man vocal harmonies. Yet the Liverpool trio of Becky Hawley, Emily Lansley and Lucy Mercer have made a debut album that never feels incoherent, or as though it’s reciting influences out loud for credibility. If anything, the psychedelic influences and lo-fi aesthetic position this record outside current trends. You can catch them doing what they do best on Rearrange, which starts off like a perky Britpop number before breaking out into a blissed-out refrain. Everything is thrown in here, including the kitchen sink, which they’re quite possibly using as a makeshift glockenspiel. Yet what grabs you are the deft tricks played within the vocal harmonies and the restrained use of electronics. For all Stealing Sheep’s maverick influences, it’s the small details that stand out on this beguiling debut.

Rating: 4/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/09/stealing-sheep-diamond-sun-review

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(Rough Trade)

Reykjavik’s grand new Harpa concert hall is a large, black, architecturally ambitious waterside edifice, a potent symbol of Iceland’s economic recovery. After their banks failed in 2008, Icelanders agreed that the men were to blame, and replaced their head of state and other key posts with women. Bank boardrooms followed suit. The decision was taken to build the concert hall, even though the coffers were empty; four years after this female takeover, Iceland appears to be well on the road to recovery.

Judging by Future Feminism – a spoken manifesto played out on track two of this extraordinary live album – Harpa may just be Antony Hegarty’s spiritual home. Live albums don’t often contain seven-minute passages in which the artist brands him/herself a witch, has a go at the wrongheadedness of “sky gods” in a manner that would interest his fellow pop sky god-sceptic Julian Cope, and demands a system of governance where the testosterone tenets of greed, aggression and Armageddon are replaced by diametrically opposed feminine values. But Hegarty is no ordinary artist, as this album, recorded last year in Copenhagen with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra, proves once again.

Pitched somewhere between male and female, pop, soul and the avant garde, between the US and the UK, Hegarty’s questioning suspension in these interzones have so far produced three affecting albums for piano and voice. Cut the World reprises 10 of his old songs, adds one new one (the title track) and Future Feminism, which is the kind of thing that will either get you punching the air as you did at Danny Boyle’s Olympics opening ceremony, or crossing your legs and muttering about distrusting gender absolutes.

When he’s not speaking in a delicate mid-Atlantic tone, or guffawing, as he does frequently on Future Feminism, you get the sense from Hegarty’s forlorn yet authoritative warble that “home” is just as shard-like a concept as “gender”. He would identify as a devoted citizen of the natural world, as Another World reminds us here; one considering refugee status when it all goes off. Originally from the 2008 EP of the same name, accompanied by the minimal, faintly menacing thrum of the orchestra, it’s even more desolate than the original.

He has other homes too. A glance at the bill for Meltdown – the arts festival Hegarty has curated, which opened last week – shows that he was nurtured by New York’s performance art underground. Here, his Epilepsy is Dancing – a very Lower East Side kind of song – gains new strings, both staccato and swelling. There’s ample evidence, too, that Hegarty’s childhood in Sussex has hardwired in him a love for British pop. Vocally, he has always resembled his hero Boy George – a white man with a black female soul voice – but bleached to the point of ghostliness and crossed with former Cocteau Twin Elizabeth Fraser. You Are My Sister is very George, with the quavers of Fraser and new opening woodwinds to boot.

It all comes, though, from a place close to Nina Simone. Hegarty says unsayable things in nuanced riddles. “For so long I’ve obeyed the feminine decree/ I always contain your desire to hurt me,” goes Cut the World, stately with horn and flutes. It bodes elegantly for future studio albums.Hegarty has not, as yet, played at Harpa. With so many spiritual homes, he probably doesn’t need another. Nevertheless, the affinity is striking, and needless to say, Harpa is not a skyscraper.

Rating: 3/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/05/antony-johnsons-cut-world-review

(Volcom)

So much hard rock is inadvertently hilarious that you hold dear those bands who are genuinely funny. Stoogey Norsemen Turbonegro have had one foot on the monitor of knowing riffola since the 90s, and were about 666 times better than Tenacious D. But they have been rocked by drug problems and so-so comebacks. This one, with new frontman Tony Sylvester, is not the triumph the closure narrative calls for. Sylvester, the band’s number one fan turned singer, sounds suitably unsavoury and tracks such as Dude Without a Face still pack menace. But a plod seems to have crept into songs suc has Rise Below, where once they used to snarl.

Rating: 2/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/05/turbonegro-sexual-harassment-review

(Daptone)

Afrobeat may not have achieved the global ubiquity of, say, reggae, but 15 years after the death of Fela Kuti, its influence continues to grow. That’s thanks, in part, to groups such as Antibalas, a multicultural Brooklyn-based ensemble co-founded by Dap-King Gabriel Roth, who have been a powerful internationalising force for the sound. Their fifth album is rich and intoxicating: billows of brass, sinuous guitar hooks and squiggles of hammond organ bubble up pungently from the stew. But they regard Afrobeat primarily as a team game, and though there are thrilling moments of individual virtuosity, every rhythmic element locks tight to create an irresistible groove.

Rating: 4/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/05/antibalas-review

(Tender Age)

If Beat Connection‘s first full-length album had appeared two weeks ago, it would have gone down like a barbecue in November in soggy, gloomy Britain. Now, though, summer’s belated arrival makes their sunny electronic sounds ideal. Waves of synthesisers crash like warm air; everything from maracas to steel drums to tugging basslines are employed to give The Palace Garden the atmosphere of sun-kissed afternoons and endless beaches. Based in coastal – though hardly seaside – Seattle, the duo’s breezy grooves lie between Daft Punk and Friendly Fires, with the lovely Saola (“champagne glasses in the ether/ I can’t remember your name either”) similar in atmosphere to the latter’s Hawaiian Air, the setting switched from transatlantic flight to late-night club. On some tracks, a hazy, almost indiscernible hint of melancholy mirrors that August feeling that summer is creeping away. The album loses its way in the middle, as sound usurps song, but Beat Connection’s more outright pop tunes – the steel drum-led Further Out and title track’s tales of “grooving to the rhythm of the soft light” – could make anybody want to hit the beach.

Rating: 3/5

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Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/aug/03/beat-connection-palace-garden-review