Thursday 25 February 2010

Adult Contemporary Essentials 21.02.10

The Strange Boys
Be Brave
Rough Trade
Texans do things differently, but not always bigger, if this wonderful little album is anything to go by. Coming across as The Basement Tapes might if Mick Jagger had taken The 60s Stones in that direction, Be Brave is full of a rusty, dusty blend of country, rock and blues.
The Strange Boys take Jason and the Scorchers onto a new, indie level the way that The Walkmen do when they play country. This record is as far from the X Factor as a record could get and still be released by a major(ish) label, but for those who partake, it has an infectiousness and a sheer joy to its existence that equally elevates other bands you've never heard of, like White Hassle or Delta Spirit - you will be so glad you came in, and want to share the secret, but realistically someone who listens to Radio 2 or a pop station is not going to get this record. If you prefer the 73 Springsteen to the 2009 one, the 60s Stones to the 80s Stones, however, do seek out this record.

ACE rating 9/10


Great Lake Swimmers
The Legion Sessions
Nettwerk
Canada's Great Lake Swimmers don't make music, they make beauty sound like something. Front man Tony Dekker looks like the kind of man on whom religions get built, and sings like an angel. The Legion Sessions was recorded in a pub - the Royal Canadian Legion Pub - and features live acoustic versions of their acoustic songs from the lovely Lost Channels record. It is, if you like, a second chance to hear those songs, a perspective 2 degrees away from the one you first came at them. Songs like Palmistry and Pulling On A Line are gorgeous, layered and gentle, like a warm clear stream - Dekker makes every song a vulnerable, fragile thing, and the band adorn each perfectly with the minimum of effort and frill. The record sounds great, too - the feel of the wooden floor is tangible - this is no sticky-floored British pub, clearly. If you don't have Lost Channels already, it doesn't make sense to start here, although you can see most of the Sessions songs on YouTube to see if you'll like it. if you do, this will help you hear it in 3D.

ACE rating 8/10


Steve Vai
Where The Wild Things Are (Live in Minneapolis)
Favored Nations
Take care that this isn't something you buy by accident expecting the film soundtrack. There is a DVD to accompany this tour de force, but this is as high end as rock guitar gets, and there is no nice warm feeling at the end. Steve Vai is a guitarist's guitarist, and even those guitarists don't necessarily like what he does - the extreme technicality of the playing requires an appreciation of how hard it is to do at least as much as any appreciation of it as 'music'. However, the CD of this show contains 15 tracks that highlight an amazing front man of an amazing band - Vai has collected a band of virtuosos, including two violinists who can match his speed and style. This elevates the music from straight rock to jazz fusion, and brings him closer to his own Frank Zappa band roots than he has been in a long time, if with less improvisation. For the guitarist listener, there are probably too many vocal tracks, but songs like Now We Run or Oooo are simply jawdropping.

ACE rating 8/10

Monday 15 February 2010

Adult Contemporary Essentials 14.02.10

The Soft Pack
The Soft Pack
Heavenly
If it’s true that all publicity is good publicity, then this San Diego band may well have decided that they could continue to call themselves The Muslims for this debut album. Fortunately, more sensible heads prevailed and this album is being allowed to stand on its own merits.
‘Fortunately’ because this album captures the spirit of The Strokes’ early work and mixes in some Fall to come out with something that isn’t new, isn’t big and certainly isn’t clever, but is the
same kind of infectious as the Von Bondies breakthrough, or the short-lived 22-20s. There is some early Beatles pop, some early REM driving Rickenbacker sounds and a whole lot of the kind of college/ underground rock that needs no explanation – full of songs, juvenile attitude and thrashed guitars. Hipsters may wish for more archness, more of the kind of image cultivated by The Drums, but leave them to their anxieties, and enjoy this album for what it is – it isn’t trying to change the world, just make 30 minutes of it pass more quickly.

ACE rating 8/10


The Smoking Popes
It’s Been A Long Day
Asian Man
For fans of The Smoking Popes, it was interesting that Morrissey suggested they were his favourite band, as they always had the sound of a Smiths that had taken REM’s punkier college rock to heart. In one respect, The Smoking Popes were one of America’s most important punk bands in the 90s, combining melody and catchy rock with their attitude preceding Green Day’s increasing popularity. This collection of unreleased material from 1991-1998 is raw and unpolished, but does give a great insight into the generation. Many songs come in under 2 minutes, and it is remarkable how much can be fitted into those 120 seconds. The overwhelming impression that remains now is of a band whose punk got subsumed under the pop surface. We can’t complain too much of that – I Need You Around from 1995’s Born To Quit remains on of THE great singles of the past 20 years. Consider this an album for completists - Born to Quit and 2008’s Stay Down should come ahead of this in your Shopping Cart.

ACE rating 7/10


Yeasayer
Odd Blood
EMI
Yeasayer have gone from the territory they set up for Vampire Weekend to a more electronic 80s place. All Hour Cymbals was, by their own admission, Middle Eastern-Psych-Pop-Snap-Gospel, which either means that a lot of good ideas were thrown into a melting pot from which the best were chosen, or that an occasionally unseemly mess resulted. The adulation that accompanied songs like 2080 did seem to suggest that the band had got some things right, however. Odd Blood is definitely an album of two halves – the first a melted down Pet Shop Boys synthy disco mix, and the second described as ‘experimental.’ In this case, that does mean what you fear it might – there is barely a song to be found in the sub-Talking Heads mess. Best avoided unless you desperately want the badge of novelty pinned to your ironic T-shirt.

ACE rating 6/10

Monday 8 February 2010

Adult Contemporary Essentials 07.02.10

Hurray For The Riff-Raff
Young Blood Blues
eMusic
There was a time when Michelle Shocked's Texas Campfire Songs was shocking. Alynda Lee, here known as Hurray For The Riff Raff, on her second album, is as folky as it gets, having left home at 17 to ride freight trains and play washboard in a street band. Her voice, all Cat Power and Shocked, is a powerful instrument in the sparse mix of banjo, accordion, and percussion, but she is at her best when delivering a line like 'you stick the needle in your arm and the baby starts crying' on Slow Walk. The capacity of songs like I Know You to be seductively bluesy is just gorgeous, and full of character. If more blues was less reverent and paid attention to its folk roots,
records like this might be easier to come by - if, as they say, blues is just the sound of a good man/ woman feeling bad, then the absence of melancholy that suggests is written all of the way through this. Its edges are its character, and its depth its primary raison d'ĂȘtre.

ACE rating 9/10

The Features
Some Kind of Salvation
Serpents and Snakes
The Features may come from Nashville, but they sound like Tennessee brethren Kings of Leon might if they came from Brighton - bouncy, edgy pop that is at once upbeat and rocking. Some Kind of Salvation is their second album after the band had trouble with the major label that released their first, Exhibit A. It is an improvement on that debut in every way - the songs are better, lyrically and musically: more fully-reconciled, more fully featured. The band do have a 60s pop inspiration, but front man Matt Pelham takes any Kinks-y leanings and mixes them nicely with some more modern Fratellis-like indie, all hooks, groove and funk. The UK charts need something with the delight of Wooden Heart, GMF or Lions (the Chelsea Dagger of this album). With some more promotion behind them, The Features could well be a massive band on this side of the Atlantic too. Fortunately, this re-release is on the Kings of Leon's label, so that may well tip the balance.

ACE rating 8/10

Jason and the Scorchers
Halcyon Times
JCPL
How does 'first album of all-new material since 1996' sound to you? Enough to strike fear that some old band has been forced by penury into the studio again, and that some retread will be the order of the day? Well, in the case of Jason and the Scorchers, put that thought far from your mind. Back in the day, J&TS and their version of cowpunk (think of the way that The Pogues turned Irish folk music into something hornier and dirtier, then think of that done to awesome country music) turned out something approaching genius, especially on Fervor their EMI debut in 1983. It is one of the all-time great records, and it has been argued (pretty successfully) that this was the album that generated alt-country, not Son Volt. Halcyon Times may not quite approach the spark that ignited Fervor, but it does have the kind of quality that sustained its follow-up albums Lost and Found and Still Standing. The cheekiness is still there, the hard rock, the melodic approach and the absolute absence of any subtlety. Funky as all get-out, there are all sorts of reasons to be grateful for this all-new material.

ACE rating 8/10

Tuesday 2 February 2010

Adult Contemporary Essentials 31.01.10

Midlake
The Courage of Others
Bella Union
Before the Fleet Foxes, the band whose retreat to early 70s hippiness was most successful was Midlake, and their lovely 2007 second album The Trials of Van Occupanther. With The Courage of Others, Midlake move closer to English folk (Pentangle, Fairport Convention) and a Woodstock-y/ Age of Aquarius vibe – it is never happy, and built around a theme that modern life sucks. Fortunately, the music makes up for that by being in itself gently uplifting. Plus ca change and all that, but there isn’t much here that wasn’t explored 40 years ago – Midlake may sound boldly unconventional now, but only by sounding conventional for an earlier time. The Denton, Texas band clearly have a wonderful feel for pastoral melody, dynamics and harmony, but too often here the feel is of earnestness and ennui.

ACE rating 7/10

The Drums
Summertime EP
Moshi Moshi
Anyone who got The Girls and their debut Album will be dead centre for this EP, from Brooklyn band The Drums. It will help if they come armed with their Joy Division, Stone Roses and The Cure chops, but that is only a starting point – The
Drums sound is a clear, 60s surfer-dude sound, with all of the exuberance that entails. In fact, the band that they most resemble is the Shout Out Louds, who have made this kind of thing their own in recent years. If new music for you means finding bands whose youthful energy overwhelms any over-production or world-weariness, The Drums will be an easy listen – the EP is not polished, and just raw fun in certain places, but it fizzes with that certain something that makes people start bands. Knocks Vampire Weekend into a cocked hat.

ACE rating 8/10

The Len Price 3
Pictures
Wicked Cool
Another revisit to older times, Len Price 3 take the period when the Beatles made pop records, and The Kinks threw out radio-friendly single after single. No one in the band is called Len Price, oddly, as it suggests the band chose the name to refer back to a golden 60s period. The way that the record sounds mirrors that – there seems to have been too great an attempt to make it sound as though it could be an uncovered 60s gem. The Kent trio do mix in some nice The Who, Squeeze-y, Jilted John cockernee punk, and the 13 tracks come in around the half hour mark, so no song outstays its welcome. Signed to Steve Van Zandt’s Wicked Cool label (van Zandt has a strong view that music has been downhill since 1970, and that mono is where it is at), The Len Price 3 have recently been knocking out some stellar singles, which are front-loaded into this album – the rest feels like a valiant attempt to pad the 30 minutes.

ACE rating 7/10