What with all the
great music and art and culture around nowadays, it seems a bit redundant to
use the old 'this is better than that because that is bad and this is good'
template for a review. It's not necessary. It's childish.
But rappers live for the who's better, who's best, don't they? It's not a
continuum, it's a competition. Who are they to call me childish? Nerr so there.
Let's take, for comparison, Eminem. When Big Boi's alma mater OutKast were making
their best work together, Eminem was making witty, unpredictable records.
Eminem has made a new record. It's Number 1 in the LP charts. The new single
has got the ubiquitous Lil Wayne, rap's biggest new star of the last few years
on it. It samples Haddaway's What Is Love. Haddaway's
What Is Love. Samples it clumsily and badly, for that matter. And is a pile
of steaming, straining, whining effluent with all the bounce and brilliance of
a burst brown beachball. Like the rest of the record.
So what has 10 years done for Big Boi? A split solo album that everyone
remembers for Hey Ya and The Love Below, with Speakerboxxx (Big Boi's half of
the double set) not getting quite the same attention despite being riddled with
belters. Launching a record label for the tremendous but unsuccessful Sleepy
Brown and Bubba Sparxxx. Dreaming up some more fantastic monikers for himself
(we now have General Patton to add to Daddy Fatsacks and Lucious Left Foot).
Denying that Outkast have split, having not played or recorded together for
seven years (Jive Records being pricks, apparently). And now he's actually made
a record. A record with a cover that looks like a cheap, thrown-together mixtape,
but plays like a pulse-pounding funk-pop CLASSIC.
You probably already know Shutterbugg, instant and funky as all get-out.
And everything else on here follows that template. It's dirty too. In the first
funny rap skit in, oooh, 20 years, we find out about the 'David Blaine'
position. Try it. But don't think the presence of a skit means a meandering
load of twaddle. These songs are all four minutes or less, get in, get down and
get out. The OutKast/Dungeon Family house producers Organized Noize (who wrote
TLC's Waterfalls) come with four songs, and all the guest beatmakers (Scott
Storch, Andre 3000, Salaam Remi) have all brought the snap and slide you want
to hear under BB's easy-jittering flow. There are no phoned-in lines. No phoned-in
guest spots. Just baking hot Atlanna class
throughout.
Go and listen to it on Spotify, it's on there F.O.C. And when you realise
you're on your sixth listen in two days, go out and spend your hard earned on
it. How else are we going to encourage rappers to keep away from mawkish
moaning and clumsy Europop sampling?Reward the Dungeon Family boys for still being the best and most
creative around.
After a couple of
EPs that were big on quirkiness if not originality, super-hyped Brooklyn quartet The Drums finally deliver their debut
album.
Despite their Hoxton haircuts and fashion magazine photo shoots, The Drums are
very definitely not trendy; they bang on about The Wake, dance like robots and
come off as fiercely uncool. They’re channelling Sarah Records rather than The
Strokes, which is admirably different – when it works.
Opening track Best Friend encapsulates The Drums at their best. With tight
guitar riffs, yearning lyrics and an insistent repetitive vocal hook, it
features brilliantly gauche lines like, "You were my best friend/But then
you died". But they repeat this formula to diminishing effect across the
album. Every song kicks in with the same tinny drum beat, whiny guitar and Joy
Division bass line, and lead singer Jonathan Pierce’s monotone vocals quickly
pall. The eccentricities poking through on earlier songs like I Felt Stupid are
flattened out, leaving only disappointing blandness.
Lyrical simplicity ("I thought my life would get easier/Instead it’s
getting harder without you") quickly stops sounding refreshing and comes
across as the best they can do. Me And The Moon’s "You still sleep with
your back to me" is like a first draft "Why is the bedroom so cold/You’ve
turned away on your side", lacking the original’s painful intimacy. And
that’s the problem: there’s an emptiness at the heart of this album. The Drums
are C86 without a manifesto. For all their name-dropping of British indie pop,
they come across as false, a band lacking in politics or sincerity, and so
desperate to be loved that it becomes a turn-off.
When they stop trying to sound like The Field Mice, they deliver something
breezy and harmonious that sounds like it’s produced by a goth Phil Spector.
Let’s Go Surfing has a playful melody undercut by an eerie sense of menace;
it’s The Beach Boys mixed with The Cure, and somehow it works. We Tried,
proclaims the title of one song, and if they wore that effort a bit more lightly,
they could make something joyous and special. Maybe they’ll deliver when the
pressure’s off, but for now, this is too try-hard to love.
Allo Darlin’, named
after the catcalls of Soho builders, consist of Australian Elizabeth Morris and
her indiepop accomplices, all of whom moonlight in other bands – Elizabeth is
in Tender Trap, bassist Bill plays with Darren Hayman and the Secondary Modern,
and guitarist Paul and drummer Michael are in Hexicon.
They’ve assembled a debut album featuring a great deal of ukelele, a heavy dose
of wide-eyed childlike wonder at the world, and songs about popcorn, Woody
Allen films and funfairs - any of which could push this album into twee
overload. But somehow the emotionally honest lyrics teeter just the right side
of sentimentality, telling Jens Lekman-esque bittersweet tales about lost loves
and new lusts. Elizabeth’s perspective of an
outsider looking in on London – a city that "has a way of taking every little thing" – gives an air
of curiosity about the capital, and a way to embrace themes of loneliness and
outsiderdom.
Opener Dreaming, a duet with Pipettes svengali Monster Bobby, echoes the
innocent breathy female/ominous baritone male pairing of Isobel Campbell and
Mark Lanegan. A couple share their differing perceptions on a night out,
reminiscing about night buses, discos and stars that turn out, more
prosaically, to be satellites. The Polaroid Song continues the nostalgia theme,
with polaroid film acting as a metaphor for a new relationship: "Will we
still look happy when we’re not so over-exposed?’ Elizabeth worries, over a backdrop of flutes
and jangly guitar.
A spirit of playful lyrical borrowing (look, you can’t call it theft when the
band are this adorable; the lyrics are just resting in their account, OK?) runs
through the album – ballad Heartbeat Chilli takes its chorus from a line from I
Walk The Line, What Will Be Will Be is based on Que Sera Sera, and the bouncy
Kiss Your Lips breaks out into a full-on Weezer singalong. Standout track Let’s
Go Swimming, about a life-affirming moment sitting by a lake in Sweden, is
entirely the band’s own creation. Swoonsome slide guitar and gorgeous vocals
usher us into the joy of something "simple and true" that "all
of the hipsters in Shoreditch could never style... all the bankers in Moorgate
could never buy."
This is a beautiful, happy, skippy gem of an album; the sound of a band that
can’t quite believe they’re getting away with it. And there’s something about
that ukelele, an instrument everyone feels they could pick up and play, that
makes this album relentlessly accessible and cheerful. This summer, we’re all
included on the Allo Darlin’ guestlist.
The pervading synth revival tends to take 1983
as a jump-off point; the moment Yazoo split
and Depeche Mode discovered a guitar, and Tears For Fears ghosted in and made
pop massive. The synth became a tool for stadium acoustics, conjuring the huge,
before Detroit whiz kids hooked it back into the future.
Aussie/US duo The Golden Filter remember how these glassy sounds splintered in
the 90s, where Saint Etienne made beautifully thin pop, icily modern in style, 70s
AOR in melody. TGF don’t share SE’s facility for killer tunes, but singer
Penelope Trappes is a vocal ringer for Sarah Cracknell and programmer Stephen
Hindman knows his way around featherweight, airy disco.
The Golden Filter’s debut album is bright, insubstantial, pretty and vague. In
their careful hands however, the absentmindedness is a plus, filing Voluspa
alongside The Beloved’s best work as ambient dance pop that’s pleasant to have
around. It sounds like faint praise, but Voluspa is rather faint. At its least
consequential, it sleepwalks through Lamb-by-rote numbers like Moonlight
Fantasy and Stardust, weaving sunset symphonies that won’t disturb your
reveries. But on top form - the Theme For Great Cities synth-play of Frejya’s
Ghost, the chunky beats and ABBA chorus of Look Me In The Eye, the mournful
warmth of The Underdogs – it’s mainstream techno at its most delightful.
In the end you take the rough with the smooth, and where The Golden Filter are
concerned, even their rough is a touch on the silky side. Sophisticated,
glacial and accessible, Voluspa would look rather nice on your coffee table.
If this is commercial suicide, then good. The
drifters don’t deserve it. MGMT’s difficult second album is a breeze.
You know the story: goofy college boys record some throwaways, they’re souped
up by a major label and the fans lap ‘em up like they’re pop’s real deal. The
hype machine – plus a couple of true blue hit singles – shifts a million units.
Caught in the spotlight, our heroes run scared from the pressure, obliquely
disown their debut and hunker down to make a record that means something to
them and them alone. So far, so La’s. (Ti do). Preview pieces across the globe
damn the album before it’s out and consign the band to the one-hit-wonder slag
heap. Job done.
But what if Oracular Spectacular wasn’t the flawless gem of fond memory? Listen
in 2010 and it adds up to the admittedly great tongue-in-cheek Time To Pretend,
the nagging-hook-as-song Kids and yards of dreary filler. At the very most,
it’s one side of hits and another of bland hippy bucolia. The odd thing is,
Congratulations takes that second side as a starting point and comes up trumps.
It finds the fun in the fantasia.
Produced by Ex-Spacemen 3 cosmic casualty Pete Kember aka Sonic Boom –
obviously the go-to guy for mainstream triumph – MGMT’s foot-shooter is
amazing. There’s more than a scent of the psychedelic, but it’s tempered by a
shambling, 80s, indie aesthetic, most obviously in hock to The Television
Personalities (whose Dan Treacy is celebrated on the album’s jittery second
track), but also to the dense beauty of AR Kane, Cocteau Twins, any other
murky, melodic 4AD acts you can pluck from the ether. It’s Zombies whimsy
filtered through an anorak.
Above all, there’s a sense of economy, of ideas whittled and released with
minimum fuss. It’s Working and Song For Dan Treacy are pacy, catchy and
fun-sized. Flash Delirium, for all its psychedelic switchbacks, is brief for
its scope, and the terrific, silly Brian Eno is a hit single where there are
meant to be none.
Obviously, thrift flies out of the window with the 12-minute Siberian Breaks,
but every magpie odyssey needs an epic. This one feels like an ADD skip through
Love’s Forever Changes, with bombastic diversions through Pink Floyd and Led
Zeppelin, and boasts the kernels of at least three or four great full-length
songs. Brainwaves burst like geysers. If Andrew Van Wyngarden and Ben
Goldwasser can survive refusal to spew out another Kids, signs are they’ve got
many more fantastic voyages for us to hop on.
It’s mildly frustrating that Siberian Breaks’ excerpts are so fleeting, sure, and
there’s similar regret that Someone’s Missing and the
Spiritualized-at-their-most-festive I Found A Whistle check out just as they
take astonishing flight – but better to whet than to weary. Congratulations is
a totem for sustained inspiration, deathless melody, the sort of thing careers
are built on. If it doesn’t kill them first, of course.
Allo Darlin’, named
after the catcalls of Soho builders, consist of Australian Elizabeth Morris and
her indiepop accomplices, all of whom moonlight in other bands – Elizabeth is
in Tender Trap, bassist Bill plays with Darren Hayman and the Secondary Modern,
and guitarist Paul and drummer Michael are in Hexicon.
