It’s fun, it really is fucking fun.  It’s culture too.  Not high culture of course, and there’s no way you could say that normal people getting involved in the arts and building communities and shared projects together could possibly do as much for the rich cultural life of the nation as keeping a handful fabulously wealthy people entertained at the ballet or the opera.  That would be crazy.  But nevertheless, music is fun, and it is culture.

Edinburgh is of course a city of great culture, and one which has invested a huge part of its considerable sense of self-worth into giving the impression that it supports culture.  And fun.  Although if one had to choose, then probably just culture.  Fun, after all, genuine balls-out taps aff belly laughing giddy fun is not really what we do here.  That is for vulgar people.  It is, in short, what Glasgow is for.

The kind of purposeful, determined fun had at the Edinburgh Festival – oh the wonderful festival, with its wonderful lineup of multi-cultural arts events and billions of pounds in profits for all the wonderful local industries like, er, Magners – that sort of fun is deliberate, and part of an image Edinburgh cultivates for itself more assiduously than any bowerbird, carefully building its nest from bits of discarded food packaging and used condoms.

Deliberate fun, or Compulsory Fun as a friend of mine so delightfully put it, is much more worthwhile that tawdry old spontaneous fun, because it is enriching, validating and nourishing for the soul.  It is also, generally, devoid of any actual fun.

You’d have thought the bonfire of the fucking bankers would have slapped the smug haughtiness out of Edinburgh a little bit recently, but the impression still remains that this is a city which secretly believes that for all people at nightclubs and pop concerts and ludicrous blockbuster movies think they are having fun, really that isn’t proper fun at all, and it most certainly isn’t culture.  Look, not one of the people in that band is even wearing tights!

So having defined, packaged, branded and then sold Compulsory Fun to the entire fucking world in August, Edinburgh seems to have recently realised that sneakily, under its own very nose, people in the damn capital have been having actual fun behind everyone’s backs.  That, of course, won’t do at all.

So, without ever needed any kind of grand conspiracy, but nevertheless somehow moving as one being with one purpose, the people of Edinburgh set about sorting out all fun which could be described as ‘really not our sort of thing’.

So first we burned down the Liquid Rooms.  Then fuck you Bowery, off you go, and balls to the Roxy too, which followed it.  Next we polished off The Lot, then set about losing the GRV/Octopus Diamond/Left Banke/whatever the fuck it called itself at the time.  Then the Forest, which probably self-combusted due to the sheer heat generated by all the burning incense.  The Red Door was also surplus to requirements, so fuck that as well.  And actually, who needs Cabaret Voltaire either, I have definitely seen Bad Fun taking place there, and you know what, fuck the Bongo Club too, as Edinburgh University are currently doing.

Sometimes I think we are actually trying to make it impossible to enjoy yourself in any more that one or two nice, approved ways in this fucking town.  Is it any wonder it’s a massive challenge to get decent bands to play here?  And contrary to the number of talentless, fat-tongued drama school toffs we import every August, and to how many tickets to the Ladyboys of fucking Bangkok we sell or how many companies get rich off the back of the fucking Festival, that has fuck all to do with culture in Edinburgh.

Culture in Edinburgh has far more to do with actual people from Edinburgh taking part in fucking culture, even if culture to them is being in a shit death metal band. In fact, I’d rather a hundred people in shit death metal bands actually doing something than two hundred serious muppets in museums looking suitably thoughtful at something painted a hundred years ago.

Still.  Despite all this shit, there’s a part of me which kind of thrills at the incredible case of venue suicides in Edinburgh in the last two years.  It’s almost like Nick at Sneaky’s, the guys at the Circus and Henry’s, hopefully now joined for the long term by the team at the Third Door are fighting a gallant last stand in the name of Unapproved Fun.  And fuck you, the harder it gets the more fun is to be had in fucking fighting it.  Fuck your Festival Theatre and your Scottish Ballet.  BOOOOOO-ring!

You can take every last fucking venue out of this town and force us to hold our gigs on the forecourts of fucking Tesco’s but Unapproved Fun will not fucking go away, you fucking twats.

At the risk of enraging classical guitarists everywhere, however, I will venture that there are limitations to what you can achieve as a solo acoustic guitarist playing entirely instrumental songs.  Not that his recorded stuff was bad by any means, just that my concentration span didn’t always bear up that well over long periods.  For some reason, what was engrossing live, didn’t have quite as much of a hold on me when recorded.

This, however, for previous fans and new, is the kind of record to approach without any preconceptions, because it is entirely different in flavour from previous work.  The reason is simple: it is an album sprinkled liberally with guest appearances, both vocal and instrumental, which makes it sound almost like an entirely new artist at work.  And given the album is apparently about friends from the last twenty years or so of Hubbert’s life I suppose it makes good sense for it to be recorded in collaboration with others.

Despite the changing voices, the constant presence of the acoustic guitar, plucked as ever with a kind of weighty seriousness, gives the record a very unified feel.  Even when the vocalists change, the sense of unity is maintained.  There is also a surprisingly similar feel to the song performed with Emma Pollock and Rafe Fitzpatrick, Half Light, and that sung by Marion Kenny and Hanna Tuulikki, Sunbeam Melts the Hour.

The latter in particular is absolutely bloody gorgeous, and I think the peculiar character of Tuulikki’s voice in one song seems to mirror the off-kilter scrape of the violin in the other, lending them the similar character I mentioned before. Sunbeam Melts the Hour also brings us what I think is Hubbert’s most arresting guitar performance of the album too, and one that is very different to the rest of the album, and downright oriental in style.

The fact that these guest performances are stitched together with more familiar RM Hubbert instrumentals is also an important factor.  Had he simply presented an entire record of collaborations it would have been in danger of coming across as a compilation, it would have taken the emphasis just a little too much from Hubbert himself, and would (at risk of being a smart-arse here) have risked coming across just a little close too much like a ‘look at my celebrity* friends’ statement, dangerously close to the manner of Elton John.

I know I’m being facetious there, but hopefully it doesn’t mask the point I was genuinely trying to make.  For all the collaborations, Hubbert still needed to make this his album, and beyond the distinctive character of his guitar playing, the regular interspersal of songs entirely his own help give this a framework into which the collaborative songs are assembled, rather than allowing them to overwhelm the whole enterprise.

The other thing I really noticed about this record was the sheer seriousness of it.  Not that it’s no fun to listen to, but the combination of precise notes, and the rolling crescendoes of picked guitar (I am sure there is a technical term for this shit, I just don’t know it) have a similarly portentous feel to some of Josh T. Pearson’s playing.  In fact opener We Radioed is strongly reminiscent of the phenomenal opening track on Pearson’s own record, and whilst clearly no copy, a similar and similarly impressive effect is nonetheless achieved.

I’ve used the term impressive here, and I think I should make it clear how it is meant.  I do not mean in in a condescending ‘oh, jolly well done’ sort of way, more to say that the music makes a really strong impression on you.  Time and again I find myself listening to this album and stopping to just absorb the impact of it, not in a deer in headlights way, just stopping to allow the impressions of the music to be absorbed uninterrupted by anything else.

And if that sounds like a high compliment, it is meant to be.  This is bloody brilliant.

RM Hubbert – Sunbeam Melts the Hour

RM Hubbert – Sandwalks

Website | More mp3s | Buy from Chemikal Underground

*Yes, I know, believe me I use that term in the loosest possible sense.

Anyhow, at the risk of repeating a little bit too much of this week’s podcast, these guys have been described in a few places, somewhat tenuously, as an Edinburgh band.  It’s a nice thought, but while they did indeed emerge, to the best of my knowledge, from the Edinburgh College of Art, I think they’re now based in London and have released their debut album on a French label, so I think it’s a bit of a stretch to refer to them as an Edinburgh band in any meaningful sense.

Add to that the fact their latest tour includes dates in Nottingham and fucking Norwich, but not Edinburgh, and I think we can say pretty conclusively that the band have moved on.  Which is a shame, because they’re very good, and given I had to miss their recent Sneaky Pete’s appearance I would really like to see them live again.

Funnily enough, I actually interviewed these guys at Homegame a couple of years ago, but an IT disaster meant that I couldn’t actually publish anything worthy of the name, unfortunately.  They were interesting people to talk to though, very thoughtful and considered, and they seemed remarkably focussed and together for a bunch of musicians.

Since then, when their first two singles made such a splash, they’ve been so very quiet that I have to confess I half wondered if they might have been stuttering a little, but it appears that this is very much not the case, as their debut album was released last week, and it’s bloody ace.

The most obvious comparison to the Djangos’ sound would be The Bees, who were briefly huge about seven or eight years ago, with a similar brand of rhythmic pop music which seemed to draw its influences from all over the place.  Speaking to the band during the Amazing Self-deleting Interview, I remember them referring to this as one of the great things about the internet era – the fact that bands no longer needed to draw their influences from such narrow fields, as absolutely anything and everything was out there waiting to be explored and absorbed.

From all these influences, Django Django make what is indisputably best described in no more a convoluted way than ‘pop music’.  As experimental as some of the sounds are, the result has a relentlessly danceable rhythm, and a sense of energetic playfulness which is impossible to ignore.

Interestingly enough, whilst they’ve included all four songs from their previous double A-side 7″s, all four songs have been relegated to the second half of the album, as if to make the statement that after a year or two of relative quiet, they are not just returning to flog the last gasps of credit from relatively old material, which I think is a good decision.

Having done that, however, I would suggest that they have slightly fallen into the trap of packing the album with pop songs, somewhat at the expense of the feel of the record as a whole. Whilst it’s good to release double A-side singles, rather than implying that really only one of the songs is worthwhile and the other will do, this approach doesn’t work as well on an album.

If I had a criticism of this it would be that every song on it sounds like an A-side, so by the end of the record it becomes a little wearying, and I think it could have done with a couple of more marked changes in pace, be they an instrumental here and there, or something a little more dreamy or melancholic, just to break the atmosphere a little and offset the relentless cheerfulness of the rest of the music.  Recent single Waveforms comes closest to fulfilling this function, but I don’t personally find the change quite significant enough to really break the mood and get me ready for the second half of the album.

Nevertheless, this is a highly enjoyable album of joyful, mischievous pop songs and very welcome return from one of the few bands around who actually make me feel like dancing. Dancing badly, I’ll grant you, but that’s still a significant achievement for a sulky old stick in the mud like myself.

Django Django – Storm

Website | More mp3s | Buy from Rough Trade

This is their third album, and despite a subtle shift evident in their second, represents by far the most decisive move yet away from the walls of squalling guitars which played such a part in the making of their name.

They have adjusted from a devastating combination of heart-rending vocal and relentless crescendoes of giddying racket, to something which you might perhaps describe as being more closely related to the hypnotic thrum of someone like Lower Dens, not that I’d directly compare the two, exactly. With the synths they’ve added to their sound there are actually moments which border on Depeche Mode as well, although I am sure that if I knew more about that kind of music I could make a more appropriate comparison.

Despite the change of pace, if one thing remains the same, it’s the quasi-spiritual feel to the Twilight Sad’s music.  The very first time I ever saw them, back at Bannerman’s of all places, years ago, I remember thinking that singer James Graham seemed to be twitching and howling his way through a particularly disturbing religious vision.  A similar feeling permeates No-one Can Ever Know, but it is more trance-like and a little less like a demonic possession.

Pre-release songs like Kill it in the Morning and the phenomenal Sick still stand out, but the rest of it is still strong, with perhaps my favourite beyond these two being Another Bed, which I chose for this week’s podcast. The fact that this song comes late in the album shows once again that these lads, for all they do write pop songs, still clearly put together whole albums rather than front-loading a couple of crowd-pleasers and making up the rest with whatever else they had lying around, as has been happening a lot recently.

Having seen them recently at the Bongo Club, I must confess that I still find a lot of their most thrilling material comes from their first album.  Since then they’ve released two more records, including this one, and both have contained songs I have loved, and a few to which I have never really warmed, I have to confess.

Again in this case, there are a couple of songs here and there which, whilst they are by no means bad, don’t quite thrill me as much as they might.  But then, some of this is just fucking great, and if I recall it was the lure of a handful of favourites which pulled me slowly into their debut album as well, so I will be sure and give this record the time it needs to sink in properly.

The Twilight Sad – Sick

The Twilight Sad – Another Bed

Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

Of course, back when I had a day job this still used to happen of, except I had to sit at my desk looking fucking useless all day.  It’s just that now when I spend a day being just a little bit vacant and useless – or glaikit as the Scots rather excellently refer to it – I just end up feeling like I am robbing myself.  Which I am, because it means I have to do this shit in the evening instead, which is just silly.

Anyhow, in terms of waking up and getting out of the house for some fun and games, things still don’t really seem to be picking up in Edinburgh, after a woefully slow start to the year.  Still, never mind, there will be plenty of Ides of Toad action in the next couple of weeks, and the Tidal Wave of Indifference will be back too, so things will start creaking into action again, hopefully.

Mind you, with the official retirement of Cabaret Voltaire from the gig circuit – not that they’d been really actively booking for a couple of years anyway – and the potential closure of the Bongo Club by Edinburgh University, I’d be surprised if any self-respecting band wanted to play this blighted fucking city ever again.  Fucking hell, we’re going to be having gigs on the forecourts of Tesco’s if this keeps on much longer.

Tuesday 7th Feb: Vieux Farka Touré and Samba Sene (solo) at the Voodoo Rooms.

The venue may make you feel, as a pal of mine so neatly put it on Twitter, like you’re at a wedding reception, but it is a venue, it is in Edinburgh, and it shows no imminent signs of being closed, so for this we must be really rather grateful.  Well, that and the fact that they are bringing someone I suppose you could legitimately describe as one of the most respected African musicians of his generation to play in Edinburgh tomorrow night.

Vieux Farka Touré – Aigna

Thursday 9th Feb: North Atlantic Oscillation at the Voodoo Rooms.

This event is actually called Moodjam and is being held to raise funds for the charity Action on Depression.  Playing will be Edinburgh’s North Atlantic Oscillation, who create indie which touches on everything from shoegaze to electronic to epic bigness.  Yes, epic bigness, it’s a term.

North Atlantic Oscillation – Marrow

Friday 10th Feb: Indie Funday Friday, with Spook School, The Seven Deadly Sins, November Orchid and Little Love and the Friendly Vibes at Henry’s Cellar Bar.

This night is designed to raise money for charity, and in order to do so they have invited a very promising collection of local bands whose music can loosely be described as variations on the term ‘indie-pop’, with the Spook School and The Seven Deadly Sins looking very good indeed.

Saturday 11th Feb: Video Loves the Radio Star with Her Royal Highness at the Third Door.

I’ve mentioned this night before because I really like the concept: Videolab apparently do a live VJ set whilst the band is playing, and in terms of making a step up from the plain old ‘get some bands in a room’ gig approach, this definitely strikes me as something very much worth investigating.

For those unfamiliar with the term, this is the offhand dismissal used to describe the sort of mawkish, clichéd tourist tat which masquerades as Scottish heritage and culture for those with woefully little imagination.  Alternatively, I suppose you could say that Tartan Shortbread is a blanket term for Scottish heritage as a sort of motorway service station take on national identity.

Anyhow, given I work very much at the coalface of the DIY music world in Scotland, I find that I have been oddly unsupportive of a large number of Scottish bands who have emerged in the last couple of years to considerable enthusiasm from the Scottish music press, both professional and amateur.

For some reason, the recent bands who have shown some likelihood of cracking an audience wider than the relatively narrow confines of the five million or so people in Scotland itself just haven’t appealed to me, with a few notable exceptions.  However, sitting down to assemble the playlist for this week I noticed that there were something like seven of the ten songs which happened to be by Scottish bands.  Oh, I thought to myself, I appear to be Scottish again.  How nice.

Direct download: Toadcast #212 – The Tartan Shortcast

Subscribe to the Toadcasts on iTunes

Subscribe to the Toadcasts on Mixcloud

01. Django Django – Default (00.17)
02. Andrew Bird – Eyeoneye (08.41)
03. Lower Dens – Brains (12.47)
04. Randolph’s Leap – Bile (26.17)
05. Clean George IV – XP Avenue (32.51)
06. Dumb Instrument – Reverse the Hearse (35.57)
07. The Occasional Flickers – When the Sky Looks so Grey (41.11)
08. R.M. Hubbert – Sunbeam Melt the Hour (with Marion Kenny & Hanna Tuulikki) (50.20)
09. The Twilight Sad – Don’t Move (55.49)
10. Brown Brogues – Anyone But You (62.04)

In other news, I will be wearing a fucking penguin suit tonight, for something like the first time in three years.  I fucking hate those things.  I’d rather be a man than a woman at these formal events, because at least we have a simple uniform and don’t have to give a fuck about being judged for our choices, but nevertheless…  yeuch.

I guess the fact that I never have to wear anything more formal than a shirt with a collar on it occasionally means I just don’t feel comfortable in these fucking things, but whatever the reason is, I just don’t, and the sooner the speeches are over, the jacket and fucking tie can come off and the sleeves be rolled up the happier I’ll be.

Then I can get hammered and swear at everyone.

Mastering was fun yesterday as well.  Although actually, there wasn’t much mastering done, just endless tweaks of the final mix to make sure everything was ready for the mastering process, so I still don’t really know what goes on behind the curtain.  I did learn a lot of good things about mixing though which, given I have never really been taught properly and generally just made it up as I went along, is a very, very welcome thing.  Just watching other people do shit is pretty useful I think, even if you don’t end up repeating it, it still just helps to accumulate as much knowledge as you can.

Listen to all the advice you can get, and then ignore 99% percent of it.

Anyway, oh yes, the Friday Fives.  This is why people like me, with a propensity to ramble, just shouldn’t have blogs.  A grownup editor would have butchered this whole load of bollocks down to about three or four sentences, if that, and honestly, where’s the fucking fun to be had there, eh?

1. What is your blues name?
2. What is your posh name?
3. When do you feel most like a fish out of water?
4. Who should be the new England captain, now John Terry’s got the boot (serious answers not encouraged)?
5. Who should headline Glastonbury (or whatever the biggest festival is) this year?

Jingo – Fever

Mercury Dance Band – Envy No Good

Das Yahoos – Mabala

Bokoor Band – Onupka Shawarpo

Nkansah and Yaanom – Pem Dwe

Except I shan’t be mostly mastering because in all honestly I have no fucking idea what that is.  Apparently it is tweaking the teeny-tiniest of things in the final mix of a song and still somehow making the most significant of differences. I’ve heard a good masterer get the most amazing clarity of instrumentation from a shitty, over-compressed mp3 file, to the extent that it sounded amazing on vinyl.

We tend to use Reuben Taylor for our mastering these days.  As well as being a lovely (if slightly mental) fellow, he does an amazing job for a very reasonable fee in a very short space of time.  He was responsible for the Meursault All Creatures vinyl, as well as the gorgeous Rob St. John record and the King Post Kitsch Honeytone EP.

Anyhow, today Rory Sutherland, who helped me record and engineer the record, and I will be off with the final mixes for the split 12″ we’ve been recording with Waiters, Sex Hands, Dolfinz and PAWS and this will be the first time I have witnessed the process first hand.  So I’ll be sure to tell you what unspeakable wizardry takes place in the mastering suite.  Assuming, of course, that I understand any of it at all.

All these photos were taken by the fantastic Nic Rue.  Except the shit one.  That was Rory.

No one can argue, surely, that ceasing to listen to chart music will improve your soul – in much the same way that no longer reading the NME will liberate your brain and give you a wonderful feeling of clarity and, more importantly, self-respect.

So given that your fundamental worth as a human being can be directly measured by the obscurity of your music collection I was horrified to plug my last.fm profile into the Obscurometer and discover that my hipster score was a measly 81.2%.  81.2% for fuck’s sake?  That means that 18.8% of last.fm users are BETTER THAN ME!  Nooooooo, this cannot possibly be true!

Now, last.fm can be a truly treacherous bastard, telling the world all sorts of dirty little secrets about your secret Alison Moyet evenings, and extensive collection of K.T. Tunstall b-sides.  Or, even worse, having written the review this afternoon, last.fm now knows I have actually listened to that fucking Lana Del Rey album, and Christ on a fucking bike, who knows who it might tell!

Anyhow, the Obscurometer can give you a hipster self-respect score for all the the listening intervals last.fm records.  Now, I’m getting better and better at this shit, so I figured that even if I had let myself down in the past, the last twelve months should represent a pretty decent improvement in my right to a sense of social superiority.

Tragically, even though I thought I would have known better since well before 2011, my score was still that devastatingly unimpressive 83.6%.  An improvement, but not very impressive, as I’m sure you’ll admit.  Despite cleverly listening to bands like Benjamin Shaw and Death Songs, with artistic validity ratings of 93.3% and 94.9% respectively, I undermined my best efforts by foolishly playing music by the crushingly well-known likes of Wilco (37.2%) and The Mountain Goats (49.4%).

Anyway, I may not have been able to acknowledge it to myself, but clearly my instincts told me something had to change, and it seems that thankfully some inner sense of self-preservation has restrained my urge to listen to whatever that damn hell I want, in favour of stuff other people will never have heard of and which therefore reassures me that I am better than them.

By six months ago, a mere year after giving up my tragically unhip grownup job, I seemed to be getting the hang of this thing, improving my score from the frankly embarrassing initial 81.2%, through the improved but nevertheless not particularly impressive 83.6% percent of a year ago, to the increasingly swagger-worthy 85.4%.

Anyhow, whilst you can’t deny that those are some pretty impressive numbers, they are nothing compared to where I am now.  Now, whilst 85.4% would probably and rightly intimidate most people, by the time we look at my score for the last three months, I am at the frankly knicker-elastic-snapping 90.5% personal validity score.  I can look down down my nose with confidence at all but the most determinedly obscure of last.fm’s users.

Looking at those listening habits, you can see a couple of key influences, thrusting me to the forefront of cultural value ratings.  Firstly, listening only to Song, by Toad Records bands.  Being a woefully unsuccessful record label is of course incredibly cool, seeing as if lots of people like your music, then you are almost certainly a populist sellout who most self-respecting hipsters stopped liking after their first couple of singles three years ago.

However, that is still only good enough for a 90.5% personal worth score.  By the last week, however, I am clearly becoming seriously awesome.  How awesome, I hear you ask?  I’ll tell you: ninety-fucking-six point two fucking percent.  Yep, 96.2.  That’s seriously fucking awesome.  That’s like a black fucking belt in hipsterism, that is.  Motherfucker, if you thought I was pretty damn worthwhile before, I am now undeniably fucking amazing – better than 96.2% of last.fm users, who are already mostly hipsters to begin with.

The key (if you look at what has been scrobbled for the last week – listening to the new Jesus H. Foxx album, the new album by The Leg and the mixes for our as yet unreleased split 12″) is very clearly to listen to music so fucking cool that it hasn’t even been released yet.  In fact, you should probably listen to unreleased music by bands who don’t actually exist yet, which is what I will be endeavouring to do as I push on for that magic 100% score. Finding their recordings might prove a challenge though, because if I thought Googling Girls’ debut album (called Girls) was a challenge, imagine how hard finding a band who don’t actually have a name yet would be.

Anyhow, I think from studying the results of the Obscurometer, we can divine a clear way forward for both myself and Song, by Toad Records in future: never actually release any of our albums, thus instantly making us the coolest record label in the world, and meaning that I will simultaneously win the Gold Medal Super Hipster Prize for listening to more of the most obscure music than anyone anywhere ever!

And then I will turn off the internet and we can all go and read a book for a bit instead.

You see, when people get an almighty slagging I automatically end up pulling for them a little even if, as in this case, that kind of means pulling against myself.  And to be fair, Del Rey has received some almighty slaggings both from anyone with any sense at all as well as, a little less enjoyably, from quite a few people with none.  I don’t mind people disliking almost anything about her, or indeed saying so, but some of it has been pretty cruel and delivered in pretty significant quantities.

So there was a part of me who sort of hoped this might end up being really good, just to stick two fingers up to everyone who had been slagging her off.  Yes, including me.

It’s not though, it’s really, really bad.  In fact it looks an awful lot like her label decided to capitalise on her sudden surge in fame and get the damn thing out as soon as possible before it went away.  They have displayed a total lack of confidence in her ability, in other words.  Apart from the timing, what suggests this might be the case is the utterly one-dimensional pop by numbers production applied to most of these tunes.

The singles – the songs which were ready and planned for – have a distinct and well-executed style to them.  The Lana Del Rey Show may have pissed me off, but I will quite happily confess to thinking those are both pretty good pop songs, delivered with character and style.  Listening to the album, they are pretty much the only ones with this kind of fully-developed character to them.

She described herself, I believe, as a gangster Nancy Sinatra, and Blue Jeans and Video Games bear that out quite well.  They manage an odd combination of sultry and vulnerable.  Now, they may also display the rather more worryingly submissive side of her caricature – the side which seems to imply no self-esteem whatsoever – but the retro-fetishist crooner mixed with the pouty sex kitten and obedient, doe-eyed girl next door was a definite and coherent image, both for her and for her music.  It annoyed me personally, but in a crucial way it worked; it was pretty well-developed and people bought into it.

That style has either been abandoned for the rest of the album, or the production team simply didn’t have the time or the courage to work it out properly.  So presumably either through a lack of time, or in a desperate play to capture the absolute maximum proportion of the mainstream market while they had the chance, she and her label have delivered a colossally tedious record of mid-level, by the numbers pop dross of the sort similar dead behind the eyes, scrabbling ingenues sing karaoke alongside on the X-Factor.

National Anthem might be one of the worst songs I’ve subjected myself to in a long time. It’s a bit depressing actually, I kind of like being proved wrong, and I thought she had a chance of doing just that.  But whether she was always a mainstream pop act who accidentally crossed over into something more interesting with a couple of songs, or whether she never really had any talent to begin with, just a desperate craving to be famous, this is still a flaccid travesty of an album.

If they had retained the courage of their convictions and released an album true to the original style of the wounded barroom seductress then this might conceivably have ended up being interesting. It might have even ended with me eating my words.  As it is it is so utterly middle of the road I can’t even hate it – it would seem cruel to hate something this crap.  What it does though is demonstrate decisively that we never need to mention Lana Del Rey ever again and can safely put this tawdry little episode in our collective musical history behind us once and for all.

Lana Del Rey – Blue Jeans

Lana Del Rey – National Anthem

Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon