Happy 80s Kid

1980-1990

My mum and dad at the temple in Kasheli, Maharashtra, 1985

Bhimsen Joshi

90s/00s. Relax and realise you’ll never be healed from the wound that is your skin. Its colour controls your past and your present and your future. That is not a limitation. Too much nervousness with talk of race, the instantaneous denials and protestations that accompany the white response. A mistaken impulse for atonement, a dealing with, a righting of wrongs, that puts fears of inadequacy and bristling resentment in EVERYONE’s response. Can’t talk race and pop because too many people think they’re on trial. Anxiety of accusation means that we can’t all acknowledge that racism isn’t some single-issue habit that can be avoided or ejected but part of each and every one of us, not someone else’s ‘problem’ but in ALL of our souls. So, first, as if it’s possible, relax, it's the best way to stay vigilant. It’s nearly morning again. We’ll be done with each other soon. Listen to Bismillah Khan, perhaps the single most inspirational musical artist of the 20th century this side of Miles Davis, and remind yourself how little any of us know, how much any of us can feel.




   We've all of us, especially us British folk, got to be asking what it means to be one of us, be on the lookout for where that meaning hardens, and thickens. And we should all be aware of those frequent moments where music, a thing made of love, is used to shore up senses of national identity, simpler times, golden ages. As an English Asian I’ve spent much of my life out-Englishing the English, I’m paranoiacly aware, through a need to know my potential enemies, of what it can mean when white pop looks back wistfully. Britpop gave me plenty of reasons to be suspect, to wonder what dreams are getting re-animated when people hark back. Yeah 67/68 can mean revolution, but it can mean the Immigration Act the Labour govt. bought in, it’s neutering of Enoch’s 67 campaigns, it’s making of me as non-patrial.
   The letters from readers told me stuff – mainly that a lot of people were even wondering what the fuck I was doing writing for white music papers. Take my “black hip-hop shit elsewhere” was the most memorable advice, whilst their favourite bands draped themselves in the flag – I’ll leave it to you to care whether I cared but I was nurturing my own guilty revisionism too. Whilst Oasis were finally and fatally winning Britishness back for the non-fey and charmless for good, I’m trapped and tripped out and looking back, and hiding in my own vintage duds as well, listening to tapes in a CD age, trying to look like I’ve just stepped off a boat (i.e. smart and sharp). And my own tone of nostalgia for Marathi film-song finds ugly compassion in the 90s & 00s on the city streets and villages of Maharashtra. Mumbai, like Coventry, is a place where you have to work fucking hard to be a racist; you’re raised in a chaotic cosmopolitan fog of accents and languages – but in the past 20 years Mumbai, at its best is a model of religious tolerance, has been twisted by the equally idiotic manoeuvres of gunmen in hotels and the Shiv Sena. These self-proclaimed 'Army Of Sivaji' spread mayhem and fascist violence, spark anti-union riots and race-hate against Muslims and immigrant workers from other states, under the guise of bhumiputr, declaring only Marathi Hindus as true 'sons of the soil'.
   Their lunatic founder-leader, ex-cartoonist Balasaheb Thackeray, has spent his entire fetid Hitler-modelled political career spewing hatred of Islam, calling only for “Marathi songs to be played on the radio”. And the ironies like a stink rose unfold - Shivaji used as a figurehead of hatred, the guy whose bronze bust I proudly polish on my mantel, a warrior-king smart enough to know that religious tolerance was the key to uniting the people because the people practiced religious tolerance naturally.

‘Verily, Islam and Hinduism are terms of contrast. They are used by the true Divine Painter for blending the colours and filling in the outlines’ - Shivaji Bhosle

   Lata Mangeshkar, like all Marathi singers, sang songs about Shivaji because he was a hero to Marathis. In fact, she sang songs to him at the formation of the Maharashtran State, May 1st 1960 in Shivaji Park, Bombay. 50 years later, Lata, now convinced and close to the Thackeray’s, sings in Bandra park Mumbai for Shiv Sena, at a celebration of Maharashtra’s Golden Jubilee. Also in 2010, Asha Bhosle, Lata’s sister, keeps the tension in their prickly relationship going (a 50 year saga involving stolen lovers, musical rivalry and Baby-Jane-style sibling antagonism too epic to deal with here) by publically stating in Pune, a Shiv Sena stronghold, that ‘India is for all Indians, [regardless of religion]’, much to the disgust of the Thackeray clan. The stink rose keeps unfolding. Last time my mum went back a few months back, she found herself apoplectic at just how many of our relatives seemed to think it was OK to engage in precisely the kind of Islamophobia Shiv Sena have smeared across the Maharashtrian body politic. (Shiv Sena are currently co-opting protests about a planned nuclear facility in Konkan, the precise area of Maharashtra that my mum’s family comes from). Feels like they’re pressing in close. In the 90s, just as I’m finding my identity, it’s getting hijacked by cunts and thugs, and I’m meeting more narrow-minded English Marathis, later arrivals than my parents, whose politics cause massive late night arguments with my folks when they come to our house, idiots with idiot offspring who grass me up for popping out for a fag.

Lata & Asha in happier times

   Shiv Sena’s rise is part of the reason I haven’t been back in many years, and Thackeray’s use of Marathi music to perpetuate his rot is almost enough to make me stick all my old Marathi vinyl and tapes up in the attic to wait for a calmer age. Of course, Thackeray is why I never can do that. Music survives because it’s communication between times and places. It contains the history of the people who pass it on that journey and so Marathi music whether classical, folk or cinematic is always absolutely dependent, as is all Indian music, on the influence of Islam, and the intransigent eternity of ancient Vedic music, and the way those two forces do the do, get busy, get down and get funky with it - drone derailed, melody endless and triumphant.



   Missionary, evangelical Abrahamanic faiths whether Mughal or British have always run into the same problem with India. The vastness and variety of unscripted, unbroken spiritual practice, local but linked, was always finally impervious to books, the written word of god. The smartest auslanders soon realised that giving India architecture and infrastructure could impose a control stronger than the superimposition (for that is all it ever could be) of a foreign faith. Akbar knew it, and so Shivaji followed - people meet and play together, can’t be stopped. And so Sufi mystics and Sultanate courts bring new tunes, new instruments, new forms like ghazal and qawalli.
   As ever, music’s potential for abstraction gives it a generosity - a universality too slippery for politic's dull manoeuvres, too powerful a slipstream to not careen over those divides, only existing when flowing on beyond petty man-made notions like race, nation or state, living irrefutable proof that Shiv Sena’s project is a contemptibly ignorant, anti-artistic battle cry of inhumanity. Why else would an Islamic shenai master like Ustad Bismillah Khan be most famous for playing this beautiful tune, this tune I remember my mum and dad singing at the temple in the morning, this ageless ancient tune ostensibly Hindu but as memory-burned by the desert and the mountain range as it is by the jungle and the river. And the city's own new seething.


(One of Ghandi’s favourites, another old Indian who knew how precarious notions of Indian identity could be when shot through with bigotry or fear, the way wilful historical ignorance so often ignores the ways people really are, preys on resentment to turn natural respect and love into a deviant enmity. “To think that I should be dubbed an enemy to an art like music because I favour asceticism! I, who cannot even conceive of the evolution of India's religious life without her music!”)

   It’s not possible to listen to Indian classical music, such a huge part of Maharashtra’s pre-cinematic & Bollywood-cinematic musical history, without hearing Islam’s influence. Shivaji himself as Emperor of the Marathas, declaring independence from Muslim rule, was clever enough to realise that it’s the secular state that endures, and it’s in the 17th century, when Shivaji’s empire sought to emulate the tolerance and open-mindedness of Muslim sultanates around India, that Maharashtrian music takes massive leaps ahead, absorbing hugely important lessons from Iran, schooling itself from the ghazal of Pashtuns from what’s now Afghanistan and Pakistan (and back then was all Bharat, or India), from the Mughal-court musicians who bought their own traditions and instrumentation from as far afield as Eastern Europe and the Middle East.         Indian classical music is a polyglot mess of this itinerant innovation and intrigue, so it’s no accident that when Bhimsen Joshi died in January this year, Shiv Sena made no attempt to pretend he was some voice from a faux-Marathi past. Movie songs, which can still be tied in with a Marathi film-industry and a golden age concurrent (although still pre-dating) independence are utilisable by poltroons on the right – the ancient music that is the wellspring of those folk and film songs is less easy to crowbar into such modern rigidity. When I first heard Joshi I pissed myself. His voice made me laugh - it may well do the same for you, possibly because like me you’ve grown up thinking that voices can only do certain things, that someone like Tim Buckley is the limit of what the throat can do. Stay with Joshi and you’ll find yourself breathless, wracked, hand on mouth to keep in the gasps.


   His music, like all great Indian music, consistently defies the post-colonial partitions, the opportunistic games played by politicians with Indian ‘identity’ – his voice, when you hear it and let it take you, is an inexhaustible repository of human experience and emotion that absolutely breaks over such barriers like a tsunami, that reveals exactly how much he learned from the Muslim pioneers of modern vocal-Raga and Kyall (Abdul Karim Khan and Abdul Wahid Khan), how he was astonishing precisely because his music destroys the confinements of his Gharana and springs from the faithless wonder, and sacred fearlessness that has characterised Indian music for thousands of years. Muslims and Hindus have sung in each others temples and mosques for a millennium - Joshi’s music is proof that Raga is simply a framework within which anyone and anything can happen, his melodies the most astonishing modernist improvisations within that ancient framework, his songs as Islamic as they are heathen, as prehistoric as they are futuristic, as civilized as they are untamed


   What I learned in the 80s and 90s, digging deep into the concepts behind Indian music, is that those strictures you might read as confinements are there to be broken and blended and played with, that music only progresses when the societies that musicians come from are invaded, overthrown, absorbed, kidnapped, returned palpably and audibly changed. Immigration of people and ideas is the lifeblood of music - has been since time immemorial - and when you hear Joshi, there can be no doubt. You hear that, yes, vocal chords and lungs and minds and imaginations can be trained within a society to do things that are superhuman, but they can only resonate within you still, can only attain true immortality, when tied to a heart open to all human experience, all human lives, all human music. Indian classical music is so often talked about as a system, a lexicon, a blueprint you can’t stray beyond, and that might indicate confinement and limitation. But in contrast to the piddling-about that Western models of musical-freedom so often inspire, the discipline and intense intent of Eastern music is peopled by artists who can’t help but use the confines of their training to explore the infinite: these aren’t people who see being a musician as essentially pissing about prettily, but people for whom music is the only discipline in their life.
   Those ragas by Khan you heard up-page – they’re meant to be played at certain times of the day but how right do they sound at 2.am when nothing else makes sense? Joshi was a raging alcoholic but even in his later recordings and especially on his stunning film-soundtrack work with Lata, you can hear an artist absolutely committed - spiritually, intellectually and musically - to exploring all the possibilities, the infinity of expression and precision that the raga mode affords it’s most expert proponents. Lack of notation is key - oral transmission as opposed to the tyranny of text opens up the possibility of whispers going awry, of learning being challenged before it can turn into orthodoxy, of sounds mutating through race, religion, and in the white-hot inferno that forges the two in the heart. Every time I hear Joshi I hear something new. It’s because Indian classical music isn’t a system. It’s a launch pad into infinite space, whether that’s cosmic or metaphysical, emotional or intellectual.


 
   Of course it suits racist scumfucks like Shiv Sena to fundamentally misunderstand music, to bound it to an earth they see in terms of fear and loathing and lines between us. By the 90s, I was realising that the attempt to either assert a false racial history, or pretend that race has no part to play in music, were two sides of the same ignorant-assed coin. The difference being that by the 90s I was writing about it. I remember, it took me three reviews to figure out what it was I wanted to say and I’ve been banging on about it ever since. Don’t be daft, you’re not going to stop me now: the ultra-English stain I am on England cannot be bleached out, even if what I have to say is nearly done. Next time, before the dawn, I want to break down your pedigree to find out mine. I want both us mongrels to meet.

Single Of The Month 1
Marcus Intalex 
Hell To Pay
Metalheadz 
Right Action 
SonyBMG
Man, been so long since 'Take Me Out' and 'Matinee', long enough to forget what I ever loved about FF. Oh, no, holdup,  I remember. What I loved was 'Take Me Out' and 'Matinee'. What I hated was the fact they made any more songs than those two. Like Interpol, Futureheads, Maximo Park, Art Brut, and that whole wave of post-Strokes new-wave-of-old-new-wavers FF really should've been one hit (at a push, two-hit) wonders. Then we'd all look back with some fondness at that silly season where Topman sold P.I.L t-shirts and trousers that only fitted the malnourished and feckless. 'Right Action' is the same old same old, same old groove, same old sound, should be a hit, a pinched-off cookie-cut 'provision' for its audience as ultimately irrelevant as the music played on Bob Harris' modern country show. Pass.

Loxy/Resound/Blocks & Escher
Monsters 
Narratives Music 
Am I imagining things or is d'n'b shaking off its liquid headache and getting seriously HEAVY again? 'Monsters' is none-more Metalheadz in the atmospherics, sweeping synth-lines straight from Goldie's school of glistening futurism but the beats that unfold and unleash underneath are from an altogether more rugged place, akin to Shut Up & Dance's most ruffneck moments. Realise all these references are two-decades old but I've been out the loop so long it's all I have to cling to. Superb, unstoppable, beautiful.





Like any good MC, AB is massively OVERused at the moment but with a bowl of cold water in front of the fan, fags, a can of Rubicon and Tangy Toms within reach this has been pure summer bliss for a coupla months now. Cling on.

Cannibal Ox 
Gases In Hell 
Below System 
If CO's music sounded at odds with the mainstream back when 'Cold Vein' came out (20 years ago now) then they're even more exquisitely isolated now. No attempt by Vast Aire & Vordul Mega to 'contemporise' their sound cos they sounded like an ugly dystopian future in the first place — 'Gases In Hell' contains enough musical madness and lyrical gems ("I played flute at camp/that's how I met your mom") to suggest the new 'Gotham' LP is one to find and seek and steep yourself until Christmas. Which this year will be called 'The Last Dawning'.

Bill Youngman
Marmor 
SCR Dark Series
Very much into dark dark instrumental music this month, as both antidote to the heat and silencer of any thought beyond the pictorial and figurative. 'Marmor' is techno that could surely only be used as a movement between two other more-obviously dancefloor-friendly tracks, so held in suspension is this, a drone chord held, rumbles and detritus hitting the sides, the beat splintering into its own febrile decay. Like Sagat's equally engaging 'Satellite' on Vlek this is pleasingly hydraulic, tactile, viscous, the slide and lock of well-oiled bearings, till you realise this automata is composed of human elements, has tendons, breath. Say hello to our new humanoid overlords.


Dead Players 
Ever
High Focus Entertainment 
Dead Players (Jam Baxter & Dabbla on vocals, GhostTown on production) drop their debut self-titled album early August and 'Ever' is a tantalising preview. Amazing rhymes but it's the bluesy, spectral production that keeps you coming back. Music that somehow manages to sound both richly organic but also laced together with real instinctive finesse, beats and harmonica building the tension with a truly psychedelic sense of space. Get in on this now.

Enei ft. Chimpo 
Headtop
Critical 
"This one's bad like Kim Jong-il" - love the way this kicks off, just a punchy beat, a droned synth & Chimpo's stentorian dread-laden vocal all leading (and y'know it) to the bass-drop and fuck me when it comes it's Hyperdub heavy and Bug-style engulfing. On computer speakers it's compelling enough, on headphones or out yr blaupunkt it's so heavy it damn well makes you queasy, renders everything else a high-end sharpened fifty-pee to your dome. Superb stuff and keep your eyes on this Chimpo fella. He's ace.

One Direction 
Best Song Ever
Sony 
Not really a rip off of  the Who's 'Baba O Reilly' (although it's been truly joyous seeing the apoplexy of 'proper'/'real' music fans regarding the similarity), more a financially sensible fairly dull rewrite of 'Makes You Beautiful'. 1-D's people aren't dummies, they know that tiny reconfigurations of what's worked already will do for the foreseeable future, at least until Harry the Hairy Heed gets the solo career that the entire 1-D phenom is surely only a prelude to. However, 1-D fans should be aware that just because rock bands carp at 1-D (primarily cos their people aren't as ruthlessly heartlessly artlessly efficient as 1-D's people clearly are) doesn't really mean 1-D are actually any good. It just means that you, 1-D, their fans, their haters, The Who, Jake Bugg, The Wanted, Noel Gallagher are all roundabout as shit as each other. God I wish I was one of 1-D's people. I have ideas. Cameos on iCarly are all very well but until Zayn's tooled-up with a Ben-10-style Omnitrix and Liam&Louis start showing up for interviews playing Bakugan Brawlers the crucial & lucrative under-10 small-boy demographic will remain fatally unmilked. Penetrate all territories before the wheels come off! Quickly!


Frank Turner 
Losing Days 
Epidemic
Many many problems. The instagram-grained video for 'Losing Days' is all about the full English, tattoos (the new badge of the middle-class), orange&cyan colour schemes, earnestness without end.  It alienates me as much as any other commercial for private health care, online dating, unaffordable technology, Waitrose. The singer is repellingly sincere, unceasingly smug in his self-deprecation, and comes served with an artisan loaf and a selection of locally-sourced cheeses. I see no justification in this day and age for playing an acoustic guitar, other than to express a deep intrinsic conservatism musically and politically. Frank Turner's video says "this is music for music fans who support real music". I say "Wank Turner more like".

Epidemic
One Life 
Mic Theory Records
Oh such a joy in this heat to drop the needle on something not desperate for your attention but something confident and naturally graceful enough to just let itself swim into your every cell and take over. 'One Life' is just gorgeous, a simple waft of '80s funk rotated and augmented minimally but devastatingly by guitar and bass. The album's called 'Somethin' For the Listeners' and has just jumped to the top of my must-get list. A blessed relieving reminder of the TRUE culture aside from the misrepresentations and lies. Essential.

Jessie J 
It's My Party 
iTunes
Just a thought - gosh she's a tedious loathsome little mockney turd isn't she, Jessie J? 'It's My Party' is all about how she doesn't care about her haters, doesn't care so much in fact that she spends 232 seconds of your life bellyaching about how she's a 'grown woman now' and proffering painfully unfunny flailing couplets like 'don't you get tired of being rude?/ awww come give me a hug dude'. What she singularly fails to acknowledge is that she's been one of the luckiest fuckers in pop of recent years, has been given innumerable opportunities via all kinds of mediums to weld herself to the nation's hearts with the unqualified support of all the different sectors of the media industry, press, TV, radio. If, given that saturated, almost entirely PR directed exposure, it turns out the nation actually finds you a fucking annoying self-pitying twat mebbe the problem's actually with you JJ? Just a thought. Maybe haters wouldn't hate so hard if you didn't consistently find ways to add extra antechambers to the already palatial detestation you've built in their hearts? Just a thought.  
   The video to this sums up her problems - as she passes by (and wafts her nose at the fakery) of the 'hipster' party she spies through a keyhole she instead crashes the room next door, full of fashionably bearded 'rockers' (all wearing high-fashion leathers and 300quid haircuts). Trouble is she also takes it upon herself to do some air-guitar, the kind of misplaced shit air-guitaring (too low, too wide) you'd ordinarily expect only from a supermodel or piss-taking townie-at-the-rock-club. Please, JumboJobbie, enjoy your life, it IS your party, just don't get so annoyed when people suss you as the fucking appallingly mediocre and unjustifiably arrogant human being you clearly are, let alone get so huffy and defencive when we quite reasonably engage in fervent daily prayers that you fail in every aspect of your life ahead. It's nothing personal. You're just a wanker. Just a thought. 

Randomer
Ruffa
Turbo
Pangaea
Viaduct
Hadal
'Ruffa' is a natty little electro-banger that starts off too-straight but then reveals its little trick - a suddenly totally wonky detune detournment of the synth-lead that unhinges the track and the listener at all the right moments. When that wonkoidness starts infecting the bass all those clever-clever comparisons you might draw tween this and innumerable StreetSounds comp-offcuts you care to name are rendered irrelevant. This is tight hard bodyrock for a whole new generation of shrimpers everywhere.
  Pangaea also deal with the same Mantronix/'Rockit' lexicon of sounds but inject so much poisonous bass and so many damn-near unpleasant distorted fake-brass noises its more like that ace moment in 1997 when Speedy J got all noisy and nasty. Pick 'em both up.

John Robinson & Kyo Itachi 
Mystical Strings (Venom Remix) 
Shinigamie Records
Last night I listened to this on headphones whilst watching my old 'Chocky' videos and have to admit that it scared the shit out of me. Something about the loop JR's found here, a spooked skeletal pulse of terror that sounds like decaying fingers tracing the lines of your face before gouging your eyes out. Jinkies, gang, I'm getting all freaked out again just remembering it. Anti-summer monster. Also seek out Dirt Platoon's 'Army of Two' that also features Mr.Itachi — best Japanese hip-hop since DJ Krush.

Dirg Gerner
What A Life
Eglo
Something about this gets me, same way Twin Shadow & Bludd Relations still get me although I know the datedness is undeniable and problematic, suspect a moustachioudness that should repel me - there's a simplicity to the arrangement and singing though that sounds like it's played live, just a man with a synth and a great pre-loaded lovers-rock beat he's downtempo'd to a somnambulist crawl. From a 6 track self-titled EP on the increasingly fascinating Eglo. My job for autumn is to poke through his foliage. Just did an image search. He has no moustache. This pleases me.

Coldplay 
Atlas 
EMI 
The true pulsating (like an abscess) soundtrack for the joyful nazi-khazi daymare of Coalition government but at time of writing, no leak of the music only the lyrics for this longawaitedbycunts newie 'Atlas'. Handy really cos my first exposure to these ubiquitous god-bothering toss-merchants was the lyrics to 'Yellow', the reading of which informed me right there right then that piled-skyhigh-shitness was all this band were ever gonna give us. So, what's been bothering that Tory motherfuck Martin now? "Some saw the sun/ Some saw the smoke/ Some heard the gun/ Some bent the bow". Riiiiiight . . . he does know the Olympics has already happened doesn't he? Oh I see, Hunger Games tie-in (should've guessed some kind of product-endorsement was going on) - I'm guessing this is going to sound geometrical and pretty and has half a hook it rotates endlessly, I'm guessing it stays in that hateful hinterland between pop and rock where neither is done effectively but enough people can convince themselves all is 'real' and 'proper'. I'm guessing there's enough dull passages of instrumental Radioheadesque tastefulness to be eminently usable in trailers for the new season of ITV drama and adverts for megapixel cameras and liberating sanitary-protection. Quite remarkable, or perhaps inevitable, for a band to get that big when nothing, literally nothing has ever been at stake with their music. As their biggest fan and spiritual godfather David Cameron said to me the other night as we both toasted Satan with a foaming pint of the blood of innocents and threw another disabled benefits-claimant on the fire - "it's only through Coldplay's kind of ruthlessly inhumane commerce that we can start competing in the global race". When you mean nothing you have found your time.   

Silent Knight
Stand Up
Elementality Productions
Bit late to this but has only just stopped being a leak and being an official release — fantastically ruff 'n' rugged little terror from SK and the magnificent Illmind on the mix. Snap it up, just don't let your fingers get too near its mouth. Don't show it fear, it can sense it.

SINGLES OF THE MONTH 3
House of Black Lanterns
Truth & Loss (Fracture's Astrophonica Remix)
Ghettozoid
Boy Toy (House of Black Lanterns Remix) 
[Houndstooth]

Daft Punk 
Lose Yourself To Dance 
Daft Life/Columbia 
About as good as the Basement Jaxx comeback i.e not very.  Reprising the Pharell/ Rodgers/  Bangalter/ Homem-Christo fourway that gave us the Official Song Of 2013 (and Christ, I'm human, I LOVED 'Get Lucky') - but nowhere near as addictively or compellingly. Rodger's guitar is a lovely thing but the groove is too slow, too lumpen to really engage (at that speed only the coming together of Al Green and Willie Mitchell will really suffice), and there's a fatal sense of disengagement/disinterest between the bass and the drums, the former not clear enough, the latter too big and echoed to get me on the dancefloor. In the gaps between Pharell's voice and the vocoder you could be listening to Haim and that's simply not good enough.

Sanys 
Hired Guns
Downfall Theory 
A sensurround sound in a two inch wall, 'Hired Guns' occupies the same kind of sonic/spiritual place as the hardest European techno with spine-punching chunks of Beltram-style mentasm swirled into the hypno-hold of the bass, a headache, almost emetic . . . 'dubstep' just means non-happy electronic music now doesn't it? Glad about this. Ugly, compulsive, brackish, drink deep.

Goldfrapp

Kid Tsunami ft. Sean Price 
Bang Exclusive 
Head Bop Music 
Head Bop's in-house producer Kid Tsu has arranged an absolute fucking beauty of a backing track for SP to spin his usual undeniable skills over here. As hot, heavy and thunkingly unstoppable as a prime Betty Davis original, scratches and sirens strafing across the mix to delicious effect whilst Sean freestyles with nonchalant ease and incisiveness. Superb.

Spectrasoul 
Sometimes We Lie (DLR Remix) 
Shogun Audio 
Bliss to every synapse. Vocals and keyboards that swirl like a tropical eddy, rippling with life, saved from over-purdiness by the wonderfully wonkoid bass, a bass that swims and dives and surfaces bearing coral with the wayward grace of a slightly pissed Man From Atlantis. Superb stuff from the ever-ace Shogun.

Katy Perry 
R.O.A.R 
iTunes
In all kinds of ways I happen to think that Katy Perry is one of the most objectionable people in modern pop since Madonna. Like Madonna, a prissy slow-witted thiever and diluter of better sources, like Madonna self-consciously 'shocking' no-one but people as tiny-minded and conservative as herself, like Madonna setting herself up as some kind of figurehead of liberation while conforming utterly to the most cravenly retrograde impulses & expectations of the men and women that inhabit her songs and fanbase, like Madonna always liable to sing for the underdog whilst culturally crushing them out. Certainly a rather crappy role-model for my nippers (which matters, if that's who you're pitching to), offering quite liddrally NOTHING in her role as pop star except titillation and surrender - 'Kissed A Girl' set out her shitty stall, even the melodically tolerable 'Hot N Cold' revealed her voice to be one of the most potently unloveable (because smugly assured of its 'passion' and 'power') in pop and the candied sexist vomit of 'California Girls' and the truly gagworthy 'Firework' have cemented her deep in all good person's bad books.  'ROAR' continues her tedious, too-visible pre-eminence in pop and will be loved by my two little girls. Thank god there's a new Juana Molina album to combat this shit with.

Nelly f. Nicki Minaj & Pharell Williams 
Get Like Me
Universal Republic 
Best thing he's done in fkn ages, a 'Drop It Like It's Hot' minimal groove you could listen to forever,  and of course Nicki kills it. A bit too much Pharell for my liking (check out how he fucks up Azealia Banks' otherwise intriguing 'ATM Jam' this month) but I'm nitpicking, this is tight, smart pop directed at the feet but with that crucial touch of suggestive infinitude to the rhythm to keep you coming back for more.

The Mole 
Lockdown Party (DJ Sprinkles' Crossfaderama)
Perlon
Don't allow the fact that tediosity-merchant Sven Vath is regularly spinning this at the moment put you off - 'Lockdown', esp. in this Sprinkles re-rub is 12 minutes of lightly lubricated body-rock that flows and syncopates in all the right places to loosen up any party you'd care to drop it at, bridges under construction at first but eventually taking over until the whole thing is just one long held-moment of build towards a resolution that rarely, if ever, comes. Prickteasing par excellence.

Wyld Bunch w/DJ Brans ft. Hannibal Stax & DJ Djaz 

I don't go looking for problems. They find me. In this numb age music must electrify every synapse, fill the space in my atoms with fire. A tight alternative to the sloppy seconds every other less-potentially-abstract/suggestive artform is offering. But all I'm getting is a migraine of mehness, a gobfull of slurry, grossed out, gagging on the hangover before it hits, the endlessly rotating self-pity of modern pop. For the first time since 85/86 I can wholly equate 'chart' music with 'shit' music.


Y'know the place. Where the skinny people writhe. Where everyone aims to look like they're in an advert. Where the good-looking find each other: aka Hell on earth. The place where pop is now locked because to step out of the club is to lose the safehold, the sure purposelessness, the backdrop of insubstantiality that makes all this lack-of-substance seem right/apposite/enough. Because like love as subject, the club as locus shuts out the world, shuts down those dangerous parts of our day'n'nite that threaten to not get with the programme, join the step, the hotbeat-soundtracked on-the-spot march forward, the excess consumption, the forgetting, the proud self-love and inevitable self-pity and endless self-advertisement.
   We're being catered for because for a decade we told the industry that we only want what it gives us i.e. more of this brain-dead fuckery, we tell them that we're incapable of imagination, thoughts dependent on a thumbs-up/peer-approval to exist, capable of only that tweaked delirium-on-ourselves, incapable of language beyond 2am wittering, drunk lols & posturing, musically and lyrically lashed to the triptych tethers of dancefloor and bar & the homes where we wallow, the rooms where we get ready for the endless party that calls us outside. We're in the club, and we can never leave, and though there's stairs to cry on and 50p pints to binge on and bouncers to argue with and toilets to take dirty photos in and cubicles to get those eyes widened we are always leaving but never making it out. All we do is drink, drug, give, give, splay, lose everything, snarfle scraps starting scraps, leaving behind an imprint of nothing.
   This is where pop puts us now if we're single, if we can't mewl about him, or her - in the club where the music, no matter how thin, can marshal movement, make you forget your stasis, blank-out your slow depletion into time. Handy of course that your typical club-friendly backing track doesn't impose the need to find a hook on the singer/writers: Madonna's 'Ray Of Light' has a hell of a lot to answer for in bequeathing us a whole gen of pop writers who think vaguely 60s-style barbershop raga vocals around a technoid-thump will suffice, will in fact equal some sort of trippy 'exploration' of the self. Personally, were I a girl looking to be spoken for by the eternally-strobelit flash of modern girl-pop, I'd be scowling on the balcony, mentally flamethrowing you fucks, ducking out, hiding under the hill. But I'm too old for clubs, look like a narc, or simply an ageing pervert. And girl-pop itself, infuriatingly makes me feel like lecturing it, teach it something unmannered, get that strap back on its shoulder, learn it hard that its mistaking 'attitude' for style and assemblage for creativity. If I had a fanny I'd feel unspoken for. As unspoken for as I feel being a man.
   Look at what pop's women are wearing. Even in Gaga's orbit of influence, it's so fucking dull out there. It's as if Girl pop looks at 30s Vogue, 70s Cosmo, 80s Face/ID, looks at the dress-up-games the high-street makes easy & search-free, throws shit on and waits for those old spirits to reinhabit the body beneath and the mind behind such carelessness. Ain't gonna happen. Those old moments of beauty, those looks so steely, timed and timeless were animated and arranged by folk who worshipped new gods, the camera and the motorcar and the mirrorball and the MDMA and that spirit cannot be conjured off-the-peg, cribbed from an idiot's guide or splattered on with a sequin gun.
   Frankly, all o'y'all folk below 30 aren't real clubbers. You can't take your medicine or your ale, you're lightweights & lemmings too scared to be alone in the crowd. Soundwise you're all too lamprey-like in your fixation on suckling from the industry, too dependent on the narcoticizing discharge you sup from its diseased perma-botoxed teats. Loneliness, joy and solidarity are what nightclubs are all about. Girl-pop right now, locked in the club, always in the club, club-friendly, can only be about loving it, losing your phone mebbe and dignity always but never ever your 'crazy', 'mixed-up' self. Life becoming a brochure, an advert, music becoming similarly deodorised, tooled for the brand it's promoting, the celeb PR strategy it's merely an adjunct to. For all the chatbout boys wanting to touch your junk, the inferences of wildness, club-friendly pop emerges as really only about belonging to the binge-drink hoipoloi, to safely derailing yourself in the knowledge that someone or some song will pick up your pieces and make them whole, take you home to the suburbs, tuck you up, hold your hair whilst you chunder, join you for coffee in the morning like the millions of consumers like you.
   I hear no shattered women on the radio right now, no one swallowing men like air or devouring worlds or commanding the cosmos or even telling the truth. Only empty-headed little girls skweeming and squeaking about what rockstars they are. Well we get the pop we deserve, the pop Fearne Cotton likes, but even if I were white skinny and pretty I'd feel lagged behind, let down, and I'd be wondering why the fuck these drippy bitches like Flo & Ke$h think they deserve to be famous. Good taste? Where's the fucking bravery? Where's girls like I know, rather than the girls & guys I'd cross streets, change clubs, emigrate, to avoid. If pop is a club right now, I find myself walking past all the tables packed full of braying twats and simpering saps and desperate to recognise a friendly face, a real face, smart people who are a laugh, rather than all these desperately needy, charmless loudmouth ignoramuses and fucking students. Why would I be up in this club? It fucking sucks. The charts right now, and the 'club-friendly' pisspile that increasingly constitutes it, prove that half-knowledge is more annoying than dumbness, especially when it appeals to the proudly quarter-witted and smugly ill-informed experts known as the great brutish public. You are welcome to each other.

This is Kelis' most 'European', club-friendly album and it's been infected by the same mediocrity that's currently making most of that club-friendly pop feel like it's on a checkout-conveyor to hell. The look, as ever, is crucial - the outfits on Flesh Tone's sleeve fit Kelis' mix of the middling and modish perfectly. Half-decent, mainly bad, what happens when you let a model dress herself. Front cover – as ever with K great face. Po(i)sed, looking beyond your shoulder, righteous combo of Dietrich ice & Crawford heat. Fab over-cooked headdress, the rest a Primark mess of mis-match and over complication where a block of black'd be better. Within, a 'Diamond Dogs' half-hound half-popstar pastiche seemingly conceived and created without any connection to the songs/words, a filigree fancy without the suggestiveness required, a fake-jewel chainmail disco dress you know will get way too heavy come midnight coupled with a daffy looking head of tin bling. Again, always, good face. Back cover – a brilliantly understated feathered two-tone bird-death atop the dome, some embarrassingly awful flesh-beneath viscera-tattoos & gore-paint, partly bringing out neck-tendons and the heart beneath the breast, helpfully framed & pushed by K herself and some careful under wiring. I focus on the looks because Kelis has never given me any reason to focus on anything else, watching 'the event' that you could see this album as 'follow-up promo' for i.e. the 'Acapella' video, you're again waiting for that chorus that never comes, bored by those verses that never fly, never move the heart. Never move the heart.
   My heart's not built like modern hearts see. Modern hearts move because of any idea that happens. Idea = they're trying = default praise earned. Enough to try, pitch up, audition and who cares there's no real magic, just the simulacra of daring. In the 'Acapella' video you're watching the dullest, most borrowed 'reimagining' of Kelis' identity imaginable. Because the sound is neither hers nor interesting enough to bully her out of things, and the looks are all thieved. Between the feathers and paint the eyes are dead, deadened, don't need to burn or bewitch, simply stare and be available and simply be. Po-faced tedium. We're being catered for.
   The album's failure doesn't matter a jot of course, Kelis' career has been about big singles. Singles that are not classic, singles that are fundamentally novelty records. 'Milkshake'& 'Caught Out There'& 'Trick Me' were songs that stuck for a summer, that would be actually tiresome to hear now, and each serve as reminders that the albums they came from, Kaleidoscope & Tasty were over-rated by mighty whitey, unloved in the memory, and only sporadically salvaged from mediocrity by the right collaborators bullying their personas/production to the fore (Neptunes/Andre3000).
   All Kelis has proven, time and time again, is that she has nothing to say, a middling voice to say it in, but she's sufficiently imaginative in her self-portrayal to hoodwink folk into thinking she's somehow some innovative 'spin' on the dead-end of modern r'n'b. On Flesh Tone her collaborators are David Guetta, the Benassi cousins, and a few other Mondrian Sky-Bar-friendly DJs and the hoax is over. For all her insistence that this album is about the birth of her son, becoming a mother etc what this album actually is is the sound of Kelis finding nothing to strike but borrowed poses, nothing to say but that she's here, nothing to sing bar her own strangulation/obliteration in the mix. A merciful 37 minutes long, mainly segues, and what a grisly, opportune yet unengaging mix it is – 'Intro's slo-mo Moroderlite backdrop coming on like a particularly weak Eurovision entry, '22nd Century's appalling zeitgeist-flailing vagueness masquerading as profundity (arserot like “religion, science-fiction, technology/There's no difference from you and me” couched in a nasty leathered hetero-house-interior).
   Two tracks in and you can sense just how carefully pitched Kelis''dance' direction is – just pissweak enough to get the requisite kudos from numbnuts daft enough to see this desperate bid for quasi-anonymity as some kind of 'bold' deflection of identity, the subsumation of Kelis' essentially thin and empty musical persona in other peoples' off-cuts/semi-bangers. Club-friendly. We're being catered for. It'll probly work for her but don't let anyone con you this is bravery or ballsiness, this is nine cameos on mediocre chart-dance tracks turned into an album, given credence by sleevenotes that bleat about having “love and life in mind”, about it all “coming from my gut, not just in an annoying warm & fuzzy way, but in a triumphant women rock way”. Grammatical shoddiness aside those notes start reading like exploitative bullshit the further into Flesh Tone you prod, the fuck-awful '4th Of July' one of those songs about sons (like Clapton's suicide-cash in 'Tears In Heaven') that gives the child no identity beyond how it can repair/redeem the singer, the parent, the celeb for whom the child is a valuable marketing tool. Kelis seems less genuinely moved by the blood, sweat'n'tears of having a kid than she seems chuffed she's finally got something to write about, finally an 'identity' where previously lived nothing but attitude & accoutrement – she's wrong, she's still bereft of the essential identity a true artist needs to grab & fixate you, only now her emptiness has that extra grisly level of sanctimony that parenthood (or, seeing as she's a celeb, nanny-hiring-hood) gives the rich. The music that backs this stuff (incl. the barely b-side-worthy nowtness of 'Home' and the sub-Madonna/Orbit fishpaste of 'Acapella') is the kind of techno you imagine the boys from Justice thinking was great, the kind of mid-European Ibiza-friendly tedium that you really shouldn't have time for in your life. Listening, finger hovering on your speakers off-switch, to the boooooooring 'Scream' (lyrics that are pure 10-your-old emo) and nauseating 'Emancipation' (lyrics that are pure 40 year old hippy) you wonder quite why anyone would need their dance music so woefully polite as this, sentiments as cloyingly daffy as this.
   (Because if you want good club music you could/should be liznin to Soul Of Man's Breaking In The House vol.2, Meat Katie Live from the Opel vol.8., Mantelo's Matadero Mix 2010, Peepshow Ownerz Spring Joke mix, Ado's Wax On podcast, Opulent Temple's Deep Underground Gough Street sessions, Reid Speed's Inside The Ride mix, Disturbed Beats 14, ID's This Is Breaks mix, Vandals' The Street Is Watching mix, Resistance Lowdown & Dirty mix 2010, L Vis & Bok Bok, Robosonic's Berlin Kreuzberg Insitut mix 2010, Grand Hotel 30min Promo mix, Inquisitive's OMGITM 2010 set, Rossco's Jakked On Smakk & Crakk mix , LHF's Pipedown mixes, all findable w'a quick search on beatport, soundcloud, noiseporn, techfunk-manifesto or links contained therein and nary a Guetto touch, ethnodelic vocal or bad lyric between em)
   I couldn't imagine a reason beyond laziness to let Flesh Tone's major-label US-idea-of-Eurodance deodorise your space, bland-out your day. In summary and feeling summery - Flesh Tone is perfick for the racks in Asda, great for the same dumb girls who dig Florence and the new shit retooled Kelly Rowland, great for people who know fuck all about music but think they know it all. You could do so much better for yourself, but if you've got tenners to spare on your next trip out go on ahead and squander them on Flesh Tone's half-hour of dullness. Final word to my 11 your old, trying to concentrate on her sewing while I'm playing this. 'Just turn it OFF dad. She's pointless'.


   Which does beg the question – what real female figureheads are there for girls to idolise, aspire to, learn from in music right now? In a pop world in which female 'presence' is in glut/spreadthin, it's startling how little of femme-import is being given, how so many of the supposed 'divas' in modern pop have nowt to offer young minds bar money-hunger, man-dependence and just-dumped aggravation. Leaf through Mizz, watch Flaunt for an hour, make the colossal strategic error of listening to the charts, and you'll see girls talk about themselves, sure, but always ONLY in relation to their relationships, only in relation to how near/far they are from love, only in relation to how much they can lose/claw back of themselves in the permanent night-out that is pop's sole focus and context in 2010. Crucially, whilst you'll see lots of girls, you won't hear a single word that dares to antagonise you, that really addresses how scarily fast and furious with innovative invective girls can be. Obvious why girls are so ill-served at the moment, why none of pop's chat and cattiness (exceptions: Gaga, Britney & Beyonce on their good days; Shakira – all of whom crucially don't try and talk to/for their young fans, just luxuriate in their own supra-identities) actually matches up to the way girls talk/live/think - somewhere along the line middle-aged fanboys started whispering to pop that if it wants to cut deep it must only thieve from the past the fanboys curate, that it can't do politics, that being a poetess is less important than simply being a witty conduit for the babble of what's contemporary, a simpering squeaker of lad-mag-friendly spunkiness. “I really like your beard.” Jesus. They're being catered for.
   In this world where real girls turn to pop only to find themselves unmirrored, absent, Envy's Set Your Self On Fire (Stopstart) isn't just the greatest British teenage debut since Disco Inferno's 'DI Go Pop', it's a rare righteous document, a necessary UK counterblast to the Americanisation of emotion & speech, my debut-album of the year so far by several country miles. Kicking off with the title track you find a microcosm of the whole: a spontaneous human combustion insisted upon by young Nicola Varley of Manchester, an insistence that an immolation in your/her own labyrinth of language is the only redemption available, matched perfectly by Medasyn's spaced-out dub-grime beats & synth drama (a feat he manages throughout). 'Nadine' follows, a rescue-bid for a friend lost to a dickhead man, the emotion taut and torsioned by a heartbreaking melody, the words never less than totally believable, totally real, totally compelling – it's a trick Varley's smart enough to pull whenever the subject matter threatens to get traditional, 'On The Horizon' exists in a stunning space for a song about relationships, love, environment, sky, sun, intimacy and the infinite woven together in one devastating poetic moment.
   The brilliant lyricism throughout Set Yourself On Fire is something lazy crits would tend to say is beyond Varley's years – how defeatist, how condescending, how utterly stereotypical and plain wrong in the face of Envy's huge huge command and control and alchemy with English, her fearless explorations of its limits and launchpads. 'Normal' is Envy's admission of how language has bent her out of shape with the world, ranges her against the state of things by dint of a mind that works too fast, a tongue too twisted to talk just common sense, & the single 'Tongue Twista' that first hipped some of us to Varley's young genius still blows your mind as wide as when you first heard it. There's a track here that eclipses it though, 'Sometimes I Think Deep' is a stunning rush of words that flashes with searing insight, lines that dazzle yet almost derail Varley's voice in a heartfelt tremble of self-revelation that damn well skewers your heart. Through the chucklesome 'Chips In My Dip'& 'Friday Night' what you're hearing is all of those Ke$has & Cilmis & Allens plain OBLITERATED musically, lyrically, stylishly.



THIS is the pop our daughters deserve, not just feisty but furious, not just witty but mind-blowing, not just realistic or dreamy but real and fantastical. The pop we done got lags laboriously behind Envy, lags behind how far we've come, how far we can go. Damn straight you should be angry about that, about how true Brit genius is getting marginalised by corporations unwilling to let us speak to ourselves and each other, corporations anxious to confine British pop music to that which can most successfully ape US models, confine British identity down to the same narrow class-base everyone chased in the election. Where Flesh Tone drowns female presence under old men's music, Set Yourself On Fire liberates a hidden voice and lets it speak, and if you ever listened to Slits, Raincoats, Huggy Bear, Lioness why the fuck ain't you listening to Envy's astonishing role-call statement of femme-intent 'Get Your Game Face On'? Blast it loud, tuck it under your arm and get out there evangelising – this is new necessary music saying new necessary things, Varley's concepts and flows finding perfect heavily suggestive backdrops in Medasyn's dark, dubbed-out, head-wreckage. Like I say, album of the year thus far, 60 minutes from here and now that will blast you to everywhere.
   Because we have to come down to our own moment of national realisation here: yes, Britain's got “talent”. Oozing out the streets, up from the underground, roaring out the corners and places and spaces where seemingly no-one is looking, the forgotten avenues where poets stride in seven-league boots with a confidence and focus unmatched by the cowardice and vagueness of those who should be dragging these supernovae through to us, to the stardom they deserve. Like seeks like, so inevitable that the giggling Jocastas and Jeremy's currently keen to write about pop, ( & also keen/able to work for the beast that is the schmindustry) are pointing us in the direction of bands, artists, bad backpacking rappers and britschool alumni from their same narrow middle class-base. As it has been for too long now, the WRONG people runnin' things from A&R to PR to the cheerleaders hired to 'write' about them - hence the WRONG people shoved our way as if we're meant to be satisfied/entertained. We're being catered for? As fucking if. It's what's most mad upsetting – Varley should be a star, should be bigger than God, should be stalked by paps and bothered by the 3am Girls, should be given the solid basis to develop what might be a long fascinating career from. But she says a little too much, a little too deeply, a little too quick, looks not right (and therefore entirely right). Varley herself hints at the struggle and depression her fearless self-exploration has earned her in 'Fire's darker passages (the scabrous 'Cocktails At Selfridges' and dread-filled 'Think Deep Pt.II').
   I pray that in this sewn-up biz of women purely fulfilling laddish fantasy & girly-stereotypes Varley can battle through, because our real girls, our daughters, our young people deserve better than what they're being given, deserve better than what this shitty blokeish industry thinks about women and the music they should make. And beyond gender, we should also be wondering why the mealy-mouthed semi-profundity of middle class indie-rock and club-friendly pop is getting our airwaves and telly-time and double-spreads when the voices from the estates, the voices from off the beaten and down the wrong streets is getting forced out into the edges (as they are politically as well).
   We've got the govt, the newspapers, the media we're told we deserve and for now there's fuck all we can do about it bar load the shitapult and keep an eye on their movements. But we deserve the music that none of those fucking chuckleheads even know exist. It's time for class, as a battleground, as a concept rather than a cheap joke, to re-enter pop as some kind of line in the sand, some kind of position of resistance – beyond that the realisation that for too long the press & industry have been sewn up by a bunch of posh boys and slightly-less-posh wannabe-lads. These motherfuckers cannot be allowed to let British pop rot on the vine, to let it fester into the insignificance of only appealing to that bunch of utter wankers known as music fans. All of us need to investigate those less-than-official channels, those non-sanctioned spaces of rapture where word & sound are really getting forged into new infinities.

Angel Haze
Echelon 
Soundcloud 
Strike one — a dull-as-fuck backdrop, dull-as-fuck singing, dull-as-fuck rapping. Strike two — first heard on Zane Lowe's show, doubtless announced as if he was going to unleash seven-thousand shades of chemical warfare up your bumgut. Strike three — produced by Markus Dravs, the man also responsible for shaving the scab off whatever crusted creative boil oozed Coldplay and Mumford & Sons our way. For shame Angel. For shame. I knew by your boosters claims that you were 'doing something different in hip-hop' that you'd be soon knocking out crossover drek like this. You're out.

Arcade Fire 
Reflektor 
Mercury 
Another mistaking of metronomy for feel, vagueness for profundity. Somewhere in this flabby seven minutes of pffft there's a shitty 2 minute song waiting to break out. I'm not being picky. I'm just having standards i.e demanding that a pop song gives me pleasure, doesn't bore me, doesn't coast, doesn't come across as entirely unjustifiably pleased with itself. 'Reflektor' has not one moment of pleasure or wonder in it, only the smug constant insistence that hey wow, we're cool cos we're a rock band but we're trying to play disco. (That boom-tish alternated hi-hat rumble every fucker has down pat when they wanna get 'dancey', another rhythm section that thinks it's Frantz/Weymouth that hasn't listened to enough Dunbar/Shakespear to even come close). Broken down to it's constituent elements everything that should work is in place on 'Reflektor' (even that 'k'), James Murphy pushing all the right buttons to try and heat things up, eventually failing to stop it flailing because what's being played is so bereft of heart and purpose, the changes so signposted and monotonously run through you're simply witness to them going round them over and over again without any real sense of movement or import. Simply not good enough when the frontman and band are clearly such tedious & arrogant individuals they have to hide their non-personas behind 'zany' masks (and what a fucking tired trick that has become for a whole generation of indie meh-merchants) in the Cjorbin-annointed video. If you're going to make music like this you need words interesting enough, a personality big enough or voice intriguing enough (Bowie, Grace, Donna) to imbue all that rotational repetition with a sense of dramatic art and change. 'Reflektor' contains none of that, just sits wobbling like a wodge of flavourless jelly slopped on a bassbin, Bowie's fleeting appearance offering merely an aggravatingly tantalising glimpse of what might've been if a human being rather than a pack of 'tastemakers' had had a go at this 'song'. Pass.

Avril Lavigne 
Rock N Roll 
Epic
Rubbish song, covering too many melodic angles in the verse that are way too similar to things she's given us before and permanently despoiled by the dim awareness that maybe these cack lyrics are actually about her & that Kroeger fella. The notion of the pair of them "flipping middle fingers to the world" whilst listening to the demos of this is revolting enough, the stadium-rock sheen Max Martin has given it never really rises above it's Roxette-lite presets, and the fact the video desperately crowbars in tons of failed comedy and a lezza kiss with the girl out of 'The Wonder Years' should inform you of the desperation levels being mined here. As someone who has Avril's autograph (for my daughter, swear down) I just hope that 'Rock N Roll' keeps the wolves from the door & the baboon-placenta injections coming thick, fast & regularly. Avril will be 30 next year. Pretty soon she's gonna start looking ridiculous.

Azealia Banks 
ATM Jam
Polydor
Crocko'shit - and a useful juncture to introduce a brief, entirely racist note about rap music in 2013. Please don't listen to white folk with busy bylines and no friends outside of PR when they tell you what's hot to death. Cunts really haven't got a fucking clue. I mean, I haven't got a fucking clue either but everyone who reads me is well aware of that. You wouldn't trust a rock journalist who is gonna spend the whole year talking about nothing but Arctic Monkeys & QOTSA so why do folk trust music journalists who portray a hip-hop world that's just about Jay & Kanye and nothing else in 2013? Even worse, people so far into their inverse snobbery that in their universe whiteboy geeky hip-hop must always be ignored? Bollocks to that, whiteboy geeky hip-hop can be fucking ace. Unlike this crocko'shit. Crocko'shit. And speaking of whiteboy, geeky hip-hop . . .

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 1

2 Mex

2Mex & Maiselph 
All About Life 
Grimm Image/Flown/Urtopia 
Oh my fucking godfathers Exile KILLING the beat here — a truly unique Norman-Collier-style cut-out cut-up of a tiny wee warped weft of '60s psyche chorale that gets splattered and splayed across the simple undertow to genuinely psychedelic effect, a highlight from 2 Mex's 'Like Farther . . . Like Sun' set on Bandcamp. Missing Edan? Don't! This is just as unsettlingly addictive and textually gorgeous as anything that little sporadic shortarse ever gave us so you KNOW how damn essential this is! Large mojitos and chocolate pizzas for all involved please.


Black Thought 
Thought Process 
Bandcamp 
OOF the mighty Beatnuts' Psycho Les on the mix. BLAAAA the Roots mighty Black Thought on the mic. BOOM part of Tony Touch's mighty 'Piece Maker Vol.3' which has a cast list that will genuinely have you drooling like Wile E Coyote. Superb.

Bruno Mars 
Moonshine 
Universal Motown
I love this little fella. Gave us the single of 2012 no doubt ('Locked Out Of Heaven') and 'Unorthodox Jukebox' was a mostly corking soundtrack to last summer. 'Moonshine' manages to do that whole mournful power-disco ballad thang that Arcade Fire are aiming for so SO much better, mainly cos Mars has a gorgeous plangent voice and cos he really does pay attention to texture and tactility, the synth lines and harmonies here from a beautiful place where Fleetwood Mac meets 80s Earth Wind & Fire and where Haim watch from the wings, realising they've just been totally invalidated. Ambiguities, tightropes tween sadness and desire that other songwriters & producers simply aren't touching these days this side of Justin Timberlake. Plus it's all over sooner than you want it to be, a trick so many people forget to do it's a joy to see it so effectively exploited here. You want more, you rewind, you hunt for another station that's playing it, eventually you have to have it. That's the way pop works. A great single. 

Constant Deviants 
California (Jewelia Pt.2) 
Six2Six Records 
Perhaps one of the most underrated crews of the '90s were New Kingdom and they're blissfully recalled here by CD (M.I & DJ Cutt) with this beautiful slab of B'more-borne brilliance. Heavy assed beats, loops that seemingly had to be slowed down to a quicksand-stuck crawl to fit, astonishing whorls of harmonica and sheer noise sweeping across the mix, the words as stream-of-conscious ecstatically horrified as Killah Priest in his prime. Without a doubt the wooziest most fantastic hip-hop 12 of the month. Go get.

Disclosure ft. London Grammar 
Help Me Lose My Mind 
Island Records
There's a moment where the pristine stops being interestingly immobile, starts sounding static and dull. There is one good thing about 'Help Me Lose My Mind' and it's the basic bedrock of it, the low synth sweep that rolls and ebbs underneath the stop-start beats. There is one horrible horrible thing about 'Help Me Lose My Mind' and it's London Grammar's Hannah Reid's none-more-Julia-Fordham vocal. No matter what delicious manipulations it undergoes (and some of the b-vox are peachy)  it remains a cold unloveable joyless thing that reveals Disclosure as no less, no more than a Beloved for 2013. Do you really NEED that in your life? I envy your storage space and your ability to prioritise this tedium into your daily commute and I can only dream of a day when I can share in the benificient plenitude of your, and Disclosure & London Grammar's pretty-much unimpeachable taste and lack of vulgarity. Just don't come running to me when they tell you they've seen the light, give you a small brown leather book, insisting that they were right. I'll be in the basement listening to Motorhead and will not be disturbed with such tomtwattery.

DJ Spinna & Shabaam Sahdeeq 
Motion Picture 
Correct Technique Records 
Love the sense straight away that here be people who want to tell you a story. Remember? A story. Not sell you something, or themselves, or product place. They want to take you on a journey, a ride musically that's sumptuous, compelling, triumphant, a ride lyrically that's vivid, tactile, complex. Not been convinced by Spinna before but this entirely pulls me into its multiverse and encourages repeated exploration. Tap it, unwrap it.

Eliza Doolittle 
Let It Rain 
Parlophone 
Whaddayado when all the kook runs out? When your target demographic becomes bored of you a little? Y'can't do another 'Big When I Was Little' - that was shameless, a craven pile-up of retro-references as desperately flailing as Alan Partridge suddenly shouting 'TISWAS' then mumbling '. . . . errm . . . sweets they don't make anymore . . . '. It always seemed one step away from simply lurching into being the cover of the 'Fresh Prince' theme perhaps most guaranteed to mop up all that whined-for pocket-money. Of course you could always call it a day, become a model or a runner or an actress or simply ask daddy or mummy for a job somewhere quieter in the biz, somewhere a little less visible. [They won't mind taking a hit remember, and it might be the only way now that fame has become a purely hereditary issue]. Or of course, you could give 'your music' another go with one more album, toss in another collab with Paloma Faith, or the XX, someone who'll get you back in the Live Lounge with Jo Whiley's pisshole eyes squinting their love your way.
   Of course, it'd help, when you were creating your new album, the second record where you can't just be a ditzy purveyor of pastiche, if you actually had a soul, rather than just loving people whom you imagine had a soul a long long time ago. Something to sing about would also help, something beyond the endless cycle and circle of massive privelige and easy access and quirky dilletantism that's been your birthright so far. But you haven't got such a vintage thing as a soul as you imagine, and the right equipment and clothes won't make it grow anytime soon. Best bet is - as a tester, toss out some half-arsed 'soul music' that makes Emile Sande sound like Betty Davis, replete with vague lyrics about being a bit sad sometimes and being in love sometimes that you ripped off a thing you saw on imgur/r/motivational last night, and a hook that a small dull child would find melodically unimaginative. Small dull child Fearne Cotton, your mate, will love it, Rob Da Bank, another mate, will love the shitty obvious remix, mummy and daddy will support you in everything you do and when it tanks in the upper reaches of the top 30 your PR will be round to tell you to tell everyone they've lined up (mainly broadsheets, a few Redtops and Saturday entertainment supplements just in case) about how this album is 'more personal and more grown up' than anything you've done before. You'll appear on Later With Jools Holland and bask in the approval your slick big-band backing will get from the assorted sycophants and liggers who have, and will, always surround you. In discussion with your PR and label you'll decide to forego being grilled by Grimshaw in the morning (who wants to get sucked into that ongoing haemorrage)  and instead embark on the second stage of your musical career with Radio 2 firmly in your sights as an eventual playlist home, the ongoing Nike endorsement hopefully backed up by a healthy portfolio of Sainsbury's & Boots No.7 ad-soundtracking, eyes on those disposable-income ABCs, the  CDEs picked up on the way merely an unfortunate less-lucrative side-effect of aspiration and blanket-marketing. It's a plan that I hope comes off for Eliza, and 'Let It Rain' is a great, hugely forgettable and sophorriifically dull start to that campaign.
   I should also probably mention that I sincerely hope everyone involved in the new plan, from Eliza herself to her label and hard-working streat team, to Whiley, Cotton and Da Bank, Jools, The One Show, the bookers on BBC Breakfast, the project managers synergising marketing strategies and choosing new music to best soundtrack the soon-come autumn/Xmas ads, are able along  the way to STOP THEIR ARSEHOLES BEING TOO JEALOUS OF ALL THE SHIT THEIR MOUTHS ARE CONSTANTLY PRODUCING, THE ORDURE THEY'RE LETTING FALL IN SLOPPY MOIST CLODS FROM THEIR PERMANENTLY FAECALLY-STAINED LIPS AS THEIR ABSENCE OF A SINGLE IOTA OF WORTHWHILE HUMANITY BEGINS TO FERMENT THEIR REPTILIAN INNARDS FUCKING STAY IN LONDON YOU HOBBYHORSE CUNTS WHERE YOUR GOVERNMENT WILL PROTECT YOU GATHER AND SUPPURATE YOUR 'CREATIVE' MEDIOCRITY BACK AND FORTH TO EACH OTHER UNDER THE PROTECTIVE UNSHEATHED WINGS OF YOUR OZMODYIAN GOD CAMERON AND KEEP SUCKLING DEEP FROM HIS BRACKISH BITTER BEACH-PINKED DUGS THE ACRID MILK OF YOUR OWN ENDLESSLY SMUG MUTUAL EVIL.
Five out of ten, perhaps it's an 'album track'?



SINGLE OF THE MONTH 2
Ed O.G. 
The Great Divide (Remix) 
Blunted Astronaut Records
Have no idea who the man behind the decks here (Bodzier) is, but hats off fella for creating a rerub so damn delicious you wanna bite, slurp, snaffle it til the juice runs down your chin. Is it the pizzicato strings, the hauntological flute, the refracted Rhodes & harp that seals this to your heart so damn adhesively? Perhaps a combination of all of the above, plus typically commanding rhymes from Ed O.G. So damn fine I don't even want to hear the original. Grown up brilliance. 'Hip-hop is alive/hip-hop never died'. You're absolutely goddamned right. Livin' proof.

Gerstaffelen
The Old Villagers
Mos Deep Recordings 
Aroy Dee's Mos Deep offshoot is shaping up as an intriguing imprint and the title track on this new 12 is techno as you want techno to be - thick, oppresive, squelchy, hopeful, unforgiving, hypnotic, dreamy, disturbing. Do check out 'Little Green Munchkin Man' as well, totally old-skool jack-yr-body analogue house with grainy drums and detuned riffs that leave you feeling so wobbly you'll consider installing handles on your walls and casters on your feet and sliding round like you're the missing link tween us and our half-Segway half-human descendents. Clams on the half shell and roller skates.

I'll Be Your Dog/Everyday Apocalypse 
Blunted Astronaut Records 
Getting really intrigued this month by Blunted Astronaut, and this natty double-header ups the curiosity, 'Dog' being a sublime slice of '60s pop (produced by The Process) given fresh life by G & Muneshine's filthy-nasty rhymes. On the flip 'Everyday Apocalypse' will get less radio play but is even more brainjanglingly great, sudden stabs of a dying piano, bristling jazzy beats, great 'Lyrics of Fury' cut-ups, utterly minimal yet maximally devastating. Watch EVERYONE involved here, they're seriously on some brand new shit.

Ghostface Killah 
The Sure Shot Parts 1&3 (Remix) 
Soul Temple Entertainment 
Blasting by trailing lush flute and squelchy wah-wah, peeling away from traffic and gunning the engine, toe to the floor, congos and sudden string stabs straight from Curtis Mayfield at his most propulsively divine. 'The Brown Album' this comes from is supastoopidly essential, but the way this gives way mid-way to some deeply plangent mournful Isaac Hayes' soul whilst Ghost's rhymes actually get more hysterical on the slowed pace is just incredible and lifts this a cut above. Push yourselves winter-wards with this wonder.

Hus Kingpin (aka Hus of Tha Connection) feat. Roc Marciano 
Boss Material 
NA
From 'The Cognac Tape', rich with Moroder texture, heavy with dancehall-bass, thunking with funk, laced-up and lurid as a particularly choice Italian horror-porn soundtrack. Me like.

Keane 
Higher Than The Sun 
Universal/Island
As the brilliant originality and promise of its title suggests, 'Higher Than The Sun' truly comes from people for whom music is important, means something crucial, justifies life, people who have had to strive to get where they are in the dazzling firmament of British pop. It must've been tough for Tim Rice-Oxley and Tom Chaplin early on, especially for Chaplin whose family only had their paltry earnings from OWNING the £6-grand-a-term Vinehall Boarding School to support poor Tom's fledgling musical interest. Later,  in the mean corridors and dusty cum-smelling dorms of Tonbridge Boarding (at £32-grand-a-year pricier than Eton or Harrow) it must have been an even greater struggle for Tom, Tim and the Dominic they'd found hiding under their desks to explore their growing musical vision at all, beset as they must've been from all sides by distractions like their ever-growing Forex portfolios, lobster-thermidore for tuck AGAIN, and of course gangs of roaming pederasts in mortar-boards 'keane' (hehheh) to investigate their puckered downy young bumholes. And yes, ok,  Tonbridge was investigated for price-fixing but it was of course a cartel-ism merely in the self-same spirit of enterprise that made Britain great, an institution dedicated to turning out those captains of industry to carry empire worldwide, that spirit of freedom and greed that had seen the school through five-hundred years of good stead. It's testament to that spirit that they can also count Keane among their alumni, in their own busy 'creative' way similarly carrying commerce from the heart of the cricket-pitches and masonic lodges of the home counties all the way across the planet. We can all consider ourselves lucky that these plucky underdogs politely turned down the King of High Finanace Chris Martin's entreaties for Tim to join the truly magnificently profitable Coldplay in 1997 and struck out on their own, cos a life without Keane's pulsating posho passion-pop and bombastic bourgeouise balladry frankly wouldn't be a life worth living. The video trailer for this single (a new track from a soon-come LONG-awaited best of) sees Keane travelling the world, enduring the living hell of the best hotels, waiting areas and boutique studios money can buy. It's clearly tough (and occassionally the band have to use medium-grade Egyptian cotton towels to dry themselves, so 'crazy' does the action get!) but thanks for going through the fire Keane. We appreciate every still & sparkling moment.

Lorde

Lorde 
Royals 
Universal 
Nice lyric (genuinely anti-materialistic, a little bit of venom to the emptiness of its fantasy, a real sense of longing alongside the laceration), a voice that can be clean and pure and grainy, an arrangement that's subtle and insiduous and gets under your skin a bit (especially the sudden moments of stacked-up though obvious harmonies). I just hope to god that the amount of shit Lorde might be forced to do after this becomes the monster worldwide hit it's already been in the States will be spaced out, sparse and maintain the mystery she's still got intact. I don't trust her record company to manage that. I hope she's strong enough to. On this evidence she may well be but if I accidentally stumble across a video of her doing this live with only solo acoustic guitar accompaniment I can't be held accountable for the sudden volte-face in my affections.

Nina Nesbitt 
Don't Stop
Universal 
There's a line you can draw see, a line that's got us down this far. Lily Allen started it, that chattiness masquerading as 'wit', knowing that if in any way a lyric can mention trivia, the small things, the unfunny 'random' detail,  it will instantly garner itself the billion OMG SO TRUE likes of a whole generation. Ed Sheeran picked up that bolus and fashioned it with his hateful wish-he-got-done-for-shoplifting-in-Saudi pasty freckly hands into the dungball of pity and poesy that Nina Nesbitt's recently crawled out from with her own brand of ballache, that hate-worthy 'Go Out' single from a few months ago with the punchably breathy voice replete with gag-reflex quiver, arm-marks from the permanently toted acoustic, the rhythm section left as a neat'n'tidy (yet charmingly 'ramshackle') twang-n-rattle (like Fairground Attraction without the . . . . no, sorry, EXACTLY like fkn Fairground Attraction really), the lyrics, like Sheeran's, a revoltingly smug peering down on wannabes and 'fake gangsters', as keenly 'observational' and 'gentle' as the comedy of Michael McIntyre & Russell Howard that fans of this kind of dizzy dogshit are so fond of. The new single, doubtless set to be a bigger hit, is a cover of Fleetwood Mac that you've probably heard on some fucking advert for some shitehawks or other and as a McVeigh song was utterly loathsome to start with before this fkn horribly perky re-rendering. This kind of music needs dum-dum blunderbussing right in the florals. Please Stop, ruining our tomorrows.

SINGLE OF THE MONTH  4

Rah Digga

Rah Digga 
New Hoes 
Soundcloud
FUCKIN' TESTIFY RAH! Way way better (because it has a point and a purpose and a snarl in its craw that will not be silenced) than Angel Haze's attempt at Kanye's 'New Slaves' track, Dirty Harriet rips forth on Miley and all other tweenage twerkers with a fury that burns brighter than a billion suns. Save it for the next kiddies' birthday party you have to DJ and watch the kids go absolutely NUTS. Nice to have you back maam.

Randomer 
Bring 
Hemlock 
I'm (un)paid to generalise but in general it's the low-end that has to grab me first, that I first fall in love with. The treble, the detail, the pretty stuff I eventually notice, yeah it all can deepen that love but unless the bass and drums get me right off, I'm not interested. If I can draw a crass analogy I'm a bum and legs man: it's nice if a song has a nice face/chest/tits but if it's got a flat non-existent arse I'm never really gonna take a fancy. Inevitable I'd be phwoaaring at this but I have altogether stranger, as yet uncategorisable (and potentially illegal) desires for it, so deformedly great is the surplus of bass & hugeness of beat, it's like an arse the size of a house. Attack of the 50ft arse. Fantastic stuff from Randomer from one of 2013's great labels.

Robin Thicke 
Give It To U 
Star Trak
My god, can you imagine how tiny Robin Thicke's dick is? Judging by his over-compensation it must be Clarkson small, Gervais small, with a couple of tiny balls looking like Murun Buchstansanger.  I mean, if you feel the need in a video to surround yourselves with pre-pubescent fantasies of 'girls' all of whom have bodies like little boys, then actually have your name with 'has a big dick' spelled out in balloons after it, whilst the editor remains under brutally strict instructions to cut out all those moments where your little trouser-maggot spooged its thimble-load and you looked prone & vulnerable rather than just repellently arrogant, you've got to have some serious issues possibly not adequately addressed by the innumerable air-pump and L'arginine-tablet offers you've been so hoodwinked by in the past. Seriously Mr. Thicke, go see a counsellor, speak to someone about it cos these shitty derivative singles about how your massive member is going to fuck everyone in the world simply aren't working and your schtick as a kind of rude Michael Buble will run out of steam soon. Counselling will help. Yes it might require remembering those embarassing moments in the changing rooms where your classmates roared with laughter at your miniscule bait'n'tackle, yes it might mean reliving those horrible tweezer-poised moments of spunk-drenched self-loathing all over again and yeah you look even uglier when you cry but it's time to face up to the fact that God blessed you with an atrophied acorn in the cock department and move on. Once those lies that have sustained you (like size not mattering) have been stripped away, and those hometruths driven home (You can't make butter with a toothpick) if counselling  means eventually coming to terms with your lifetime of enforced celibacy it'll be worth it, and save you lots of potentially dangerous quack-treatment and uncomfortable implants down the line. Jude Law, Mick Jagger and Enrique Inglesias have all taken that first step. I hope you can too shrimpy.

Stealth 
Scrummage 
Program Music 
Ram's subsid Program have never been less than ace so far and no-change here with this fierce twist of taut tension from Stealth. All about how that bass reaches down and pulls at yr guts but also how the growing sense of menace and dread is accentuated by passages of genuinely atonal shrike and fizzing noise, almost sounding like a malfunction, an accident that occured somewhere in transit but adding to the unfolding drama wonderfully. Play so loud when it's over all you can hear is a high-pitched note that won't leave.

Tessela 
Nancy's Pantry 
R&S 
Heavy as fuck cos it knows when to disappear. The big holes of silence in amidst the rupturing slabs of hard n heavy breakbeats make for a wonderfully unsettling sense of non-danceability to this monster, the tempo kept up but seemingly draining of power as each explosion happens, old-skool breaks held up like bottles to the light, shot through with strobes, frozen in the neon. And when the roll starts and doesn't stop it ploughs like a juggernaut through your central reservations. Superb.


U.God 
Mt. Everest 
Soul Temple Entertainment 
Inspektah Deck & Elzhi also featured, so you can imagine how corking this is — great production from Blastah Beats as dark and downered as some prime PF Cuttin' wrecknology, and U.God pulls out some of the finest rhymes from his much slept-on 'Keynote Speaker' set. The kind of track you couldn't hum back to anyone but that gets under your skin precisely because of its unplaceable variety. Wu still delivering.

White Collar Boy

SUUU (Frank B Remix) Bodytonic Music 
New label from Dublin, new music from two-piece 'electronic garage group' called White Collar Boy and though the original is a little too clean for my tastes this Frank B Remix is perfectly weighted between ecstasy and confusion, the last few minutes of end-of-night powder'n'pilled madness before unconsciousness thwacks it's blissful blackness into your head. The true romantic resonance of sought-for-and-found oblivion. Get yourself untogether to this and for god sake don't get ready to go out listening to this, no-one wants to hit the town looking like Charlie Caroli. See you next month pop-pickers. Get the heating on.

". . . basically taught by anarchists, communists, Maoists. . . " - Will Ashon, head of Big Dada

“If I get no rewind still I pay fools no mind” – Roots Manuva, Sinking Sand

‘Will Ashon has upped the bar in terms of what a label can do, and I think his artists have responded in kind’ – Mike Ladd

New Flesh For Old

Pic by Becky Ross

Blonde Redhead 
The Social, Nottingham
I let my daughter do my make-up tonight. She has a delicate touch, combined with an innate understanding of excessive face paint and its ability to charm and to declare war. She smears my lids with metallic shadow and turns my mouth into a pouting, pink, puffed-up pot of farting putty. After showering me in glitter she leads me outside for her friends to laugh at, but they look palpably traumatised. I expect Social Services will be informed.
   In the rear-view on the M69, I turn myself on. I’m driving to a different town, one where the women outnumber the men, to watch Blonde Redhead, and I just want to look how they make me feel. Hell, they made me try again – I need this band. So much of my obsession with them is in their look, and they look like they could be the most beautiful band in the world tonight. And so much of my obsession with them is their music, their wild romance and bitter awareness of love’s confinements. I love them like I love F Scott Fitzgerald, because there’s that same intimacy and instinct with words. They have the same directness; that sense of artistry becoming one with the heart rather than throwing up walls around it.
   Tonight, the older songs work for me as a remembrance of my personality flaws past, tracks from Melody Of Certain Damaged Lemons and In An Expression Of The Inexpressible (the album that kicked off this affair) putting a ferocity into a gaze that I had been too weary to keep up anymore. Songs from the more recent Misery Is A Butterfly, particularly a stunning ‘Elephant Woman’ and ‘Anticipation’, crashland with you on your current conveyor belt to God. These songs are more at ease with the waste of their beauty, the poignant inadequacy of each gorgeous shard under the weight of the cosmos. Beyond the look and beyond the lineage lies the key to Blonde Redhead’s real ambiguity. It’s in the mixing of the eternal themes from within with the brittle precarious shell that surrounds. Crushed love songs that draw their power from a dead-eyed realisation of their own inability to save Blonde Redhead.
   When Kazu sings there is no sense of exorcism or deliverance. The only redemption going on here is entirely selfish, the knowledge that, as you cast yourself into the flames, your body found walking on air at the end of a rope will be a body finally loved again. As such, Blonde Redhead send me buzzing back home. I feel like they’re watching me now, checking on their believers, making sure none of us slip – they are ultimately suicidal music in the truest, non-gothic, non-obvious sense and for that I applaud them and need them like water and cigarettes and a routine. As safety valve, as magic mirror, as a journey into the secret world of everything you’ve ever known. My life’s untenable without them.



Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds
Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus 
(Mute)
Hey, look, I believed once. I realised I was buying well-read misogyny, suckered into being controlled by a perfect simulacrum of anarchy. Not a problem, cos I dug being played like that. But now that I feel I’m being played (down) to, granted an audience, nasty Nick can’t touch me anymore. Now the protagonist doesn’t even want to be out of control anymore, now the icon is content to be an ‘artist’, whose every word and deed is anticipated to the point where it cannot be criticised, my faith wavers. I don’t buy him anymore. What a tarnished brand. The Bad Seeds, I buy. What a fucking band. Opener, ‘Get Ready For Love’, is as holy and horny a fuzzed-up gospel racket as Cave’s got close to since ‘Deanna’.
   There’s a thump, a ringing blast to much of Abattoir Blues (the first disc of this sumptuously packaged double) that successfully pushes Nick The Stripper into the peripheries. Sure, he’s the songwriter, but that only matters if you think that ‘craft’ is more important than magic: nah, the true bliss lies in Jim and Thom’s drums; in Mick Harvey’s instantly recognisable sugar and spite; in the colour Warren Ellis always brings; in the unmannered, holy noise of the London Community Gospel Choir.
When you spend time trying to find Cave within all this wondrous collage, you find him telling the same old story he’s always been telling. I don’t buy that great artists are essentially monomaniacal – or that a career spent writing love songs and blues songs means your obsessions have to be so limited. Nick Cave’s brand of macho self-loathing/celebration, inverted racial snobbery/ shame, and spiritual hunger/queasiness is sounding so fucking inadequate now, so menopausal and conservative in its pain and tired in its evocations of love. How sad it must be to be so encircled by your own fatalism that you can only repeat your railings against it, with ever-dwindling effect.
   A little conciseness, a little breakdown in all this communication would do Cave’s genius well. Until then, Abattoir Blues/The Lyre Of Orpheus is the masterpiece of Nick Cave the bandleader and living legend. The sooner he cares less about that, and more about the living horror of the moment, the sooner his final resurrection will come about.
   I pray for it fervently.


Various
All Good Clean Fun: A Journey Through The Underground Of Liberty/
United Artists Records (EMI)
A twofold response.
1) Fuck me, when old music is good it’s terrifically good. Before rock got saddled with being depressing, back when natural joy and wonder at life could express itself through rock’n’roll, bands had a freewheeling throb and wail to them that even a vintage production job couldn’t recreate now. Listen to the two Can tracks here and Hawkwind’s frankly awesome ‘Be Yourself’ and ‘You Shouldn’t Do That’ (without a doubt the best band Lemmy’s ever been in) and get your soul blown out the back of your head. Oh, and dig Idle Race’s lumbering fuzz-pop and Bonzo’s wonderful ‘Intro/Outro’ and realise that if The Groundhogs were around today, all those little Jets and White Stripes and Detroit Cobras would be shitting themselves silly and running for the bunkers.
2) Fuck me, when old music is bad it’s fucking awful. The hippy shit and gruesome pub rock that over-clogs this retrospective of the late Sixties/early Seventies ‘golden age’ for Liberty Records, is all so unlistenably twee it wants slapping. Much of AGCF is useful proof that there have always been shitbands: hobbyists, wannabes and over-praised poltroons hyped to fuck by the press. Think of the real lineage the likes of The Libertines and Razorlight are gonna belong to. In 30 years, they’ll be as fondly remembered as, say, Deke Leonard, the fucking appalling Man, or the frankly inexcusable Brinsley Schwartz. Ahh, the circle of life.

Various
Tracks And Fields 
(Kill Rock Stars)
These kids is too hip for me. Across two and a half hours, and a sleeve that looks cool left around your hovel but, like a metaphor, doesn’t warrant close examination, they prove that I’m just a little too slow to be here. I come out confused but I guess that’s the point and I know that these I dig. The Legend! brave as Robert Wyatt. Antietam reminding me of That Dog. HNIA live coming on like some divine cross ‘tween the Feminine Complex and A Tribe Called Quest. Dos’ forgetting everything but bass and getting so damn accurate. John Wilkes Booze’s mental ‘We’ve Got Room In Outer Space’. Cynthia Dall out-Smog-ing her ex-band, the wondrous Lovers and Xiu Xiu stroking every spare inch of you, the monstrous Jucifer and Wiretaps Chinese-burning the rest. Radio Berlin making the best bassheavy goth electro since bad Bauhaus, Measles Mumps Rubellas, and the fabulous Slumber Party doing the same to Six Finger Satellite and Mel’n’Kim respectively. Male Slut letting Thurston Moore, Jim O Rourke, Steve Shelley and Lee Ranaldo fend off the menopause a little longer. Wonderful tracks from the Paper Chase and Devendra Banhart (did you pick your feet in ‘Poughkeepsie’?). I didn’t know Laura Veirs sounded so like Lois and Helium. Someone send me an album yeah?
   Tracks And Fields bows out on an increasingly psychedelic fade that takes in Sweet Heat’s femme raunch, C Average’s nutzoid ‘Stalwart’ and Dead Meadow’s hippy-killing ‘Golden Cloud’. And if, like all comps, Tracks And Fields can be proof that the great and godawful sometimes have to share the same stage, at least mediocrity doesn’t even get a look in.
   Diggit like Tweaky.

Pic by Sarah Bowles

Slipknot/Slayer
National Indoor Arena, Birmingham
Shit. Where do I fit here? Walk from back to front and chart the changes. At the back, the likes of me, old fuckers, seen-it-all-before fake nonchalance, mainly male, overweight, desperately unattractive and waiting for the ever-awesome Slayer to play ‘Angel Of Death’ so we can prove we’ve still got it. They do this, tailing a typically ace set which has never lost its fuck-off power, its absolute hostility to the musical rules of every other band on earth.
   Frequently surging into peals of ear-splitting noise and terror that wouldn’t sound out of place on Constellation, Slayer are still punks who want to scare you shitless and will be gods forever. Down front, kids crush each other into delirium, building up bruises, headaches and war stories for the school playground tomorrow. Passing from prior owners to current inheritors of metal’s poisoned chalice, all you see is improvement (in look, in diversity, in openness to other music, in lack of meatheaded twattery). Good. I’ve never felt more comfortable at a metal gig in my life.
   In a sense, Slipknot’s moment has passed. Good. There’s an increased sense of tribal loyalty here tonight. No one is simply ‘checking out’ this band. Everyone here has stayed with Slipknot even though the ‘buzz’ has long since faded. So let the arbiters of modern rock feel faintly embarrassed that Slipknot and metal received so much attention a couple of years ago – we believers still know that when they slam into ‘People = Shit’ there’s no moment in metal more exciting. And if two years ago this place’d be rammed, then all we’ve lost is the fly-by-nighters and fairweather friends.
   As ‘Disasterpieces’ and ‘Eyeless’ send the pit frothing over in hormonal tsunamis, you sense that the death of nu metal’s hipness meant the rebirth of metal again, for those that always deserved it – the teenage, the lost, the spoiled, the stroppy. ‘Pulse Of The Maggots’ and ‘Three Nil’ fuckin’ hurt, ‘Duality’ gets sung like a new national anthem and ‘Wait And Bleed’ sends us home with a heavenly din in our ears that we won’t shake for a week. Good. Metal’s ours again, and all old snobs can fuck off and die. I’m just tryna figure out if that means me yet.

Elliott Smith
From A Basement On The Hill 
(Domino)
It’s shocking how angry beauty can make you feel. Dug out Elliott Smith and Roman Candle t’other day: first time in a long time, left me messed up and twisted again. It was perhaps the first time I’ve really absorbed Elliott’s death. Tears (which prove nothing except perhaps my sentimentality) did come, as did furywith the fucker for leaving so soon. The songs on those two records detail a boy becoming a man; the dual pulls of living, the endless journey within and without. These songs suggested a way of living with love and loss that Smith could perhaps negotiate. In contrast, From A Basement On The Hill is one long hymn to disappearance. And the fact that Smith finally made real what this album suggests is a heartbreaking paradox: that this is his most successful work of art and that it had to be his last.
   You feel that Smith was finally able to vanish into his music, and hit that divine point where words and meaning are half obscured by the sheer arresting push’n’pull of his band and their noise. So, the ostensibly barnstorming opener ‘Coast To Coast’ still emerges from a drone chamber and fades into radio static. These are all pop songs under stress, under threat, driven out to you by pressure and by chance. It’s not just the lyrics on ‘Let’s Get Lost’ that make plain Smith’s urge to evaporate – the music itself contains a heavenly trajectory, a desire to snip the gravitational umbilicus and join the dark matter of the cosmos.
   Always such a pretty racket, always with the balance and Brownian ethereality of a true angel, Smith has made his music more chaotic, more elegiac and more implosive. Yet he has actually sharpened his songwriting beyond the confines of conciseness or indulgence. ‘Pretty (Ugly Before)’ and ‘Don’t Go Down’ have their own pace and pulse, bringing to life their own reality and rules. When Smith rocks now, there’s no vague distaste in his vocal. He throws himself into the fuzz of ‘Strung Out Again’ and the amazing triple-track delay fest of ‘Shooting Star’, flailing against the electricity. His ability to change his vocal persona (from T Rex to Bowie to Arthur Lee back to Mr Smith) always makes it seem like each melodic twist is spontaneously brought into being. Throughout, Smith doesn’t sing ‘over’ tracks. Instead, the songs sing him, the band swinging under his breath. Whenever From A Basement… slips into silence, your mind races up ladders, which, together with his emotive control, are testament to a man surely only just exploring how good and godlike he could be. And herein lies the anger.
   ‘A Fond Farewell’ presses you up close, a dear friend giving you a last ambiguous shred of contact. Then you scroll down the sleeve and see: “Copyright 2004, The Estate Of Elliott Smith” and your guts lurch. Bastard. What makes you spit feathers isn’t just the clear signs that Smith had further to go; what makes his loss so infuriating is that songs as beautiful as ‘Twilight’ or ‘A Passing Feeling’ seem so indestructible, even as you know their creator has fallen into a silent unknowable eternity. This record is as addictive as seeing a medium after a bereavement – one that only really reveals its full impact as From A Basement On The Hill latches onto your soul. Painkiller? And pain giver. Oh Elliott, you’ve got me all messed up and twisted again.

Various
The OC: Mix 2
(Warner Bros)
If you don’t know it, The OC is a drama bold and brave enough to deal with a social group criminally underrepresented in American entertainment: rich, skinny, white, young Californians. With such daring subject matter you can only imagine the sound barriers being broken within the soundtrack. The Killers. Interpol. The Thrills. Keane. The Walkmen. There if you want it. Y’wanker.

Various
Women Of Latin America
(Putamayo World Music)
The toilet? Top of the stairs, first on your left. What? Yeah, I know we’ve run out of bogroll. STAMP YOUR FEET. OK, spotlights down low? Check. Big pantypeeling shots of gin and tonic poured out? Check. TV tuned to L’Aventura, so that, despite permeating the room with a supersexy vibe, no one will actually be able to watch it for any length of time? Check. Twiglets? Check. Big-assed soapbar/whitewitch bifta ready to be lit? Check. Wonderfully sensual Women Of Latin America CD rotating? Check.
   I think I’m in like Flynt here. But, hold on before I start working out the combination to your foundation garments, I just wanna hear Adriana Calcanhotto and Marta Gomez spin the air around us into a heatstruck dream. And have you noticed how the stuff from Chile (Mariana Montalvo) is all bleak and blue as you’d expect? Hey, look! The fabulously informative sleevenotes enable us to sing along in the original languages! No, sorry, those earrings will give my thighs green patches, besides which, I’m trying to dig the subtext of Belo Velluso’s exquisite ‘Toda Sexta Feira’.
   See , music and sex do not mix. Music’s too damn distracting. Especially when it’s as full of rich melody, sumptuous colour and undulating beats as this superb collection. Pass the Twiglets. Make this a night to remember.

The Howling Hex
All Night Fox 
(Drag City)
When I last saw Royal Trux, I was unprepared for the sheer danger level that seemed to shoot out from them and suffuse the room. Not danger as in the usual r’n’r hotel-trashing puerility – danger as in it felt frightening, seeing how many possibilities they were toying with. And while Jennifer H was the focus of most people’s attention, the most palpable waves of hostility to the universe were pouring from Neil Hagerty. Or rather, from this fucked-up little Fender box amp and the kind of guitar you’d pick up at Argos. There was a freedom and a fearlessness to what he did with that guitar that I’ll never forget, and it’s reinvoked every time I hear him.
   So The Howling Hex have a lot of love to trash, simply by dint of his presence. Before a note is heard, this is a hip document. But you don’t need to know the Trux to digthis. All Night Fox is a livid, searing lash of aggravation and contact-high noise that welcomes anyone in who wants to hear riffs unshakeable, vocals unbreakable, patterns inescapable. We’re talking lip-smacking hooks courtesy of Hagerty’s constant Eddie Hazel/John McLaughlin homage – his palette limited but kicking against its limitations in pleasingly aggressive fashion. Underneath we have the horniest, holiest, funkiest rhythm section this side of Can or The Silver Apples. Slathered over everything is Hagerty’s whining tones, somewhere between abject filth and religious revelation, and two female voices heavily echoplexed and coming on like The Feminine Complex or Grace Slick wandering the sewers.
   ‘Now We’re Gonna Sing’ kicks things off on a collision of The Pretty Things ‘Come See Me’ and The Creation’s ‘Making Time’, and that should tell you how ace it is. ‘Instilled With Mem’ry’ lives in its dubbed-out space as much as its bustling Beefheart undertow, before ‘Pair Back Up Mass With’ slays ya – a slo-mo, arsepummellingly, toe-curlingly funky take on ‘Sister Ray’-style repetition with enough psychout touches to reach those parts of your brain you’d rather leave unravaged. ‘Activity Risks’ comes on like Tarnation backed by PiL; ‘What Man? Who Are You?!' takes seven minutes of your life and gives you back a holy headache, only slightly relieved by ‘Cast Aside The False’ – Ronettes/Roches-style soul played by dirty, dirty people. ‘Soft Enfolding Spreads’ waves you back to the beginning with the best music Hagerty’s made since Royal Trux’s Accelerator, and perhaps the most mindblowing since their Twin Infinitives. It’s probably best to have never heard Hagerty before – keep The Howling Hex as your first exposure to his unquenchable drive to mutual headfuck. Cos he hasn’t been as locked-on and out of control for too damn long.
   Welcome back to being out of the loop, in no fold, with only this goddamn irresistable sound to hold you up as it frogmarches you into its depths and up into the cosmos. For all the echoes you hear within All Night Fox, what’s truly frightening is that you have to invent your response as it occurs to you. Like all that will truly excite in 2005, All Night Fox is linked to nothing but its own red-eyed commitment to pursue its own tail, swallow you up with it, and devour itself out of existence. Let it pull you under, soon as.

Gig Diary
Summer 2005
So I walked out of the voting booth, prerogative and duty exercised, feeling little difference between the window of democracy and that of an ill-stocked tuck shop. I’ve just committed an act based on fear and hatred and fear of hatred, fear of the accelerated hatred a Tory government would bring, hatred of the thought of all those Daily Mail-believing scum getting a grain of succour from my x. Walking to the train station to go see a metal gig, I ponder getting older and more cynical as my knees creak in readiness for the circle pit. The way in which hope’s been removed from my politics mirrors the defeated way in which, every Saturday night, I take my position in the sniper’s nest/DJ booth and watch myriad supposed futures for rock’n’roll swim in and out. In the past few months I’ve seen The Cribs toss themselves around to little avail. I’ve seen The Editors and wished the lead singer would pursue his Ian Curtis fixation all the way. I’ve seen The Mooney Suzuki and Kaiser Chiefs get away with crimes I thought we declared against international law in the Britpop Wars. And I’ve seen The Paddingtons and Special Needs be so fucking bad that I’ve been rude to friends and family as a consequence. I’ve felt like I’m watching car commercials. I’ve seen the reactionary point-missing stupidity and soullessness of the last wave of Britrock wankers simply moved on five years and applied to a different era. I’ve seen this defiantly unthrilling fossil-fucking called an exciting new wave by kids happy to surf it, as old farts are gruesomely vindicated like groped grandads.
   So, now, I take a book and read while waiting to DJ. And I’ve started believing in metal again. Cos fuck me, if anyone’s doing anything with gusto or grace with a guitar any more, it ain’t painfully hip indie kids. If you walk into a rehearsal room and put your ear to the door, the bands who are gonna be most fascinating AREN’T gonna be the skinny-tie designer-dishevelled wankers trying to cobble together a bad cover of ‘I Love A Man In Uniform’. S’gonna be the metal kids, the almost pre-teen noiseniks proudly unschooled in anything old beyond the first two Stooges and first four Sabs albums. Metal kids love music that scenesters snottily turn their noses up at, and therefore the moshkids have a much more freewheeling sense of melody and arrangement. Metal’s always written OUT by those in the know, so I know there’s little else in white rock worth writing about. I prefer the crowds n’all; I like watching girls beat up boys while the old look older than ever.

Mastodon

   Mastodon slayed me in Birmingham with perhaps the best show I’ll see all year, The Haunted creased me up and broke me down with equal brutality and tonight I’m on the train to see Triviumtear Wolverhampton a new arsehole (like they’ll notice: last year a woman’s body was found in a bush off Wolves ring-road after it had lain unnoticed and decomposing for over eight months). They’re great, happytobehere, clumsily headbanging like a thrash metal boyband, and a tonguewaggling joyful delight compared to all the tired disaffection and old poses by which indie bands seem hidebound. Hysterically epic and pompous, angst-ridden and childish, suffused with melodies so Euro-romantic that A-Ha would be proud, but fed through a grindcore mincer that makes everything emerge as a direct heat-seaking girder of chrome through the temple.
I’m gonna go write a letter to the NME about why Still Remains should be on the cover and how all that indie shit can kiss my black-metal ass. Too cerebral perhaps? You’re right. Next person I see with a fashionably false Ramones T-shirt gets a pinch and a punch and a Chinese burn like a motherfucker.
You’re damn right we’re still at war.


Hip-hop Column 
Autumn 2005
Hey pal, where do you think you’re going?
   I have a question for you. Why don’t you listen to more hip hop? Your pained expression tells me all. You’re a sensitive soul. Complex, deep, with a rich and varied emotional life whose ripples and undulations aren’t always served by straight-up motherfuckin’ rhyming and stealing from the motherfuckin’ streets. When you’re alone and feeling tender, who wants some one-note MC bellowing in your ear about all the people, places and situations he’s been a total dick in – nah, you need similarly limp and moisturised music to suit your long soak in Lake You. Well, I have news of a sort. Hip hop can be fey. Hip hop can be deeply ambiguous. And crucially, hip hop works on you with all the complexity and generosity of spirit that we’ve been indoctrinated into believing only music made by skinny white folks can. Dig First Rate’s Walky Talkyz (Scenario), Quasimoto’s The Further Adventures Of Lord Quas (Stones Throw), Grafh’s Autografh (All City), Afu-Ra’s State Of The Arts (Decon) and C Rayz Walz’s Year Of The Beast (Definitive Jux) for major rethinks of the whole solo MC remit. All say things that will surprise you, all become friends to be tapped up for inspiration and information. Not from your postcode, sure. But music lets you cross those tracks, buzz on new perspectives and feel awed by humanity’s diversity and unity. Conditioned to cross the road, tighten the hold on the purse and push that front doorkey in between your fingers in a primed fist whenever you see a crowd of young scallywags waiting for you to pass them in the street – why not flip their hats off, push them in the chest, find out how hollow or solid they are, find out what the fuck is on their mind. The Last Word compilation on the never-ungreat SON records is an even more lethal backstep from the street into the collective unconscious.

Quasimoto

   Talking of comps, The Dugout on Zebra Traffic is too stuffed with joys to miss, Late & Tricksta of Wolverhampton-based future-rap genii Wolftown Recordings do a bang-up job turning in an unmissable third volume of the UK Runnings series (Profyle), Seven Entertainment’s Underworld (Seven) and DJ Moodie’s Construction Skillz (Undali) are hour-plus long headrushes into the here’n’now, and the Darka Dayz comp on Dark Horizon is the state-of-the-UK mash-up CD of the year thus far.
   All bargains, all too complex to detail here, all sprayed to the corners of the cranium on first contact – the feeling throughout is that the lack of press/media interest/attention this music gets is telling these people one thing. Sure, make something new, tell the truth, dare to think music can be something beyond an airbrushed tour around the modern strictures of musical correctness and sonic digestibility, ignore the taste-test niche producing that’s busy turning modern pop’n’rock into such nondescript and tasteful aural ornamentation – the world doesn’t care, we’re looking the other way,and we always will. And that’s given hiphop, specifically UK hip hop, a thirst for purposeful sonic experiment and lyrical innovation that you ignore only to keep your prettily pastelled walls intact.In a society and structure determined to cut you off and contain your energieswith demographic precision and control,soundtracks to your life aren’t important anymore, are perhaps precisely that which should be avoided. The battle is on. Arm yourself with knowledge. Cos if we don’t share where we are, the chances for escape are dim indeed. That’s alright, pal. Walk on.Just try getting lost once in a while, yeah?

Singles Column
Autumn 2005
Oh to stop and think. Some hope. The boom the bip the boombip, the slide the slip the slideslip. Done lost my bearings. Doesn’t make it any easier that everyone else is similarly unmoored, that no one can give me both question and answer. OK, so I know that the biggest failing in my life so far has been the expectation of happiness but wasn’t there a point once? Wasn’t there a moment of pause once?
   That’s all there was as a teenager. You could  turn pausing into your way of life. Now, I’m old and confused by events, hungry for solitude but harried by company, with a scant notion of whys and wherefores. I had more of an identity when I imagined myself, felt ghost lenses zeroing in on every windswept moment. I was happiest as a tortured adolescent, assailed by fantastical self-inflicted woes, dramatising everything because absolutely nothing was actually happening, letting a day stretch to a life and back to a day again. Right now, when kitchen-sink events really do keep stopping the clock and changing the world, I find myself arse-slapped along by time, rushed through whole years too fast, without recourse to the cheekbones or self-delusion necessary to glam my way through everything.
   Accidentally clocking myself in the glass of the off-license fridge I think yeah, I knew him once, this fleshy carriage for this accursed brain that won’t shut up, that seems chronically unable to shake itself out of a paralysing infinity of demands and find a place to repair itself. Tiredness yeah, kids yeah, more kids next year yeah, so it seems, but none of that’s an excuse. And none of it gets rid of the thought that the fuller life becomes, the more we take in and flood ourselves with, the deader we become, the tissue growing spent and grey and taken from the centre of your heart in progressively more elliptical waves by your knackered, thin blood. Because no experience has been pure, because everything taken in has had to refer to everything else already jammed in there, through sheer effort of processing I’m burning out once alive connections, becoming dozy and forgetful and slipshod cos I’ve never stopped to dust, fix, maintain.
   So you look out the glass in your own windows up close, avoid eye-contact with yourself and stare dumbfounded at the humans and hatchbacks. At the people with purpose. And you wonder what human life is like, and how you got left behind, still a child, still insomniac, still too full of shit to relax for a moment.
   At night, this queasiness at my utter ill-equipped unreadiness for adulthood and middle-age is fairly easy to stave off. Changing my house round has necessitated going patiently through my vinyl, getting pulled back to old faves and dancing, rocking, singing my way well again, immersing myself in old teenage kicks (Mozart’s ‘Requiem’, The Band, Throwing Muses, Buttholes, Tribe Called Quest and so on and so on) right through the night.
   But during the day, current modern pop performs a vital task of cruelty, measuring up to the deranged pull of time by making the minutes flash by quicker, showing me just how dazed and confused everyone is right now, how moments of oxygen-giddy lucidity can only be stumbled upon like the accidental detours from the daily miasma they are. Straight off, Lady Sovereign’s ‘Nine To Five’ (Island) seems to dazzle you with a contrary mix of timelessness and timeliness. I can hear all sorts of things going on here that all occurred well before Lady Sov even saw the light of day.

Lady Sovereign

   Unconscious, subliminal, or direct – if you don’t hear traces of More Specials and The Raincoats’ Odyshape on this devastatingly funny, searingly honest anthem for this hungover nation of wage slaves and skivers then you ain’t listening hard enough. So much going on – weird squally tics, Dammers skank Hammond, instantly memorable chorus (“I’m lazy, that’s all I can say…”), sudden echoed-out vulnerability (“I need food!”), cute snores and moments of documentary charm. And throughout, Sov’s totally twisted double-tracked real-live-genius vocal that kills shit completely.
   Smart enough to let a spare vocal wander around the subject with interruptions, sudden disturbing moments of pungent terror (“Oh my god, I’m drinking Lambrini”) and the ‘Yes Vocal Mix’ fully dives into moments of musical oddity, drone-menace and weird studio-spun freakiness that make you gasp and guffaw like a Bash Street Kid. I know I keep coming back to the Slits/Raincoats/Liliput thing but that’s because she seriously sounds like Ari Up fronting This Heat at some points.
    I suspect that LS’s determination to fully express the full range of her attention-deficit soul might make her records a little bit too full, too much, for popular consumption. As a single, ‘Nine To Five’ feels like a choon you’re gonna have to hear again and again and again to barely enclose, a record whose ringtone will be the most witheringly inadequate ever. In terms of making music that matches up to life, I think she’s untouchable right now.
   From men, I expect nothing but outright lip-diddling lunacy. Anything less is simply dishonest, or expressive of a sure masculinity whose internal insecurities I’m bored of trying to tease out. So sure Snoop Dogg’s ‘Ups & Downs’, Tony Yayo’s ‘So Seductive’, Eminem’s ‘Ups & Downs’ (all Interscope) and Kanye West’s ‘Diamonds’ (Roc-A-Fella) are all immaculately realised portraits of impending mental collapse and the brass-balled frontin’ that precedes it.

Dubbledge

   S’just I’ve heard them all before.
   For straight-up desperation without the moneyed-up backdrop go for Dubbleedge’s fantastic ‘Smile’ (Dented), Keith Lawrence’s ‘Goin’ True’ EP (KL), and for dancing as desperate act (sometimes I think it’s all that’s left) Missy’s masterful ‘Lose Control’ (Elektra) or (goddess) Faith Evans’ superb ‘Mesmerize’ (on EMI, and like Eugene McDaniels going down on Betty ‘NastyGal’ Davis) are perfect for some frantic hothoofing.
   But when I need a reboot and wipe-down then nothing’s better at the moment than Quasimoto’s ‘Bully’s Hit’ (Stones Throw) for plain batshit genius. Pulled into some semblance of ordered disorder by a fantastically freaky Kool- Keith-style flow from the Q, and quite possibly the most nutzoid agglomeration of bizzare sources you’ll hear in hip hop this year. Fluted-up psychedelic jazz, electronic sweeps and squelches straight out of Stockhausen’s ‘Struktur’ or The White Noise’s ‘Love Without Sound’, sepulchral monastic Comus-style chanting of either the Taoist or medieval variety, sudden drop-ins from a theme park advert of coarse plenitude of course.
   It all combines to have the effect of a random transient captivating you for three minutes from which you can’t (and strangely don’t want to) extricate yourself, making perfect lucid sense until you try and follow exactly what it is he isn’t saying, before he rattles his bottles on down the street leaving you wondering if you’ve just run into the second coming of the Buddha or the avatar of Lucifer himself. Stunning, and ‘Season’s Change’ on the flip is equally unhinged, equally random-yet-painstaking in substance but here backed by a lush peel-off of quiet-storm soul that Camp Lo or Blak Moon or Beatnuts would’ve been proud of. Unlike 99 per cent of the hip hop you’ll hear this week or this year, Quasimoto seems unable to stand still, join the queue or run with the herd. A freewheeling, magnificent work of art.

Bobby Valentino

   Similarly curious, yet from the opposite end of the urban spectrum, Bobby Valentino’s ‘Slow Down’ (Def Jam) should just be another big-selling r’n’b single, a crooned slew of clichés about babys and your beauty and you being a cutie and how much game he kicks to you and just wanting to get to know you after seeing you cruising down Melrose. But it’s subverted by surprising moments of dew-kissed childish wonder in the lyrics (“Never seen anything so lonely” is a curious chat-up line) and a backdrop of sighing strings and glissando-harp that’s pure Disney, pure Hood, pure delight. Tablas straight off that amazing Lata Mangeshkar/Bhimsen Joshi Bhajanarpan album you should be hunting down your Asian high street for (actually it’ll be a wild goose chase seeing as it’s 30 years old but fuck me, it’s a Bollywood Astral Weeks).
   An ending? There is no ending this short of the tempting traffic-flow out on the ringroad or the train-tracks. Nice to know there’s always a way out of your skull. For now, pop offers it. Then laughs with demoniac callousness as you find yourself spinning on the spot. The best pop right now sounds like the lurch in your guts at the chaos and absurdity of it all. How long can we be kept alive like this?
   Oh…to stop and think.


Michael Manning
Public (Ai)
The debut album for Ai’s 19-yr-old wunderkind Michael Manning follows up his equally enchanting ‘The Lost Aberrant Dragonfly’ EP from 2003. It’s beyond perfection if you’ve been yearning for skykissing electronic bliss and gorgeously minimal lo-fi wonder and you can’t hang around until the next Boards Of Canada LP.    The startling yet always melodically swooning likes of ‘Walk In The Park’ and ‘Cautionary Tale’ will colour your evening parlour with sensurround wow; infuse your moments of three am solitude with an almost unbearable poignancy, and that’s before this wonderful album forces you to invent new dance moves to MM’s strange co-options of jazz, hip hop and dub (on the stunning ‘I Dare You’ and ‘Insect Potentiality’). Ai’s best release yet and the point where ‘DI Goes Pop’ meets ‘Music Has The Right To Children’. The fact you knew it was coming doesn’t make it feel any less ravishing when it first drops from the sky to your skin.


Killing Joke
Killing Joke
What’s This For?
Revelations
Ha!
(Virgin)
“Want to be part of the Killing Joke? We mean it, man. Total exploitation, total publicity, total anonymity. Bass and lead wanted” – Melody Maker situations vacant advert, 1979
   Doom-mongering is a charmed life. But what makes the first few Killing Joke albums work beyond mere lyrical and musical prophecy is the unrepeatable mix of will and personality. For all their supposed descendants, no one’s been truly able to capture the queer ambivalences KJ have, the problematic points of fascination that make them more than a straight-up macho noise outfit, that make these first four albums still so timely and eternal.
   Timely, because they reacted to their times with supreme aggression and yet a palpable sense of wonder: for all the aggravation, for all the horror Jaz Coleman spills out at the world he was in, the band seem intent on matching the brutalising mechanic glory of the age. By the time of What’s This For? it’s clear no British plastic had sounded this clear and perverse since the first side of Bowie’s Low. By Revelations, the sickness had spread in from the street and was operating on an almost cellular level. Ha! is a great live document from the same period, but buy these first three studio transmissions for that rarest of kindnesses – music that has you feeling less alone as the walls close in and your mind breaks open like a bad egg. Ripped to fuck. Untouched by anyone yet. As I write this, bombs go off in London.

Album Reviews Column 
Late Autumn 2005

Opeth

Albums? Don’t have the time mate. Don’t fit with my biz. What, so I’ve got to sit still for 70 minutes? And listen rather than just hear? Sorry pal. I’ve got hats to block, dolls to play with, much radish to harvest. And if someone dares be presumptuous enough to think that just because they’ve pressed themselves onto mirrored plastic I’ve got to pay solemn attention while they stumble around the dimly lit bog-cubicles of their soul, they can kiss my callipygous arse. Except: God Forbid whose nonemore- metal Constitution Of Treason (Century Media) peels your face off nice and cruel and military. Except: Lightheaded’s Wrong Way and Giant Panda’s Fly School Reunion (both Tres), cos Tres is looking good for San Fran psychedelic hip hop rightaboutnow; Big Shug’s Who’s Hard (All City Music), cos it’s half produced by DJ Premier and that’s all you need to know. Except Beecher’s This Elegy: His Autopsy (Earache) simply for being able to do titles like ‘It’s Good Weather For Black Leather’ and ‘...On The Day He Became A Human Plumb Line’ with both gusto and aplomb.
   And, while we’re learning to love our Inner Greaser, let’s wave through Opeth’s stunning Ghost Reveries (Roadrunner) and Most Precious Blood’s Merciless (Trustkill) for FORCING you to concentrate, filling out every corner of your head with noise and beauty. And if you ain’t got that Throwdown album yet, you’ve had since spring and you should be suicidal with shame. But that’s it, OK? Oh shit, actually, yeah, as ever, hip hop won’t fucking let you be: dig Micall Parknsun’s The Working Class Dad (Lowlife) for showing us the past and the future of one of the UK’s finest, freakiest labels. And take a step back into some wonderfully unsettling nostalgia with Prince Paul’s Hip Hop Gold Dust (Antidote) and Blufoot’s The Old Testament (Wu).

Micall Parknsun

   Avoid the calumny and fib of the new Franz Ferdinand album by dosing yourselves heavily with Beefeaterz’s Badge Of Honour (SFDB), Lowkey’s Key To The Game 3 (Sensory Overload), Baby J’s FTP (All City) and Delegates Of Culture’s Patchwork Gideon (Peppe Mintay), all a little closer to life in Blighty as we know it.
   While Kanye makes critics who should know better cream their shorts with half an album of genius and half an album of snoozeworthy filler, I suggest you hie yourself along to the reggaeton joy of Chosen Few’s El Documental (EMI), Maspyke’s Static, Cesar Comanche’s Squirrel & The Aces and Big Tones The Drought (all on ABB).

 And, fuck me, you goddamn well better clear a huge space in your tiny mind for Greenhouse Effect’s Columbus Or Bust (Weightless): my rap album of the year so far and therefore bound to become a great lost classic that condemns its creators to a life of penury and undeserved ignominy. Sorry lads, my reverse Midas touch can’t be stopped. Maybe a little bit of charity to assuage the guilt – I better pick an indie album.
   There’s only one that counts for the mouses round our houses and that’s Minus Story’s untouchably great No Rest For Ghosts (Jagjaguwar) because it makes you believe in love all over again everytime it swims so sweetly into your fog.
   But that’s pissing well it for the year, y’hear? I’ve got oysters to shuck and albums can go fuck until Xmas. I’m listening to nothing but Heart FM for the rest of 2005 and I’ll see you all in hell.
   From heaven.

Why?
Elephant Eyelash (Anticon)
PM: I got home and looked in the mirror to see if my eyeliner had run and spotted about a fiver’s worth of cheap amphetamine on my lapel. Licked myself clean, smoked a fiveskin joint and threw on Elephant Eyelash. It was so awesome I forgot about wanking.
AM: I scraped myself off my sheets and confronted my heaving wardrobe to the strains of what I’d been listening to the night before. And fuck me, it’s mediocre, it’s a mess, it’s a little too pleased with itself This ain’t just the comedown, it’s the realisation that Anticon are fallible and that without the correct ravishment of sound that Odd Nosdam and Clouddead manage, the whole Built-to-Spill meets Blak Moon vibe just don’t work. One for the DJ Shadow fans.
   Get the hell away from me.


The Young Gods
Twenty Years: 1985-2005 (PIAS)
Adrenaline’s a weird drug. Easy to stimulate, less easy to maintain in the system. Probably a good thing too, because even though it’s in you and on tap, it can invest even the most sloping-shouldered weedling with a boundless Promethean verve and energy that can so easily lead to split lips, shameful beatings or a bad asthma attack at the least. As a 15-year-old PE freak (and I don’t mean physical education) I was pointed towards The Young Gods by Melody Maker; within a week I was stomping into fifth-form centres putting on ‘Envoyé’ at top volume and feeling like I’d dipped my dick in a pot of PCP.
   Forget about The Young Gods’ relationship to rock’n’roll. They were always postulated as both saviours and destroyers when in fact they were less concerned with rock history and more concerned with burrowing into the earth and shaking it till the pips squeaked. Helped that the Gods were never scared, helped that the Gods sounded not quite so simplistically ‘like the future’ but absolutely beyond time, able to leap all the way from the 55th Century back to the first yelp of primal man. It helped that Franz Treichler’s lyrics and voice made him a seductive yet scarifying lovechild of Gainsbourg and Iggy, a poetic traducer of Rilke and Hendrix, with his band able to play Varese riffs while thumping like the Sex Pistols. Oh so manly, but all the more honestly perfect for adolescent dreams to drift on and be driven by.
   And of course, even now, things like ‘Pas Mal’, ‘L’amourir’, ‘Did You Miss Me’ and ‘Envoyé’ fucking rock – make you holler along in the best sub-bass profundo baritone you can summon up. But it was the mystical and romantic pulse of The Young Gods that kept you so addicted – and though represented on this 20-track retrospective with ‘Charlotte’ and that divine skin-close cover of ‘September Song’ I’d have liked to have heard bigger chunks of L’eau Rouge (especially ‘La Fille De La Mort’). This comp is the raft of Medusa, but you should really start with L’eau Rouge and then go forward and backward through the ages with the Gods as your whims take you. As this music testifies, you are a young god as well. Freedom and love never sounded so all-conquering.

Why I Love . . . Ustad Bismillah Khan 


Born in 1916 in Bihar into a family of court musicians, Bismillah Khan was trained in the art of playing the shehnai, a small oboe/recorder style reed instrument that in Khan’s hands can summon up eternity. More than anyone else, Khan helped bring what was essentially a folk instrument into the more formalised world of classical raga. A devout Shia Muslim, he’s curiously also a staunch devotee of Saraswati, the Hindu goddess of music. His music and his religion are a divine unity. He lives in Benares and has eschewed much of the wealth and trappings of success, picked up innumerable state honours, and spent his life making heaven in sound.
   Were I an expert, I could explain how Khan’s meld of drone, tetrachord and powerful ornamentation combine to make magic. But I didn’t learn this music; rather, it came to claim me. My dad would listen to him and it percolated through. When I’d take him a beer in the room with the stereo in it, I’d see him nearly in tears. Ever hungry for drone, I stole my dad’s tapes and jammed along with a cracked Les Paul. After my dad died, I inherited the vinyl – beautiful records pressed up by the Gramophone Company Of India, mainly from the Sixties – and listened even closer and the tears began to flow seemingly from my dad through Khan’s music and out of my own eyes. I realised that precisely the fucked-up beats, vocal freedom and anti-melodies I was digging in early Seventies Miles and Tim Buckley and drum’n’bass were being lashed down by these guys in the Twenties, never mind being played by innumerable genii since raga’s inception since the 3rd Century BC. But it was Bismillah’s glorious voice, Bismillah’s soul that he spilled out through his shehnai (I own a shehnai, and can’t even get a squeak out of it, let alone spend the two hours it takes Khan to tune the thing up), that pulled me back to a fragile sense of belonging in Indian music. Within – on the plastic, in the grooves – were revolving doors to nebulae, trapdoors into galaxies, turnstiles into a seemingly infinitesimal selfawareness.
   This music, basically a drone set up by tanpura and tabla, and Khan’s rich rolling improvisations around the mathematical complexities of raga form, is so vivid with colour, so deep in spirituality, yet always touched by a love and longing for life, it’s devastating. The shattering twists and unique idiosyncracies of his playing transport you out of yourself, closer to God, and closer in on the wonder locked in your own heart. There’s a peace to be found in Khan’s music, but there’s also anger, a celestial fury, the darkest blues and the bloodiest reds and the most tranquil yellows. It’s an alternate universe where emotion finds clear expression and the sculpting of sound enfolds you. There’s a soul-shaking humanity to his music, and that’s maybe the most brave and beautiful thing about the 91-year-old maestro’s undying art. The balance between restraint and abandon, surprise and fulfillment, and the sheer joyful melodic invention are inspirational, no matter what music you’re into. But find any of the albums he did with the incredible violin player VG Jog, especially the Ragamala series of ‘Morning To Midnight’ ragas, and get yourself blessed by them, soon as. Because only beauty can save us now. And only tears can wash us new.


Various
Lightnin’ To The Nations: NWOBHM –25th Anniversary Collection (Castle)
In the past few years, we have been told by a lot of clever people that the early Eighties was the most incredibly exciting time in music. But let’s see where they were looking: to London’s hipper suburbs and inner sanctums, to the right neighbourhoods in the right cities, to arty experiment and eclectic doodad. What about the sound that was really rattling suburban windows? What about Maiden, Priest, Venom, Motörhead, Saxon, Magnum, Diamond Head? A quick stroll round the park with that samurai sword you made in Woodwork/CDT; 10 JPS bought with your last 75p; playing C64 games; collecting Fangoria and A History Of Gruesome Warfare ; reading Sven Hassel and 2000 AD; and listening to NWOBHM non-stop? When the big boys of the Seventies (Sabs, Zep) had died like the diplodoci they’d become, when punk had run out of chords, and when post-punk lost us in a welter of smart-arsedness, NWOBHM spoke to us of virgins and death, wank-fantasy and impossible dreams, tied to music that seemed fiendishly difficult to play but spoke directly to your simple urges: to bang your head and to play loud music to smellies like you. So this music, for me and my little mates, was the soundtrack to that time, way more than yer This Heats and Gang Of Fours. This superb three-CD collection exhaustively reminds me of those cheap Metal Muthas comps you could pick up for a couple o’quid and also reminds me of loads of things I don’t think I could share with anyone but the people I shared them with initially. They’re all dead/disappeared now. But the wardrobe door that this music was, the fantastical landscape it opened up onto, remains as touching and poignant as ever.
   Gratifyingly focused way more on the obscure bands than the big names (there’s no Priest, Maiden, Motörhead or Def Leppard here), the joys of this comp are many, but I’d direct you towards Diamond Head, Saxon, Blitzkrieg and Girlschool, because you’ve heard of them; Raven, Cloven Hoof and Warfare because you ain’t; and make sure you read Dave Ling’s trifficly spod-tastic sleevenotes while you jack the volume high and feel the wind in your greasy locks. And if you crack a smirk during, say, Holocaust’s ‘Heavy Metal Mania’ or Atomkraft’s splendid ‘Future Warriors’, that’s fine, but this was the soundtrack for a forgotten geek generation who, apart from going on to run computer games manufacture for the next decade, have been pretty much forgotten in any history of UK pop culture in the Eighties. So we expected, of course. Ignored; an embarrassment to parents and peers; outcasts, always and forever. Long may we fester.

Singles Column 
Winter 2005
Hey, pop fans. Have you died yet? Find yourself slipping into autopilot, disappearing? Where do you stand in relation to all this cool shit you’re surrounding yourself with? Music’s utter meaninglessness always threatens gently, of course. Part of the thrill. But just recently, I’ve been staring dully at the product racks I’ve littered my otherwise beautiful home with, and thinking of shifting more than just the speakers and my mess. I’m skint all the time, so that affects. But while I’m permanently down to a hardcore of vinyl I simply can’t part with (and seven-inches are just too damn cute to flog), the CDs come and the CDs go. A man has to smoke, no?

So when it’s down to a choice between a packet of fags and the latest ultra-hep bunkum and tommyrot from the music industry, I know what I’d rather find wedged in my soft furnishings. Hey, don’t blame me. I’m a piddling peon in this chain. Blame the fucking machine I’m writing this on. Because, with the onward lunge of Bill Gates’ rubbered fist past our gag reflex and into every home and orifice (he’s in so far, he has looped through your arse up through your oesophagus, and is shaking his own hand in self-congratulation somewhere near your trachea), music (much like everything else), has stopped mattering in a tangible, palpable sense, beyond mere annoyance/ fatigue. T’aint mere fogeyish petulance to suggest that the Bold New Digital anschluss has critically changed pop, cos it has taken away the chase, the longing for pop that pop’s innaccessibility used to stoke like lust in a Methodist’s loins. Anything you could possibly ever want to hear is probably a few minutes away from you right now. The wait, the search, the sight, the yearning, the saving, the orgasm of purchase, the afterglow of analysis and tactility – much of this bliss is getting rarer and rarer, and watching numbers fall on a screen really doesn’t pull the same tricks and fancies upon your poor soul. Yeah, I’m being an old twat. So I’m allowed to annoy you. Like my biz-card sez: “I may be a liar, but I don’t tell the truth!” Figure it out, you fucks! (Got ‘em done at Wooley Edge Services on the M1. Pressed the wrong button and got a logo of a sporty ol’ toff in a cap and plus-fours pointing his rifle at some distant furry victim, as his faithful gun-dog points his snout verminwards, like the snivelling grassing bastard it is. Quite pleased with ‘em, actually). I’m not senile yet, y’funkin’ barstewards. Check my salad. It’s crisp!
   But I done gone snapped my celery. Remembering the times when the only records we had in the house were a German Language Dictaphone stray, Negro Spirituals For Children (from K-Tel’s White Supremacist StartEmYoung collection), The Jungle Book (a Pickwick fake, I realised disappointedly), Charlie Drake (fucking sensational), Mantovani (fucking terrifying), and a couple of classical compilations that got me started on my way here. It was all Music For Pleasure, in every way – and I can’t sell vinyl with the same blasé disaffection I have for those loathsomely uninvolving lumps of plastic that even now are bugging me with their omnipresent ugliness. What I fucking hate about CDs is everything – the packaging, the look of them, the sound of them, the way that you can’t see how they work when they’re working (and tell me that a skipping CD ain’t a trillion times more annoying than a little scratch on an LP).  
   So, all the shit I’ve loved this month has been on wax. Like Jel’s ‘WMD’ (Anticon). Yeah, OK, mardyarse, groan all y’like, but it’s beautiful and all glittery, with a rough belly and a fat bum. This guitar that spills Doug Yule into Sunny Adé into Manzarena, all over geet big steaming chunky drums underneath, all spread thickly with warm ranch bass and smattered with crispy bacon bits. Other tracks way back on that Jel thang sound like Manitoba/the nutty fast bits of ‘Feels’, so that’s cool by me, and the closer ‘1938’ is a wee monster. Bit of a racket, the right grain in the rumble, pitter-patted with a masseuse touch by some properly palpitative beats. So doggone peachy you wanna bite it.
    All these 12-inchers bounce the tattered tendrils of tinsel out the carpet to wink at your hibernation’s impending demise – the Mos Def verse on Immortal Technique’s ‘Bin Laden’ (Viper), Sway’s poignant and inspirational ‘Little Derek’ (Dcypha), DTP’s Luda-heavy ‘Georgia’ (DTP), Tha Alkaholiks’ swandive into hip hop’s history books with ‘Flute Song’ (Kock), Vanishing System’s fearsome ‘Back 2 Back’ (Altered Vibes), Ying Yang Twins’ ‘Shake’ (TVT) for a blinding Pitbull cameo, Spankrock’s spooktacular homage to ‘Rick Rubin’ (Big Dada), The Guvnor’s natty seven-inch stormer ‘You Can’t Blag A Blagga’ (Raw Creation), Atki2 & Renee Silver’s absolutely head-wrecking ‘Sweaty Palms EP’ on the never-forgettable Shadatek label, Lupe Fiasco’s soon-to-be-huge ‘Kick Push’ (Atlantic), and Zygote’s quite incredibly dark ‘Casiopia/Heat Rise’ on the Boot imprint that’s steadily becoming one of the UK’s, nay the world’s, finest. But after all those extremes, howzabout some good ol’ British greyness, after an admission that I’m losing my thread?

Evil Ed

I mean, Christ, all that righteous technofear I was on a while back? Bollocks, really, weren’t it? Its disproof popped through my door a few days ago and has filled the world. I got a thing on a cheaply knocked out, anonymous-looking CD-R that’s getting played over and over. It’s a South Coast thing but don’t run. T’aint spangly or brittle, just sure and poetic and true. 12” Matter’s ‘Sunshine Coast’ (HID Productions) is an utterly stunning transmission from the depths of the dark south – a flipped, inverted look at coastal living and the ugly realities of small-town darkness and decay, both external and internal. Almost Graham Greene in its transformative look at holidayland paradise as a vicious criminal hell, but honest and raw, rather than cinematic, 12” Matter willingly admit that what they document on ‘Sunshine Coast’ happens in virtually every town in Britain, but there’s a definite sense of place to this recording that locates it firmly in their local milieu, the sea an unheard yet sure presence in the eerie silences, almost mocking the landlubbing hordes with its enormity and its emptiness. Absolutely unashamed in both accent and accuracy, it’s one of the most effectively honest tunes you’ll hear all year – and Evil Ed, as ever, goes way above and beyond and pulls an amazing remix off on the B-side. Ed’s one of those producers keen not just to show off his own talents but to really listen to a track, and think about what it means before he starts his work: the result is that the remix of this actually makes the track even sadder, even more poignant, even more redolent of the kind of blasted piers and broken-down funfairs 12” Matter seem to be circling as they rhyme. Never mind anything else coming out of these islands this month in any genre – if The Specials were around today, they’d be making tunes as righteous, painfully true-to-life and compellingly suggestive as ‘Sunshine Coast’. In 2006, let’s concentrate. There are glimmers in all the glitz and gladhanding of pop’s currently endless insistence on your daily space that entirely recall and reinvoke the same dazed infatuation you felt when you had nothing but a Dansette Music Centre and a few squares of card and black shellac for company.
   The key is: don’t just spend 2006 getting what you want. Spend time making sure that you love, unreasonably, excessively, what you get, or don’t get it at all. Delete everything else. Or you might as well be a shell for corporations to blow through at will.
   Concentrate. Think harder. I think it might help.

Pic by Becky Ross

Elliott Smith
From A Basement On The Hill
(Domino)
   It’s shocking how angry beauty can make you feel. Dug out Elliott Smith and Roman Candle t’other day: first time in a long time, left me messed up and twisted again. It was perhaps the first time I’ve really absorbed Elliott’s death. Tears (which prove nothing except perhaps my sentimentality) did come, as did furywith the fucker for leaving so soon. The songs on those two records detail a boy becoming a man; the dual pulls of living, the endless journey within and without. These songs suggested a way of living with love and loss that Smith could perhaps negotiate. In contrast, From A Basement On The Hill is one long hymn to disappearance. And the fact that Smith finally made real what this album suggests is a heartbreaking paradox: that this is his most successful work of art and that it had to be his last.


   You feel that Smith was finally able to vanish into his music, and hit that divine point where words and meaning are half obscured by the sheer arresting push’n’pull of his band and their noise. So, the ostensibly barnstorming opener ‘Coast To Coast’ still emerges from a drone chamber and fades into radio static. These are all pop songs under stress, under threat, driven out to you by pressure and by chance. It’s not just the lyrics on ‘Let’s Get Lost’ that make plain Smith’s urge to evaporate – the music itself contains a heavenly trajectory, a desire to snip the gravitational umbilicus and join the dark matter of the cosmos.
   Always such a pretty racket, always with the balance and Brownian ethereality of a true angel, Smith has made his music more chaotic, more elegiac and more implosive. Yet he has actually sharpened his songwriting beyond the confines of conciseness or indulgence. ‘Pretty (Ugly Before)’ and ‘Don’t Go Down’ have their own pace and pulse, bringing to life their own reality and rules. When Smith rocks now, there’s no vague distaste in his vocal. He throws himself into the fuzz of ‘Strung Out Again’ and the amazing triple-track delay fest of ‘Shooting Star’, flailing against the electricity. His ability to change his vocal persona (from T Rex to Bowie to Arthur Lee back to Mr Smith) always makes it seem like each melodic twist is spontaneously brought into being. Throughout, Smith doesn’t sing ‘over’ tracks. Instead, the songs sing him, the band swinging under his breath. Whenever From A Basement… slips into silence, your mind races up ladders, which, together with his emotive control, are testament to a man surely only just exploring how good and godlike he could be. And herein lies the anger.


   ‘A Fond Farewell’ presses you up close, a dear friend giving you a last ambiguous shred of contact. Then you scroll down the sleeve and see: “Copyright 2004, The Estate Of Elliott Smith” and your guts lurch. Bastard. What makes you spit feathers isn’t just the clear signs that Smith had further to go; what makes his loss so infuriating is that songs as beautiful as ‘Twilight’ or ‘A Passing Feeling’ seem so indestructible, even as you know their creator has fallen into a silent unknowable eternity. This record is as addictive as seeing a medium after a bereavement – one that only really reveals its full impact as From A Basement On The Hill latches onto your soul. Painkiller? And pain giver. Oh Elliott, you’ve got me all messed up and twisted again.

ARCTIC MONKEYS 
ONE FOR THE ROAD 
(Domino)
Quality. Legends. Sloppy. Erectile dysfunction. Celibate. Forgettable. Yup, everything that 10/10 from the NME led you to believe. They had way more feel, more heat, when they started out I reck. (Sidetrack - AM are yet another shouldabeenonehitwonders of the 00s - sometimes I think we'd have lost nothing if albums had been banned for that whole decade and bands' first singles were all we had). Now losing whatever they had in floppy pendulous shapeless pomposity, that Vegas air slowing them to a plod as dull as QOTSA's "Make It Wichu'. This sounds like Chris Moyles' idea of 'experimental', like the Stereophonics zany new 'disco direction', like bleedin' Hard-Fi fer chrissakes. Epic. Boosted as somehow AM at their 'blackest', their 'danciest' (uggh) just cos they coo octave-split vocals on the chorus and the click track's been bonged-slower a few notches. You'd have to have been found swaddled in a wicker basket in a forest clearing and bought up and reared by wankers to ever consider this anything other than time-marking bollocks of the most tedious kind. Legends. A guaranteed in-at-12 out the next week non-hit doubtless already embedded into the editing suites (smartly, Alex sings "to the relegation zone" early on, he no dummy) at Talksport and the Sky F1 channel for judicious cutting and disseminating through the ever-lucrative medium of sports-montage right now. Decent. Look away and hold yr nose. Chapman Bridge for snobs. FAKE sound of Vegas. Quality. 

AZTECH & REEL DRAMA ft. BIG SHUG
CAN'T STOP 
(NA)
SWEETNESS on the mix from Reel Drama, obviously touched by the influence of Premo but cut with a speedy grace that's pure post-Kanye and with sudden moments of brooding doom amidst the luscious Rhodes & jazz-funk. A track that's not happy just staying in one place, that hits all kinds of different pleasure buttons across its breathless, gorgeous two hundred odd seconds. You owe yourself this deliciousness.
BRITNEY SPEARS
WORK BITCH 
(RCA)
UNPOPULAR. A poxy 37million hits (vs 93mill for Gaga's latest, 161mill for Perry's) but I love this. I love the way it's been rushed out at Britney's behest and Will.I.Am is hopping mad (cos it's unrepresentative of the album). May more stars be this smart, this freewheeling. I love the way it doesn't even pretend to have a verse or a chorus, and is pretty much just a steady build and blast of jacked-up electro over which Britney marshalls the aggravation masterfully, slipping between accents (her British accent is ACES) and varying degrees of listener-baiting with the steely grace of a  her octave-jumping peal the only concession to melody, the rest like some freaky Lambourghini-speed mash-up of The Ones''Flawless' and Wildchild's 'Renegade Master'. Exquisitely unmusical trouble-making on the one hand. On the other, a record that's offers a disturbing, triumphant, body-rockingly thrilling snapshot of how tough you have to be to live through this. Actually good enough to make me want to hear it, too loud (the whole thing is gloriously too loud) in a club with other human beings. Better than the entire recorded works of Bob Dylan and no mistake. True sound of Vegas.  

DAVID GUETTA ft. MIKKY EKKO
ONE VOICE
(EMI)
TOO many outlets in and out. Of course, I should have massive problems with everyone involved here but 'Titanium' keeps on nagging away at me as a damn good reason not to fully condemn DG (if only he could and of course, like anyone else, I LOVED 'Stay', still Rihanna's only truly salvageable moment. Happy to report though that this is absolutely vile, like Chris Martin, Bono and Thom Yorke all frantically spunked on to a biscuit and then fed the soggy detritus through Logic Pro via a midi cable. Vocals - horrible, production - ghastly, concept- foul. The video,  which seeks to somehow bat away the none-more-whiteness of the track and give it some kind of political message it really can't sustain  by randomly splicing in footage of smiling Africans whenever it can, is perhaps one of the most revolting artefacts 2013 will give us. Hell, I know I should be critically schtum cos this is all for the United Nations or something but fuck the United Nations if enabling pop as terrible as this has now swum within their remit. Only fair that we consider marching Guetta, Ekko, and the smiling Africans as well, to the edge of a volcanic crater and push them all in, just to be firm but fair. A luncheon of lava will learn them not to foist poo on innocent pop fans and no mistake. 

DOPPLEREFFEKT
TETRAHYMENA
(Leisure System)
DREXCIYA's Gerald Donald is the man behind Dopplereffekt, here returning from the nigh-on beatless bleakness of 2007's 'Calabai Yau Space' album to something approaching their electro roots again. 'Tetrahymena' is antarctic cold, your fingers fusing to it like a frostbit clutch at a metal door that won't stop shutting. Reminds me of 'The Thing' massively but the highlight here can be found on the flip  - 'Gene Silencing' is one of the sweetest most mournful Kraftwerk imaginings I've heard in a while, for once someone doubtless using the same pallette as Zer Gut Meisters Of Klinklang but refusing to merely be satisfied with sourcing the same textures and going about the collage with a real sense of melodic and emotional complexity. The deliciously dark 'Zygote' closes things out with eeriness and impact as well. Short for a techno EP but all the more concisely brainjangling for it. Oh and, I know you gentlemen have been through a lot, but when you find the time, I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH.

ELLIE GOULDING
HOW LONG WILL I LOVE YOU (CHILDREN IN NEED SINGLE)
(Polydor)
THINGS were easier when bad voices, damaging, dangerously influential voices were the loudest voices, the most stentorian and bossy and show offy. It was obvious how dangerous the likes of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey were for pop, that surfeit of notes and melisma, that mistaking of technicality and proficiency for emotion that was so analogous to other musicians, guitarists who solo too much, drummers who solo at all. 

Goulding with arch shitbag Jo Whiley

   What's so horrible at the moment is that the most dangerously influential voices are the weak ones, or rather the faux-weak ones, the ones that impart a horrible tincture of fake fragility to their singing, fake conversationality, a prissy, self-aggrandizing 'vulnerability' that's monstrously arrogant. Wonky-mouthed mediocrity Ellie Goulding (even that name seems to live in a floral dress, the geek amazed at the good audition) is the exemplar of this. 'Burn' would have been a fairly emetic slice of EDM-folk in anyone's hands but with her 'broken''breathy''natural' tones it attained fresh new levels of hellishness. The only time such voices have ever been tolerable to me is when they're accompanied by a similar sense of brokenness and trauma in the production of the whole record (Lois, Lisa Germano). When, as with this Pudsey-boosting pool of piss (& the equally venal Passenger) they're backed by state-of-the-art 96-track pomposity (again masquerading as finesse) the package is a hateful, ghastly one, a song wherein you can almost hear the Zooey Deschanel rom-com unfolding in the background. This isn't just pop music, it's M&S pop music. Spurn it as you would spurn a rabid dog.

FADE
GUIDELINE/SPECTRAL FORMS
(Beta Recordings)
UGGGH, bleurggh, ouch, ouch, owww, ooyah, oooyafuckayabastaya, wonderful. Synths so distorted and paranoid it's like you're head's becoming enmeshed in a new molten metal exoskull, chords turning round every three times, never letting you rest, everything else so dementedly processed you can practically feel the e-numbers racing around behind your widening retinas. Kind of what I was hoping for after his fantastic couple of tracks on Renegade Hardware's 'Horsementality' EP but on the flip 'Spectral Forms' couldn't be a more different kettle of fish - aquatic, slippery, bubbling to the edges, liquid in only the most pleasing mercurial senses, like Prince alone in the studio got possessed by the spirit of Sam Binga. Great stuff.

FALL OUT BOY 
YOUNG VOLCANOES
(Island) 
   They have no right to do this to me.
How dare they make me feel this bad? What rotters. What meanies. What a perfectly beastly song in every way. The kind of song you want to punch in the face, repeatedly, finding the weak point in the facial structure, and then punching that spot over and over, again and again with increasing force and fury, preferably with a heavy-gauge ball bearing in your palm, until little shards of the song's nose-bone are embedded in your knuckles. Shut UP shut UP shut UP. 

Some badly dressed turds, yesterday

Fashionably unplugged acoustic oompah bollocks musically and then, vocally, that hateful thing so much 'anthemic' music does these days - that kind of soaring simpleton holler to the heavens everyone's on a ce moment (see also Bastille, Arcade Fire - who could also be blamed for starting this shit, Lumineers, Fun, Katy Perry, even Derulo now. . . ) meant I'm sure to imply/recall/become a kind of open-throated end-of-the-night wail at the wonder at the universe, coming over as the kind of hateful studenty bellowing singalong shit you scowl at from the gap in the curtains at & can't help wishing will get scooped up by the wrong kind of cab-driver, then groomed into a lifelong nightmare of white slavery and degradation i.e reality shows and reunion tours. No right at all you future botox-addicts. How dare they make me feel so bad.

GRAYSKUL ft. DJ SPARK 
COME ON  
(Fake Four Inc.)
2009's 'Graymaker' was an unsung underground monsterpiece (but way more accessible and palatable than that suggests), in 2013 Seattle crew Grayskul are ready to drop a new opus 'Zenith' from which 'Come On' forms a blistering opening salvo. Razor-sharp rhymes and beats and on the flip check the Aesop Rock-produced 'Not Going Anywhere' for some truly diseased '80s electro-funk that sinks as low down and disturbing as a John Carpenter soundtrack. Superb.

JOE 
SLOPE/MAXIMUM BUSY MUSCLE
(Hessle Audio)
LOVE 'Slope', turning from drone-dubstep (akin to Juana Molina with her strings in a twist) into bumping doom-house for the most fucked-up party of mutants imaginable, a party slowly getting vacated until all that's left is a ghost of a track, vocals squashed into a nigh-on extinct echo from a distant room in a distant sinking ship. On the flip , 'Maximum Busy Muscle' (is this planned?) fits its MBM acronym with some pulverising Meat Beat/KMFDM/Waxtrax-style electronic body rock. Like other Hemlock affiliate Randomer, Joe doesn't release much but when he does it's always compelling.

JUBEI
THE MOMENT/TIP THE SCALES
(Metalheadz)
NOT that fussed about 'The Moment' (although typically sharp rhymes from Flowdan) but definitely fussed about 'Tip The Scales' cos that man Marcus Intalex is in on the mix and this rolls and punches and snaps your shoulders as good as Hazard's 'Time Tripping' but with all trippiness wafted away by DRS' menacing vocals: ""I'm not paranoid/I'm just conscious of the consequences/How the most miniscule distractions/ can easily tip the scales/or blow the senses . . ." Amen brother.



KK NULL & ORE 
COMPONENTS OF CIRCULATION/ DAWN OF TIME 
(Endtyme Records) 
Beautifully hung drone on 'Components Of Circulation', a medieval church organ slowly getting overtaken by brazen flying wraiths of static and fuzz that evanesce in gradually, initially spooking your peripheries eventually swooping full upon thee as the air starts to shimmer and shake and shatter like a mystical vision, snakes biting you in the pulpit. On the flip Brum duo Ore (who together with Kazuyuki Kishino who you already know from those amazing albums with James Plotkin) pepper the low-end pull and anchor of their tubas (or are they slowed-down shenais?) with frictive flickers of birdsong and a digitised oceanwave machine that eventually engulfs you. Far too good for just the bedroom. Let it make the city phantasmogoric, your walk to work an even more terrifying dawning horror than usual.


LITTLE MIX
MOVE 
(Syco/Columbia)
NICE to hear a manufactured girl band not fatally tied to retreading old motifs - 'Move' has got a sweet wee dubsteppy vibe to it and sees Little Mix finally starting to imbue their music with their own style, the style that emerges from the people involved, not a style hastily followed in hope that the con and scam will hold (see The Saturdays). This sounds like them. It's not perfect, but nor are they. Starting to really dig 'em.

MADLIB & FREDDIE GIBBS 
DEEPER EP
(Madlib Invasion)
THE title track drowns a poignant couple of string and vocal loops in an ocean of echo and dub, Freddie keeping the only semblance of flow going against the steadily engulfing sense of blissful dread. 'Harold' is even more skin-puckeringly awesome, a held moment of exquisite tension kept going for an almost-unbearable length, the beats part Outkast-party, part minimal nu-skool. As you'd imagine from these guys, absolutely vital you own this launchpad into infinity as soon as possible.


MEEK MILL
MAKE ME  
(Warners)
APPARENTLY, as he reveals on this autotuned crockashit MM's haters only 'make him worse'. Was thinking mebbe I should hold off but actually Meek it's not POSSIBLE to be worse than this. So go on fuckface, show me how bad you can get. There's no further down to go from 'Make Me' beyond the sound of paramecium flatulence and frankly even that would be preferable to this big bowl of fuck all. Gwan man. Hit your nadir.


MEFJUS & ICICLE 
CONTEMPORARY
(Critical)
BRILLIANT the way this starts with slow taps of a cymbal like it's about to launch into a collosal doom-metal riff, then explodes into vivid rubbery d'n'b life, the first drop at 1 minute palpitating your heart, the second drop at 2 and a half minutes in damn near giving you a coronary. Were I 19 again, and it's only d'n'b that makes me feel that way, this would soundtrack a walk round town variously feeling like The Man Who Fell To Earth, Robocop and Roy Batty. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die. 

MUMDANCE & LOGOS
GENESIS EP
(Keysound Recordings) 
Yeah, I initially recoiled at the first syllable too but this is entertaining stuff from Brighton based Mumdance & Logos: 'In Reverse PIV' plays naughty tricks with your expectations, bass n strings lunging forward, beats and vocals all shadow moonwalking backwards as the headlights pass them in the rain. My other faves here are the wonderfully bass-heavy, old-skool hip-hop collage of 'Wut It Do', the almost Dillinja-heavy bass tectonics of 'Turrican 2' and the unsettling dystopian funk of 'Truth'. In that order. Seek out on soundcloud. You don't need me anymore. 

MUTATED FORMS 
86 EP 
(Pilot Records) 
LONDON-based Estonian-born drum'n'bass trio Mutated Forms give us five tracks a million miles away from d'n'b, all at the bpm implied in the title. 'Swamp' is weird supra-digi trap hip-hop nagged at by truly demented synthesised scratching, the two tracks with Virus Syndicate are fantastically off-kilter bangers rhythmically touched by bhangra and death-metal and I won't even talk about the other two tracks cos I sense I'm putting you off this shit. Don't be. 

NAUGHTY BOY 
THINK ABOUT IT (TORN REMIX) 
(VIRGIN EMI )
LOOKING forward to hearing 'Hotel Cabana' when it comes out cos 'La La La' has soundtracked many an in-car moment of seated dancing with the grandkids this summer. As he's proven already, Shahid Kahn has a great ear for a hook but here, gratifyingly he lets his straight-up pop-side take a breather in the boot whilst he tools around in this fantastic chrome-plated funk beast of a production, Wiz Khalifa and Ella Eyre just sounding happy to be couched in such a fabulous interior, the mix of G-funk, Premo-heaviness and scratchy synths proving rewindably addictive by the time your ride is up. No Whitetown jokes please. Kahn is gonna be making us dance in our Hondas for some time yet.

NEED FOR MIRRORS
SLING BLADE/GRAPEFRUIT
(Dispatch)
'SLING Blade' is just astonishing, plays tricks with your head, pitches it off the flyover to the underpass where it gets burrowed into by ravenous bassworms, the beats plunging into your soft brainpan with all the delicacy of a steamhammer. Such a fat as fuck rotational stomp to the face, such bass-heavy head wreckage that every single additional shard of detail (the refracted keyboards, sudden whorls of phased horn, the skittering sliced up breaks, the rumbling sound of traffic careening somewhere below your centre of gravity) takes on a spooked oddity and power. Superb stuff. 


OBJEKT
AGNES DEMISE/FISHBONE
(Objekt Recordings)
BERLINER headcase Objekt drops a new 2-track 12". Here's his own (presumably translated) take on what he's offering here "By bursts of silence that seemed woven deafening persistent and grinding Agnes' earrings, scream, hand drill, it is that it is possible to mix, they will break the hustle and bustle, to listen to all the way from the village interruption. Did the Richard Where am I? His bed was empty. Indifferent, in the field miles away pills and his grandmother danced his vision to horrowshow beat repeatedly reckless and unrestrained cruel twist, Richard has a gruesome demise of more than 20 contorting mess the limbs of his. In the rush of his early, he had forgotten to shut the door behind him." To which I can only add, SPOT ON & fuck me 'Agnes Demise' is a gloriously unhinged racket, and the moment 3 minutes in when the chest-punching beat gives way to a shitload of sublime distortion is one of the most deeply pleasurable moments techno music has given me all year. On the flip 'Fishbone' sets up a moebius lattice of pulsating ebm and then starts piling on robo-helium voices like Joe Meek's seen his new world all over again. IN THE RUSH OF HIS EARLY. 

PLACEBO
LOUD LIKE LOVE 
(Elevator Lady Ltd., under exclusive license to Vertigo/Capitol, a division of Universal Music GmbH)
YES, just thought I'd be explicit about who's ponied up the dough. ANYHOO, though starting off with a pleasing wooshing kinda Stereolab groove fairly rapidly tragedy ensues from the usual quarters - Brian Molko's voice and lyrics. Dynamics in a horrible Biffy Clyro/Killers/ImaginaryDragons place as well. 'We are loud like love' eh? Is he . . . is he talking about . . . he's talking about fanny farts isn't he? Genuine question, I don't understand how love is loud. Explanations in a self-addressed envelope to the normal address please and a googly-eyed 'F.U.N.K' badge will be winging its way to you.



PROBLEM CHILD 
QUICKTING
(Potentfunk Records)
PROBLEM Child are Illaman, Dubbledge & Dabbla, with production by Sumgii and 'Quickting' is the first thing I've heard by them. It's politically objectionable in all kinds of ways and lovably fucking nuts. Theremin, filthy bass, crisp vintage electro bits, derangement in the mix kicking off everytime the helium voices and queasy aggravation bleeds in on the chorus. Absolute fuckin' sickness and by several country miles the most compelling slab of madness I've heard all week. Album drops soon. Get ready for the end times.

PROFESSOR P & DJ AKILLES
BREWS AND GOOD NEWS EP
(Pro & AKHB/Ill Adrenaline Records)
'KILLING Time' featuring A.G is the highlight here, great scratches and production from Pro P & DJ Akilles, A.G bringing total authority and command to his verses. Also check out 'Lamp Posts & Neon Lights' for some reflective, sharp rhyming from Blu and a backdrop that seems to breathe and exude the rain-swept mystery of the city night. Old skool perhaps but with ever-new poetic things to say. For fans of the popular music genre known as rap, or hip-hop. 

PROJECT PAT ft. JUICY J 
BE A G
(Relativity)
MIKE Will produces this like a man possessed by a lunatic urge to drive all high-frequencies out of existence with the thickest ugliest bass sound he can find. Don't ask questions, just enjoy.

PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTING
NIGHT MAIL 
(Testcard Recordings)
UPDATE MY ECOFASHIONBLOG BUT JEEBUS Hyperion Christ - excuse me, is this a joke? I mean, I know Edith 'Fully, Some Might Say Exhaustively Exploring the Lucrative Role Of Ignoramus As Career Option For Over A Decade Now' Bowman digs 'em but . . . is this a joke? Public Service Broadcasting, as their Target Audience Profile indicates, create music best suited for the triumphal & emotional closing sequence of 'D.I.Y. SOS With Nick Knowles', a spod-u-like tour around a barrage of modern studio equipment all done with thorough and charmless competence and an almost inhuman disinterest, whilst cut-ins of John Grierson reading Auden's 'Night Mail' swim in and out of the mix for a totally unfathomable purpose. Some of my nearest & dearest love PSB but, them excused (they're bigger than me, that's why I hang out with them), only the cloth headed could consider this 'interesting' let alone grant PSB's avowed purpose of 'teaching the lessons of the past through the music of the future' any credulity. This is 'music of the future' in the same way that Paul Hardcastle's '19''literally ended the Vietnam war'. Shitehawks to be sure. None of them should receive a heroes welcome. None of them, n-n-n-none of them. 



RAHIEM DEVAUGHN 
MAKE EM LIKE YOU 
(Mass Appeal Entertainment)
Lovely, bass heavy, slo-mo psychedelic soul from Rahiem, somewhere triangulated tween D'Angelo, Prince & Outkast. The voice that's been 16-rpm'd to a crawl and the skanking organ, the surprising gloriously open-ended chord changes and the stuck-in-a-mud groove make 'Make Em' into a slab of darkness akin to New Kingdom trying to break into the panty-peeling quiet-storm market. Superb lo-end romance to be played end to end with the Butthole surfers. Me very much like.

ROBBIE WILLIAMS
GO GENTLE
(iTunes)
THE bleating cowardice of the regretful Redcoat, the remorseful clown. Robbie wants to slip into the calm places inbetween our entirely justified loathing of him, here reduces his voice to as anodyne and smooth a place as Roger Whittaker (he even fkn whistles!), his lyrics shorn of the usual dumpkopf pith and punnery and buzzword sloganeering, the arrangement committed to safely couching him amidst the Matt Monros and Frankie Vaughans of all our easy-listening yesterdays. Unfortunately, even listening to the pure audio without any imagery you can't shake that fucking Chris Evans smirk from your vision, that simpering neediness that is not just his default facial setting but also the bedrock of his soul. You've got all the money. Now fuck off and spend it, and don't come back until you're willing to fall apart more publically, more disastrously, more shamefully than you ever have before. Bald, naked, pissing-and-shitting-yourself on X-factor style shame please. It is, right now, pretty much all you're ever going to be good for. 

RUN THE JEWELS 
GET IT 
(FOOLS GOLD)
RUN the Jewels are Killer Mike and EL-P and you can imagine what a freaked-out slab of frabjous fuckery this is: 'Get It' impacts the head with a bleak harshness to the synthetic textures balanced beautifully by the sheer chunky joy of the 808 beats and looming vistas of smeared bass that drag everything to a primitive-futurist nadir devoutly to be wished. The album also features Prince Paul and Big Boi and should be one of the highlights/blowbacks of the whole winter. Absolutely essential.

SHABAAM-SHADEEQ 
SEASONS CHANGE/RELAX
(King Underground)
"I'M lightyears ahead of your thoughts kid"— Sahdeeq's skills you should be familiar with from his work with Polyrhythm Addicts, Lewis Parker's production smarts you should know from . . . what the hell you still doing here? The sumptuous, smoky, addictive 'Seasons Change' is taken from the forthcoming SS album 'Keepers of the Lost Art', on the flip of this check out 'Relax' for a truly lunatic few verses and then keep 'em peeled for the LP in the New Year.

SONNYJIM & KOSYNE
THE DEATH DEFYING SAGA
(Eat Good Records)
THE first single from the Sonnyjim & Kosyne debut EP 'It's About Time', highlarious rhyming, astonishing headnodic production from Kelakovsk. The EP also features production from Apatight & Dag Nabit, and is totally free to download from Sonny or Ko's Bandcamp pages now. One of these days someone's gonna come up to Birmingham and make these people the international superstars they deserve to be. Until then, find, download, share the shit out of this brilliance.

TAYLOR SWIFT ft. GARY LIGHTBODY
THE LAST TIME
(Big Machine)
I'M guessing you can imagine just how abhorrent this is, even worse than that Ed Sh**ran collaboration. Happen to think Taylor Swift has a good (and tougher/more touching than you might think) voice but a voice that reached its zenith with the held-hard distorted note in the chorus of 'Trouble' and has done nothing as good since. Gary Lightbody on the other hand has a totally revolting voice, and a totally revolting 'way with a tune' as well, and they come together in truly dreadful ways on 'The Last Time' together with that arch-architect of adult-pop horror Jacknife Lee (U2, Snow Patrol). I think the placement of this track on 'Red' is meant to signify that Swift is now ready to 'step up' to a 'more mature' sound. Though hopeful that local commercial radio won't playlist such a dull new direction, (and knowing that Radio 'Former Paedophiles Sanctuary' 1 almost certainly will) I can only beg, please Lord, let me not have to listen to any of it. 

THE STRYPES
CAN'T JUDGE A BOOK
(Virgin/EMI)
EXTREMELY reminiscent for me of Bridges, the band the Enemy could gave been before they got their music airbrushed and their egos sphincter-locked on to airhoses. Would probably enjoy them live if stumbled across, pissed. See absolutely no reason on earth to listen to their music through choice, sober. Neither heavy enough to be enjoyable nor nuanced enough to do anything but make you yearn for Bo's magic and heat, The Strypes should still be safe, armed as they are with plenty of jaded pre-emptive apologists, ready with arguments about how 'energy' and 'fun' is all that matters, conning themselves that they're not essentially engaged in the same kind of vintage 'thrills'/sloppy seconds as yer Michael Buble or Jamie Cullum fans. Hope the shtick holds for 'em, and if it doesn't, someone throw a cordon around them before Warners come knocking with silly money, shit sportswear and a load of cack 'anthems' about the mean streets of Cavan. They're only bairns. Leave 'em be you preverts (sic) & monsters. 

TERMANOLOGY
YOU AIN'T SAFE 
(Brick Records)
MOST emphatically not for the club. For that guy down your street that you see through his window hitting a punchbag into the wee smalls. Survivalist, scary shit. Me like.

WU TANG CLAN 
EXECUTION IN AUTUMN
(Soul Temple Entertainment) 
FANTASTICALLY dank, squalid production from Frank Dukes, norralot to it but what there is accumulates a head of black steam beautifully, occassionally giving way to strange funkless moments of static arrhythmia, typically engrossing verbals from RZA, U-God, Rae & Deck. Fingers crossed, necks snapped that this is just an offcut from a new album soon-come. See you in the bleak midwinter. 

[Editors note - June 2013 
A warning - this, to my eyes now, is bad writing. At times terrible writing. Not just the obvious fact that too many sentences start with the word 'And'. The thrust of it, the lack of tightness, the voice, the rambling, the nastiness, the repetition, the self-pity. It's all pretty horrible I think, or at least emerges from a not-very-nice person. I probably wasn't a very nice person when I wrote it, certainly wasn't happy. The supposed 'metal' columns I did for CTCL (which rapidly just became longwinded belly-aching on my part) were from a time when I was just getting used to how I'd never make a living out of this malarkey, and consequently I used them to write in a way I never had before, no wordcount, dim awareness of deadline, entirely freewheeling. In a big way I was 'practicing' the kind of writing that in a more substantive manner took over when writing 'Eastern Spring' so it all had a reason but mygod this is painful now. Man, I hated the noughties.] 


June 2002

(Review from Plan B Magazine, 2005)

THE HOWLING HEX 
ALL NIGHT FOX
(Drag City)
When I last saw Royal Trux, I was unprepared for the sheer danger level that seemed to shoot out from them and suffuse the room. Not danger as in the usual r’n’r hotel-trashing puerility – danger as in it felt frightening, seeing how many possibilities they were toying with. And while Jennifer H was the focus of most people’s attention, the most palpable waves of hostility to the universe were pouring from Neil Hagerty. Or rather, from this fucked-up little Fender box amp and the kind of guitar you’d pick up at Argos. There was a freedom and a fearlessness to what he did with that guitar that I’ll never forget, and it’s reinvoked every time I hear him.
   So The Howling Hex have a lot of love to trash, simply by dint of his presence. Before a note is heard, this is a hip document. But you don’t need to know the Trux to digthis. All Night Fox is a livid, searing lash of aggravation and contact-high noise that welcomes anyone in who wants to hear riffs unshakeable, vocals unbreakable, patterns inescapable. We’re talking lip-smacking hooks courtesy of Hagerty’s constant Eddie Hazel/John McLaughlin homage – his palette limited but kicking against its limitations in pleasingly aggressive fashion. Underneath we have the horniest, holiest, funkiest rhythm section this side of Can or The Silver Apples. Slathered over everything is Hagerty’s whining tones, somewhere between abject filth and religious revelation, and two female voices heavily echoplexed and coming on like The Feminine Complex or Grace Slick wandering the sewers.
   ‘Now We’re Gonna Sing’ kicks things off on a collision of The Pretty Things ‘Come See Me’ and The Creation’s ‘Making Time’, and that should tell you how ace it is. ‘Instilled With Mem’ry’ lives in its dubbed-out space as much as its bustling Beefheart undertow, before ‘Pair Back Up Mass With’ slays ya – a slo-mo, arsepummellingly, toe-curlingly funky take on ‘Sister Ray’-style repetition with enough psychout touches to reach those parts of your brain you’d rather leave unravaged. ‘Activity Risks’ comes on like Tarnation backed by PiL; ‘What Man? Who Are You?!' takes seven minutes of your life and gives you back a holy headache, only slightly relieved by ‘Cast Aside The False’ – Ronettes/Roches-style soul played by dirty, dirty people. ‘Soft Enfolding Spreads’ waves you back to the beginning with the best music Hagerty’s made since Royal Trux’s Accelerator, and perhaps the most mindblowing since their Twin Infinitives. It’s probably best to have never heard Hagerty before – keep The Howling Hex as your first exposure to his unquenchable drive to mutual headfuck. Cos he hasn’t been as locked-on and out of control for too damn long.
   Welcome back to being out of the loop, in no fold, with only this goddamn irresistable sound to hold you up as it frogmarches you into its depths and up into the cosmos. For all the echoes you hear within All Night Fox, what’s truly frightening is that you have to invent your response as it occurs to you. Like all that will truly excite in 2005, All Night Fox is linked to nothing but its own red-eyed commitment to pursue its own tail, swallow you up with it, and devour itself out of existence. Let it pull you under, soon as.

A) CAPSULE 




D) Graded

Azealia Banks 

Nick Drake
Bryter Layter Boxset
(Commercial Marketing)

"I think that's one of the problems with Nick's legacy, if there is a problem. I get sent tapes just by people out there who have a guitar and want to write songs, and they are very touched by Nick Drake and they make a demo tape, and they send it to Nick Drake's producer and they say, "What do you think of this? I love Nick Drake, can't you hear it in my music?" And 99 percent of those tapes that I get – or electronic submissions these days – are breathy vocals, Aparicio guitars and form without essence. There's nothing in there of the wit or the subtlety of Nick, or the sophistication of his music. What drew me to Nick wasn't the subject matter, but the tremendous originality and freshness of the musical vision. And it's always been mysterious"  - Joe Boyd

There is an epidemic out there, a nasty rash. Even Simon Cowell's noticed. It would seem that the singer-songwriter is everywhere, all so similar, all so dull, all so slimily seeking our fondness. Everywhere you turn there is someone bearded, someone earnest, someone with passion trying to sing you a song from the heart. The song is nearly always the same. It will be about 'holding on'. It will be about 'letting things go'. It will be about 'staying together'. Not a single word will be poetic, although the writer will frequently mistake the use of scientific or managerial speak in the lyrics as being poetic. It will take a condescending look at a 'character', mistaking pity for compassion and metaphor for depth. It will be the very best the writer and singer can do. And that is why these people need informing of something. That they are all, convincing though the mutual backslaps and incestuousness is - suffering from a severe type of mental illness, the kind of Aspergers-delusion that in any other walk of life would require a psyche-evaluation and a recommended sabbatical for six-months to a year.


    I know some of these people. Every city has them, their little community of folkies and troubadours, who all go to the same pubs on the same night to watch each other close their eyes and be transported within the ever-engrossing confines of their windswept souls. Together they keep their delusions alive, that they're cutting away the flab and fanny that chokes meaning in modern industrial pop and returning things to an agrarian wood'n'wire purity, a place where the city can be risen above even as it's so 'bravely' explored. There's several fronts to this arrogance - first and foremost the supposed gallantry of 'writing their own songs' immediately auto-annointing themselves with the burnished glow of self-sufficiency, their superiority to those puppets who sing only other people's words, play other people's tunes, y'know like Elvis, Frank Sinatra. These folk have the guts and grit and dauntlessness to write all their own songs, y'know, like Nickelback, Ed Sheeran.  There's also the further arrogance that can only come from a fundamental misunderstanding of what music's all about - collaboration between people- this rather modern idea that the singer songwriter stands alone, works on their vision alone, that we are lucky to bear witness to such purely committed artistry, uncut as it is by the concision or urge to edit that others would bring. Finally there's the arrogance in assuming that what people want to hear is songs 'from the heart', which usually means an incredibly constricted set of cliches have to be in place for that song's writing and execution. Politically it can be extroverted yet must always return to a deeper message of survival DESPITE the interference of others, personally it has to arrive at a moment where the singer figures it all out, self-diagnoses his or herself and prescribes a better future or a self-satisfied stasis. It's from their heart and you will listen, regardless of any selfishness behind the expression, attuned as you are to the lazy universality of the lyrics, the ease of empathy all that vaguery about confinement versus the open road inspires. Vocally the singer must twitch, at carefully timed ("quirky) moments of particular import, into their 'other' voice, the one they only flex when they're really feeling it, tapping their internal maelstrom for the rawest emotion, that moment where all the men get to sound like that overrated cunt Jeff Buckley and all the women set their larynxes to 'foghorn'. In the delivery of their songs, eyes will be constantly closed, heads will sway, locked in on their own genius, rarely making contact with an audience who should feel honoured to be witness to such courage and daring.
   That inflated sense of truth and connection doesn't just animate the performers, it also brings together the audience, galvanises their sense of commitment to an entirely urban bucolic ideal of 'what music is all about', the tacit unspoken critique and conservative fear of the real city and all that problematic post-60s diversity that despoiled and defiled the true troubadour impulse.
    To a tiny extent you can blame people like poor old Nick Drake for these kind of delusions. Drake was off on his own, toted a tape, he played a 24 hour festival with Fairport, got his tape to Joe Boyd, and Boyd knew then something special was happening. As Boyd points out though, this gives too many people the idea that in their seclusion, in their endlessly self-important, humourless explorations of their innards they'll find something unique that needs hearing. Whereas what actually emerges as important whenever you listen to Drake, particularly 'Bryter Layter', his most interesting album, is that other people's interference was crucial, and that really what Drake was can't be reduced to so brutishly simplistic and loaded a formulation as 'singer-songwriter'. He's far too odd still, far too different and special still despite the legion of lunkheaded copyists he's inspired, to be so easily summated, or so confined to the tools he used or the supposed lack-of-image he put across (which of course becomes its own image).


   For starters, his guitar playing. If you're 'committed' a music-fan enough to only experience one sense at a time then you'll see on the cover that he's playing an acoustic guitar, but if you're a human being you'll realise - my god WHAT a thing he turns it into. Not simply an up and down thing of strum, or a finger picking thing of detail but the fretboard as dancefloor, the soundboard as rumpus room, a labarynth of geometry and shadow, a rhythm section all to itself. One of the funkiest guitarists of all time and the only other British people I could remotely compare his playing to is John Martyn and Vini Reilly - players so unique that a lifetime spent trying to emulate them would be a lifetime wasted. Anyone who's ever tried to learn how to play a Nick Drake song knows that it's not contained in the chords, or the structure. It's contained in the unplaceable tunings, the shape of the way he leans into what he's playing, the way his fingers, deep within themselves, are actually possessed of an almost frighteningly inhuman mechanical grace, the way he absolutely resolutely refuses to play everything he could be playing. And where alot of musicians allow their bad cliched habits as players inform their equally uninteresting songwriting, so Drake's songs are always pitched in a totally unique place, somewhere between reverie and resistance, somewhere between being buffeted away by a breeze or a whim and being the heaviest blackest darkest shit you've ever heard in your life. There's a private humour to Nick Drake's songs that allows that heaviness to not hurt or become wearisome, there's a cellular bleakness that stops it being all air and light, that slowly has his vision closing in on you, closing you down, enveloping you. 'Bryter Layter' was the first Nick Drake album I ever heard, consequently it's my favourite, but I think beyond that initial way his voice just made me crumble I think it's my favourite cos it's his poppiest, his lushest, the one where you feel he's most part of the world. 'Introduction' I used to put on as a little bathe of sunshine every morning, still it's one of the most evocative openings to an album you'll hear, cracking your shell, letting the rays in, and the clouds. Listen to Jake Bugg's fuckawful pointless cover of 'Hazey Jane II' and then listen to Drake's and you can hear exactly how much is going on here more than chords and words. Richard Thompson's guitar is key as it is throughout, sliding things round the corner, fracturing and forming the shapes, Robert Kirby's simply gorgeous strings (best 'rock'-band string-arrangement this side of Paul Buckmaster or Tony Visconti) force Drake out of himself and out into the street. 'Chime Of A City Clock'& the heart-rending 'One Of These Things First' both gently remind you just exactly what an astonishing riddim-machine Nick was, how vital Dave Pegg's bass is throughout, what a genius move it was getting Beach Boys veteran Mike Kowalski in to do some sunkissed shuffle & stealth.
   "Hazey Jane I" is the moment for me when 'Bryter Layter' stops just being dazzling and starts negotiating its place in heaven, Dave Mattacks giving the drums the same sense of rippling endless fade-out that Paul Thompson does in the last minutes of Roxy's 'For Your Pleasure', Pegg, Drake & Kirby making the rest a swish of zephyrs and brokenness. 'Bryter Layter', the title track is twisted supermarket muzak, the most unsettling warp of almost too-sweet melody my young head had heard since the 2nd side of 'Forever Changes'. John Cale's viola and harpsichord on 'Fly' are just exquisite, working with Pegg's fantastically medieval low-end to lend Drake the poet-knightly air of the Stones 'Lady Jane' with none of the meanness of spirit, just a beautiful proneness and wilted need that suits the words and the voice perfectly. Boyd's brilliance at bringing the right people together in service of the songs, not the artist, works so brilliantly throughout 'Bryter Layter' it becomes less and less like a singer-songwriter's album, more and more like an ensemble piece, albeit an ensemble who have to follow the curious mix of clear-eyed hardboiledness and red-eyed dissipation that Drake's songs inhabit. All the words I've ever heard to describe Drake, 'ethereal', 'airy', 'introspective' seem to me to be reflecting a response to his voice rather than the way his songs actually come across - this idea that Drake's natural shyness leads to an obscurity of purpose or meaning is demolished through 'Bryter Layter's stunning closing side, perhaps suggesting that it's always a mistake to think the shy boy can't be a monster on the quiet, or that a naturally weak voice can't dominate your day. Drake's voice sounds anything but non-committal, has the same unbridled sense of personality and difficulty and bloody-minded naturalism that you sense Drake was always possesed with. So 'Poor Boy' is never in danger of being earnest, is always taking the piss out of its protaganist and out of you, P.P Arnold & Doris Troy's sweet backing vocals cutting loose on the chump, skewering his self-pity. "Northern Sky" seems to want to wipe the slate clean, clear the clutter of poesy any songwriter finds him/herself backed into, start afresh with a "new mind's eye", Cale's wondrous celeste adding to that sense of rebirth at the dead-end of a loveless lifetime, Drake now seemingly getting down to the basic yet inherently ambiguous statements of hope and irredeemable darkness the whole album's been playing with. And 'Sunday' is just the perfect closer - back in the strangely off-key muzak world of the title track, suffused with a warmth that's pure Bosworth archive from Kirby's hanging strings, the flute at times embodying what you feel Drake might have sung, at times slipping free and skipping down the road with a naivete and innocence you couldn't credit him with - it leaves you wondering who the hell is this Nick Drake guy and why has he chosen to bookend and sandwich his LP with these moments of purely instrumental lissomness when you've been told he was a singer-songwriter, someone who meant it man, someone who played from the heart. Throughout 'Bryter Layter' it's clear he's playing, writing, from a way more twisted, more open, more generous place than that.


   A word about the box. I don't have it. I don't care about it and neither should you. Drake's is a story that needs no more fleshing out (and Brad fucking Pitt should be banned from ever talking about him again), and requires no more artifacts beyond the records as they are. They themselves are inexhaustible and infinite enough to be getting along with, and ticket stubs, posters, extra artwork, free downloads, sketches, nuts'n'bolts demystifications I can do without.  I'm utterly disinterested in Nick Drake the man, just as I'm utterly disinterested in all singers 'from the heart', all musicians who see music as a way of keeping a journal, inflicting their self-absorption on the rest of us. I'm still, despite the unpleasant speculations and romanticising of the rock 'audience', totally fascinated by the sophistication, ease, and suggestiveness of Drake's music. His depression and demise are as tragic to me as any persons passing, but no-one should allow them to in any way affect their enjoyment of the things he made, cos his music in its sheer intransigent existence absolutely denies the sadness, denies whatever 'message' you might draw from the way he ended up. What you hear on 'Bryter Layter' is the man at play, in delight and wonder, exercising his powers to their fullest in collaboration with some of pop's brightest sparks and most humane spirits. Nick Drake, though so often used as emblematic of some auteur spirit, especially by his fans who've "discovered" him through something other than the records, is, like any interesting musician proof of the exact opposite, that the best artists need others to truly bring out what isn't inside them, what's more than they contain, that you only get to be thoroughly honest when you're being honest about your own inherent dishonesty, unreal about your reality, real about your unreality, and music is the perfect artform to express that essential dualism so many straight-ahead singer-songwriters are missing. In comparison to Drake's shy reticence, the confidence and sickly self-regard of his self-appointed descendants is a natural consequence of their musical myopia and their pipsqueak souls. Drake's harder, tougher, funnier, than any of them, and 'Bryter Layter' is his most welcoming and giving statement. If songs were lines in a conversation the situation would be fine. It aint, and Drake knew it, knew how much more songs could be, how much more his songs had to be. Love it, and live in here forever.