THE F.U.N.K SINGLES PAGE JUNE 2013

June 6, 2013, 5:26 am

≫ Next: 20 THOUGHTS ABOUT LOVE AND ERYKAH BADU

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SINGLE OF THE MONTH 1
INSIDE INFO & MEFJUS
MYTHOS
(VIRUS)

Oh man, there's a sound threaded through this that's just EVIL. It's like something from a Japanese 

horror movie, this low-down croak that slows to the point where you can hear every single popped kernel of it, like the kind of weird-assed noises you find yourself making late at night to spook the bejesus out of yourself when you've been left alone with the medicine cabinet. It ripples and reemerges and pulls you under like Jenny Greenteeth throughout this monster from Mefjus on the ever-dependable Virus Recordings and when it starts getting ping-ponged back'n'forth across the mix it turns 'Mythos' into just about the most damn addictive d'n'b track you've heard since Break's 'Love So True'& Calyx & Teebee's 'We Fall Away' back in 2012. Essential. 

Atoms For Peace 

Before Your Very Eyes
(XL)
Why are Atoms For Peace releasing a single? Thom Yorke hates pop music like he hates modern standards of hygiene. He's the enemy of pop music. He's all about good music, proper music, proper music played by proper people on proper instruments of a proper intellect that doesn't lower itself to having such vulgar things as 'hooks' or trying to be 'likeable' and so this dislikable splat of coffee-table-ready coffee-coloured shit proves. Perhaps the most punchably dislikeable cunt involved in music this side of the Gallagher bros or Bono, Thom and his fellow wankonauts here explore a  Fela-ish groove with none of the warmth or fire or reason to be, Eno-production with none of the stealth or purpose and always always always that smeared false-modest sanctimonious croon so convinced of it's own depth it feels no need to bother creating a melody that isn't transient, instantly forgettable, comes phutting out with one leg cocked and a smirk on its face and a frown on its brow. Gosh how very very very fucking clever 'Before Your Very Eyes' is, how hard it tries to make a sound you can't deny but how completely it reveals itself to be  utterly antithetical to everything you should hold dear politically, culturally, and emotionally about music. The sound of rich people trying to expiate their guilt, pomposity that negates communication, that hates the listener, a bottomless topless unfathomable pomposity that makes the soul turgid from exposure to it.  Fucking hippy cunts fuck off and die.

Avril Lavigne 
Here's To Never Growing Up 
(Epic) 
Speaking of the piss-stinking rat-faced piss-faced rat-stinking one Avril's finest memory of her youth here is "Singing Radiohead at the top of our lungs" - well that's your fucking card marked innit Mrs Kroeger. This contains possibly the worse lyrics of the year - yet another brain-buggeringly repetetive post-Perry/Ke$ha thqueam-till-I'm-thick bleat that the height of rock'n'roll transgressiveness is 'dancing on a bar', yet another attempt at infantilism from someone old, the endless perpetuation of the fear of ageing so ingrained now in popsong that every artist either has to be young, or sad about being old and no-one can simply SING ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN SELF-PITY/AGGRANDIZEMENT. Hateful in every single way musically but beyond that, sung and delivered with a thoroughly unpalatable sense of priveliged selfishness that only a Radiohead fan could enjoy. You are welcome.

Alicia Keys 
New Day 
(RCA)
Fully skill verse, 3-quarter triffic beats,  half-ace bridge, shit chorus. Problem being the usual appeal to the 'party people'.Pop remains convinced that the party people KNOW. Pop always wants to know where they're at. Pop always sends things out for the party people. I wonder if pop has ever MET the party people? I have, and they're badly-dressed desperate wankers to a man. Fuck the party people. Next artist to give a shout out to the 'motherfuckers chundering in the bogs', or proudly state that 'this one's going out to the toilet attendant', or even give mad props to 'the angry bastards spitting at the dancefloor' gets me intrigued and signed up for their newsletter and that's a promise.

Frank Turner 
The Way I Tend To Be 
(iTunes)
Why do singer-songwriters think they can write a song on an acoustic guitar and then just add other instruments and that'll count as 'a record'? Unless you're making 'Astral Weeks' and you've got folk who played with Charles Mingus showing up it aint gonna work you turnip-breathed twats.

The Last Skeptik 
Be There 
(BBE Records) 
One of the most skin-puckeringly gorgeous tracks from Skeptik's superb 'Thanks For Trying' set, up there with Telemachus' utterly stunning 'In the Evening' as one of 2013's real highlights. The loops here are sweet, the flute a thing of real beauty, but it's the rock-solid beat that gets you addicted, has you swimming back for more like a grinning shark sniffing blood. UK hip-hop production on a roll right now and here be evidence writ large. Oh btw - hip-hop fans who like coming here to tell me my hip-hop choices are hilariously bad please do fuck off back to your Lil' B mixtapes you fucking clowns I really could not give two fucks what you cretins think about rap music.

Mark Owen 
Stars 
(Polydor) 

I remember when I really fancied Mark Owen, always the prettiest Take Thatter. Then he turned up at a nightclub I DJ'd in and I realised that he was well under 3 feet tall and seemed to be shrinking as the night progressed. Then, though still pretty, he started bringing out shitty solo records under some serious delusions of talent that have tested my horn for him to the max. This typically tedious single, which manages to make a video in which he's dressed as a spaceman and is walking around Berlin somehow be the most boring thing you've seen from ANY of TT in recent years (including Robbie "Failed Redcoat" Williams) confirms that I was quite right to edge him out of the wank-bank in preference for more up to date fantasy figures like Arturo De Cordova, Oliver Tobias and Ben 10. Always nice to know you were right to move on -still get the screaming thigh-sweats for Christian Ingebrigtsen from A1 though. Who doesn't? 

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 2
Tegan & Sara 
I Was A Fool 
(Warner Bros.)

Hey Haim, listen up, if you're gonna use those kind of 70s/80s textures THIS is how you do it. Firstly you write a good song, not just a series of clever coherent structures without any emotional movement or linkage. Secondly you don't over-egg the mix- the gorgeous lambent sweep and thump of 'I Was A Fool' is weighted & pitched just right, never exhausts you, never sounds like showing off or a journey round the correctness of their kit, always seems in service of the song and the heads & hearts behind it, leaves enough space amidst the pristineness for human beings to be able to emerge (and I just love the slightly delay-laden piano,  it gets me right in the ribs). Thirdly, you actually have something to say, something lacerating & true to say about love  rather than just the rotation of numb cliches and dead metaphors. I love Tegan & Sara and see no reason why they shouldn't be the giant pop stars they've always deserved to be. I hope this song takes them there.

Bastille 
Laura Palmer 
(Virgin)
BasTARDS more like. (ArfArf! This is why they still pay me the big bucks) "This is your heart/Can you feel it?/Can you feel it?/Pumps through your veins/Can you feel it?/Can you feel it?". Fatal and exasperating error here lyrically. Your heart doesn't pump through your veins. It pumps blood through your veins, but if your heart is actually pumping through your veins in small capillary-wide chunks you got severe, potentially life-threatening problems son.
   Hey, I understand a little lassitude in medical accuracy is permissable in pop songs esp. seeing as most pop songs, if they mention the heart, have it doing something it shouldn't be doing or afflicted with deformities that would render urgent medical attention a real priority beyond the singing of a song ("Groove Is In The Heart", "Thunder In My Heart","Heart Of Glass") but c'mon Bastille, I'd been led to believe you were a literate smart pop band. If my heart was pumping through my veins what exactly would be doing the pumping thickos? The fact I've spent the last 3 minutes pondering this when I should've been actually listening to this anthemic boobery is neither here nor there. I cannot abide imprecision and we shouldn't tolerate it anymore, time's too short and life's too long.

Cappadonna 
Can't Believe it's Him 
(Fat Beats) 

Real resurrection of the Wu under recent solo outings (especially the Ghostface/Younge album), but don't overlook this simmering little corker as well, great rhymes and lush jazzed-out menace perfectly realised.

Union J 
Carry You
(Sony/RCA) 
Awww. How sweet. I think Union J have tried to pitch this as a 'hold on'-type anthem, y'know, the kind of 'times are tough and you feel like giving up but I'll be there baby to help you' (fuck me! that just came out of me! Sending it to Biffy Clyro with a pre-invoice for a squillion quid now!) identikit song EVERYONE IN THE FUCKING WORLD seems to be singing right now. The popularity of this 'helping hand' motif is down to no-one actually being willing/able to say what's wrong in any deep or meaningful or crazily meaningless sense (politically/sexually/socially/culturally) let alone proffer solutions beyond a pally 'don't worry mate' vagueness but 'Carry You', by dint of UJ's shit haircuts and general Beds/Berks excess-of-gorm manage to turn the universal into something that sounds entirely local and specific. By the sounds of it, their girlfriend/boyfriend (don't forget Jaymi came out as gay last November and according to Wiki " instantly became a role model for young adults struggling with their own sexuality") isn't going through anything like a genuine life crisis. They've just had a few too many WKDs by the swings up the park and have fallen unconscious in a pool of their own vomit. At such an admittedly vital moment in any young person's life-curve be assured that the Union-J boys are there for you: "When the vision you have gets blurry you don't have to worry I'll be your eyes it's the least I can do/We'll take each step together till you come back to centre/The demons are screaming so loud in your head, you're tired, you're broken, you're cut and you're bruised but nothing's too heavy, just hold on, I'll carry you." Dead sweet. Anyone would be glad for such thoughtful nice young boys to be looking out for their kids, although the addition of the couplet 'I'll hold your hair whilst you stick two fingers down your throat' would have really sealed them into the affections of all parents of teenage girls. Such a shame that - their fireman's-lift skills and shitty parping castrato nonsense notwithstanding - they're pretty much fucked for at least the next 5 years cos they're not One Direction. It's a shitty business.


Czarface
Czardi Gras (It's Raw Again)
(Brick Fly/Casual Creative) 

Featuring Action Bronson on a particularly ace verse - not as good as the album version, but still unmissable and some of the juiciest, grainiest sampladelia in years.

Two Door Cinema Club 
Handshake 
(Kitsune)
What a horrible horrible sound, such four-square lumpen 'danceyness', such gag-worthily correct textures but there comes a point where you have to admit that some music just isn't for you, was never for you, never had your demographic on the drawing board. 'Handshake' isn't made for human beings. It's made for silhouettes against a beach-sun, spinning, dancing, holding slimline devices. It's made for lightly-bearded men and floral-dressed women holding on to each other against a backdrop of lit-up skyscrapers (preferably Japanese - the skyscrapers that is), all holding slimline devices. It's for the geographically estranged young couple, separated by their lucrative and exciting jobs in the creative sector but united by technology's abilities to allow them to share instagrams of their meals across continents and add it all to their eco-fashion blogs, all holding slimline devices. It's for the rock audience listening to rock music at the rock show, bouncing as one, glowsticks and ipads held aloft, everyone looking clean and fresh and on-brand, everyone having an unforgettable time, everyone gaining maximum leverage value, everyone holding slimline devices. It's for small photogenic kids to be doing something outdoorsy and memorable with their comfortably well-off parents, on holiday but with an ever-present connectivity, all holding slimline devices. It's for the ITV or Sky TV trailer for their new seasons of drama, moments of tears and sadness and emotional content-provision, every single moment retrievable so long as you're holding slimline devices. It's for the daytime DJ, punching the playlist-B bed and proudly intoning the title with heavy pregnant pauses between each word, sending it out to the world, listeners and players all holding slimline devices. All holding slimline devices. All holding slimline. All holding. All.


Bring Me The Horizon 
Go To Hell For Heaven's Sake 
(RCA) 
"Upon its release, the album Sempiternal was met with critical acclaim. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream music critics, the album received an average score of 81, based on 11 reviews, which indicates "universal acclaim". So anything I say about this tremendously shouty, dissapointingly polite shower of well-appointed utterly forgettable shite is kinda surplus to requirements but a little bit of advice: if you run into a BMTH fan, make sure you point out to them  how much they sound like Linkin Park. They'll LOVE you for it. (Well, no, they'll actually go into a colossal sulk and then start threatening you with death but THAT'S WHAT THEY LIVE FOR). If that doesn't work just say "Man, you should grow up and listen to some Thrice". Guaranteed maxi-strop effective at either Blue Banana Coventry or any Scream pub anywhere - bless 'em. Mediocre in the extreme but you'd still rather your kids were into this than the fucking Mumfords.


SINGLE OF THE MONTH 3
Melanin 9 feat Triple Darkness 
Heartless Island 
(Bandcamp) 

One hell of a preview of (one hell of an album) the new M9 monster 'Magna Carta'. Jehst produces, so you know what kind of compelling montage you're in for, jarring-but-hypnotic horns riding a neck-snapping hard beat, the kind of bubbling synths that have you flashbacking to Saxon Sound and bass so narcotic you'll be nodding out at the wheel, but as ever with M9, it's the rhymes you keep returning to here, a simply stunningly spat slew of sense, and prophetic/poetic rage you just can't shake. Exploring the limits and pushing out beyond them with bravery and purpose. Essential.

Bon Jovi 
What About Now
(Island)
Remember how bands like the Stone Roses & Primal Scream always used to go on about Curtis Mayfield or Can when talking about how there'd 'always been a dance element to our music'. Lying motherfuckers! Clear to anyone with ears that the biggest influence on both of them was Bon Jovi's 'Keep The Faith' and it's prescient ability to match a shittily lumpen 'funk' groove to the usual hairy-chested alpha-twat poolhall bollocks they've been peddling for the best part of 3 decades now. 'What About Now' sadly sees the Jovi stop being leaders of the pack and simply following a nastily contemporary amalgam of Biffy Clyro-style dunce-chords and Killers-style ugly wordiness. Let's hope they return to the cutting edge that ensured they were perhaps the biggest single influence on bands as big and important as Oasis, Green Day and Kings Of Leon. Oh of course none of those snobby cowardly motherfuckers would admit it but just listen to them - they've all got a big bit of Jovi in their souls. Never forget it.

Depeche Mode 
Soothe My Soul
(Venusnote/Columbia) 
Your voice suits your face doesn't it? S'why it's impossible to love The Enemy. S'why I've never got along with Depeche Mode. It's Gahan. It's his diddy Jeremy Kyle-like seriousness, no matter how much self-deprecation he might indulge in now. Oh, I'm sure he's a charming & thoroughly decent fellow. But I hate his singing, hate that grain of heartfeltness in it, its rockschool professionalism and lack of personality, hate the eternally wracked tedious lines between junkiedom, religion and romance Depeche always push our way. 'Soothe My Soul' aims for the all-conquering wonder of Rachel Stevens''Some Girls' but only reaches the non-conquering middlingness of a Nitzer Ebb b-side. I always remember the last scene of '101' when they're all sat backstage ponying up the dough. They don't need this and nor do we.

Everything Everything 
Don't Try 
(Sony)
Hey, I'm not on a mission to hate all new indie music y'know. I'm a hungry boy.  If they give me something to get my teeth into I'll lap at the flesh, I'll drink that juice, I'll grab myself a gutfull for mine is never a principled stand, purely a hedonist one. EE totally win me over here (have to admit it's just their name that rubbed me up the wrong way) cos of the sheer joyful nuttiness of the groove (like something off Suburban Base circa 91)  and the brilliantly thought-out arrangement. Love the almost-oppressive synths in the bridge and the way the voices positively skitter across the mix, little bitable chunks of close-harmonies popping off in the peripheries - and the ending is just ace, a hung growingly-engulfing tsunami of voice and electricity that blows you away. Gosh, it's nice to feel part of white music again.

Homeboy Sandman 
Dag Philly Too 
(Stones Throw) 
Roll down them windows, pump up the volume, tap your arm on your driver-side door. Yes, I know it's pissing it down and you're getting your arm wet, but play this loud enough and it might just MAKE summer happen. C'mon people, collective action!

Bruno Mars 
Treasure 
(Warners)
Love me a little bit of this little man - 'Unorthodox Jukebox' isn't as good as the first album but it's still got some corkers on it and 'Treasure' is one of them - as with 'Locked Out Of Heaven' it's the feel and texture that's paramount here, the sense here that it's touched with the hand of Nile Rogers, a little bit of Foster Sylvers on the vocal, some ace 80s synth squiggles and robo-soul harmonies. He's so much better when he's just aiming at fun and not doing soppy break-up songs. A whole album of 'Treasure'/'Heaven' style poptasms next time please Mr. Mars and don't spare the pompadours.

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 4 
Ulterior Motive & Judda 
Timekeeper 
(Subtitles Music)

Norralot to it but what little there is terrorises the dome something darklike - a bass so thick and wrapped up with itself it struggles to emerge from the depths of its own dank, every snare hit reverbed until the aftershocks start becoming their own labyrinthine chamber of death, the bass-hits and snare-snaps eventually indistinguishable from each other, everything dubbed to the infinite. Christ knows what this sounds like on a lungfull. Calyx & Teebee turn up on the flip with an even trippier rerub. Limited to 300 Vinyl only and possibly thee underground d'n'b track of the summer.

Martha Knuckles 
Give Me Room 
(Bandcamp)
Martha Knuckles are Dillon and the utterly fantastic Boog Brown, and this is a slice of frabjous wonder cooked up by producer Anthony Accurate that really allows them both to show what subtly devastating poets they are on the mic. Dillon's compelling in his own right, but Boog is just one of the greatest voices in hip-hop right now and makes everything she lands on an instantaneous classic. Go to the website (marthaknuckles.com) to get the 7" or EP, and hold tight for an album. Sooner the better.

Tons Of Utterly Shit Wank Bands & Artists ft. Other Shit Wank Artists   
Timewasting Songs That Are Fucking Rubbish 
(Pretty Much Every Major Label In Existence And Some Indie Labels That Should Be Fucking Ashamed Of Themselves) 
Sorry, time was getting on so thought it'd be better to save a few hours and simply say that Peace - Lovesick/Kelly Clarkson - People Like Us/Lumineers - Stubborn Love/The Wanted - Walk Like Rihanna/Biffy Clyro – Opposite/Tom Odell - Another Love/ London Grammar – Wasting My Young Years/Bullet For My Valentine – P.O.W./ Britney Spears - Ooh La La/ Tunng - The Village/ Wiley ft. Angel & Tinchy Stryder – Lights On/Bo Bruce – Alive/Don Broco – Hold On/Ed Drewett – Undefeated/ Editors – A Ton Of Love - you all need sealing in airtight vats of your own ordure for crimes against the desire to carry on living you hyperacusis/melophobia-causing motherfuckers. Hey, that was labour-saving. Next month I might do 90 percent of this column simply by referring to the Bristol Stool Index. Have a nice June folks, I'm knocking off early.

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20 THOUGHTS ABOUT LOVE AND ERYKAH BADU

June 11, 2013, 2:45 am

≫ Next: CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES ISSUE 3 'METAL: A COLUMN'

≪ Previous: THE F.U.N.K SINGLES PAGE JUNE 2013

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(original review from The Quietus, April 23rd, 2010)

1.  I’ve put our uniforms in the wash. We’ve got a few hours to get ready. Aww love. I hope you get banished from pop soon. You're in a bad way. Fatally estranged from your soulmate Death, starved of the real Romance that negotiates that crucial relationship, that way you cheat each other, the way you each make us forget about the other one. ‘This Ain't A Love Song’? Too fucking right. You cunts couldn't write a love song. It's too serious for you.

2. Love, Jesus, look at you, you're starving, you're not looking good. Wasting away. Every song is about you. Bieber to Derulo, Perry to Cole to Allen. All this exposure with no-one actually asking how you are. Have you seen Romance recently? What an idiot. Such slush in your name, so at odds with the way our lovers make  us feel.  Anyone who had a heart doesn't watch new movies. Skinny kids getting sappy on each other. We watch only studio system b&ws, only movies in which grown-ups, who have suffered, find love and lose their minds. People who know about permanence and transience. People who know how love burns what flimsy handles you had on yourself,  who have grown up to find out how love bereaves you. How you wave g'bye to your freedom, send your sanity trundling down the be-curtained conveyor-belt to the flames, tip the ashes of your control on the grave of your ability to think straight. You grow up you find out how love addicts you, inhabits you, makes you wait on it because you need it, makes you hang out a window for hours staring at a corner waiting for a face, a cab, a sign. You find how, when the clock ticks beyond a promise, time stretches infinitely into your guts. You taste  the sweet searing martyrdom of a bit lip, the  quinine-hit of poison on an unleashed tongue. . Love makes all it's clichés true and bigger than life. ‘My Life Would Suck Without You’ will never become a cliché. It's too untrue.

3. But that kind of love, like

or

or

 

wouldn't fly anymore. Love lyrics have switched angles from the frenzied p.o.v of the problem-page correspondent to the endlessly prescriptive, dully didactic cheese shot out by the agony aunt/uncle. Where once pop poets were able to sum up young crush and old need , now gaucheness and wisdom have been voted out by the cynicism and smugness of middle-aged songwriters & mentors putting their relationship-advice diagnoses into the mouths of middle-aged teenagers. A massive overabundance of 'wit' masking an actual fear of language until everyone speaks & sings in the same dull poesy & shrunken verbals of those advice columns, those cover-mounted confessions. Lyrics that read like status updates.Have you heard that Kate Nash single? “Everybody thinks that girl’s so fine/Everybody’s like I’ll make her mine. Everyone thinks she’s a bit of alright/But I think that she’s not so nice”. Jesus am I the only one who just felt it get fucking   stupider in here?

4. So, no new clichés for a while now. Plenty of topicality, linguistic gimmickry, sharpness, fashion. No style, no real talk, no timelessness. Lies, generalities and gossip about love and no truth about love. Too much judgement and smart-arsedness, as if love isn't way too complicated to merely write through, think through, sing yourself better with. Like bereavement it will put potholes in the pavement for your dumbass facade & reason to tumble down. But most pop about love is now about preparation, redemption, making sure you come out on top, paid, self-pity intact, moving on.  Makeover music, self-help music, in pop 2010 there's plenty of knowledge of how emotion looks and can be described, and a total lack of any emotion.

5. And it's killing it. Real unreal love and real unreal romance are forced into hiding under the floorboards, in wallspaces, appalled at what's being committed in their names within these rooms and soundstages and vocal booths. In an era in which ostensibly the details and derailments of modern love have never been more piled high by more saps with nothing else to sing about, why are we getting so much assurance that things work out, that time will tell & pay all debts, when in actual fact love, like bereavement,  NEVER leaves, never gets evened out or dealt with. In the charts,  no matter how infantile the lungs knocking it out it's always from the charmless viewpoint of someone who knows better now, someone who can diagnose and prescribe the emotional turmoil they were in and get healed. Nothing about modern pop lingers, makes you think, stops clocks. It rinses and leaves.

6. Sure this is a two-way relationship. Pop music effects the way we conduct our relationships. The deeper problem mebbe that mebbe the full-to-busting emptiness of modern lovesong perfectly reflects our new glass identities, our dizzy disappearance into the virtual life. I say stay away Love, stay between the walls, I know you're sick of being toyed with by the merely horny, sick of being mistaken for a daily fact, bought out by Miramax, pimped by Sony, turned out by MTV, lost to the truly beautiful & derelicted by youth. They use you to avoid talking about anything else, to avoid alienating anyone. I suspect an age in which all that's written is love songs is an age where people & the biz they work for are trying to shut out the scary shit, minimise risk. But love can be some scary shit. Never in songs these days.

7. Hugely condescending when you think about the talk you hear round the shops, down the park, on the street, at the bus-stop, in the pub, in the club, at the cab rank, over the garden-fence, through the walls via a glass, wherever lovers can hide or hide their mad connection with each other. The way people actually talk is still occasionally unique and often revelatory, but they are talked about by pop in ways that always stink of daytime-telly psychology and rom-com over-wordiness, lyrics that attempt observation but only see the average, push what the piecharts are saying plays well with the most suckers. Everyone says what they want/mean, everything resolves, enacting the same self-important Western fictions yr Kyles and Povitches and Loose Women rely upon (that pop-psyche can solve the insoluble, that somehow making a relationship work is about 'growing up', being a 'strong' man/woman, that horrific notion of 'compatibility') It's exhortative, preachy, pushy, whiney – it wears it's immoderate nature on it's sleeve, never reveals it by accident in-between the lines. Eavesdrop on 'normal' folk anywhere and you realise - though the tedious txt-spk twaddle of modern love songs matches the tedium of modern love as portrayed back to us,  ALL of it fails to match the way love is, and continues to be, and endures.

8. The true intractability of you and your lover, the way you finish each other, the way your despair and joy are intimately linked with that lost freedom you want for yourself but loathe in him/her, the way that lovers grind against each other in every way, shooting sparks, wearing each other down up to a point where you will never ever ever get over them for as long as you live – these are complex tectonic processes that don't feel like they take place in heart, head or even groin.  Some other place, some elemental mix of every other emotion fused not in a single part of the body but that thrums on a deeper subcutaneous level, bacterial-like, a network of spores, an illness of sorts. Love should come with a warning, should require a license. So many modern love songs muzzle it's growl, hide it's howl, cure its palsy - cheap chat-up lines, new-man confessionals, and no real sweet talk. I'm a little bit lost without you. I'm a bloody big mess inside. Fuck off then you blubbering cunt. Michael MacIntyre, Ricky Gervais. Front and centre for the guillotine. You're both partly responsible.

9. Of course real romance, real love & life is never gonna be touched on when all must be spray-on, skin-deep: lyrically, modern love-songs are a post-modern grab-bag of buzzwordy bitesize bollocks in a zesty ranch dressing, sub-sexting neediness/nastiness that isn't equipped and doesn't have the attention span to deal with love's depths, is too busy in the giggling glee of matchmaking/voyeurism to notice the cold fires, the seething furies, the frenzies, too busy whining to really address the doom and desperation and depth of love's import in an age of dwindling dreams. The songs of love of the past ten years haven't been up to the job, will never become their own clichés but only rejig already dried-out ones, a pastiche-move often mirrored in the music's restorationist bent towards the 60s or 50s. Songs that have been written for the simpering saps on the match-dot-com ads but not the lovers on the street and on the roof and in the rooms tearing chunks out of each other, arming themselves against the rot within and without, scared of death, reaching out for the immortality of joy and completion and her arm or his shoulders. And there's not enough good singers to sing what good songs there are. Big problems for pop, if it wants to speak to people who are good at fucking as opposed to good at wanking, if it wants to win love back and stop getting told what to do by everyone else.

10.Erykah Badu is not a teenager, names her album after the Egyptian hieroglyph for 'eternal life', sees it as the other side of the more avowedly socio-political firestorms of New Amerykah Pt 1: 4^th World War, has just had a kid with Jay Electronica, and is a little too good for the kids, just like all the best kids and grown-ups these days.

11. Which is not to say that New Amerykah Part Two: Return Of The Ankh isn't laden with hooks, isn't sweet as it is sour, sumptuous as it is seething. It's just that for such an enjoyable record, Ankh needs your time to fully work on you. Badu gives you a total picture of herself in & out of love and it grows, it builds, it edges it's way sideways into your consciousness and then pulls on you like those once-a-decade opium binges you can't give up on. Rare grooves indeed.

12. Don't allow your natural suspicion/doubt of those who venerate Badu deny you the wonder of her works: just cos way too many backpackin'critics get gusset-froth from Badu & her loosely-affiliated Soulquarian posse, hold them up as some kind of venerable old-skool antidote to the treacheries of their mainstream contemporaries, doesn't mean that you have to dig them for the same weaselly reasons. Listening to Ankh, Badu's 'marginalisation' from the US rap mainstream (although 359,000 sales for 4^thWorld War is still a margin a lot of people would love to reside in) seems less important than her steady estrangement from the rest of US music full-stop. Badu’s albums since 97 /have gone triple platinum, double platinum, platinum & gold in that order – she and you shouldn’t give a fuck about that thinning out of her appeal because it’s meant increased concentration, increased oddity, increased determination. The generosity and lack of fear of her music (this album is freewheeling, contains fuck-ups other artists would kill for and is still perfect) makes it current and ancient, performance and role and persona fused in Badu so she falls into an elder lineage by dint of dreaming herself there, being that good, not by just saying so or sounding how you might 'expect'. Those crits usually get the names wrong. They say Donny Hath & Roberta & Stevie & Aretha & Lady Day. I say Earth, Wind And Fire.  And Joni, and Steely Dan because what's bracing about Badu is her full-tilt addiction to melody, restraint and jazzed-out possibility for pop songwriting. I play this end to end with 'Hissing Of Summer Lawns' and 'That's The Way Of The World' and it balances, like a 12” on your little finger. 

13. Crucially she's made a record here that doesn't use love or romance to shore up or reassure or push an ego, rather it's the giddy rush of love-talk, could be from him could be from her, the sudden defiances, the doomed declarations of independence that get swirled in. No accident that it's Badu's voice rather than the band that get fkd around with in the mix. Sonically this is less trippy but more hypnotic than it’s prequel – the accent on live instrumentation makes the grooves warmer & sweetens Badu's voice, and the voice, way more than the band is prone to all kinds of chaos and chiaroscuro, doubling, tripling, swinging out to the margins and looping elliptically back to the centre of your headspace, riding into phase sunsets. By infinitely disappearing into their own traces and trails her multiple voices can be everyone at once and this wonderful smudginess/sharpness of identity makes Ankh a record that gratifyingly refuses to make Badu likeable, a winner, a caricature. Rather than use love as  mere subject matter Badu has set out to make a record lovers can use, the unrequited can trip out on, we can all feel warming us like the sun. It feels wonderfully endless. Badu is smart enough not to try and have the final word – like the grooves and the lethal lyrical lines the album flows back on itself, concepts link back and forth, arguments get reignited.  Like a real relationship this record can both create bliss and throw punches, is compassionate enough to be as real and unreal as love can be. We've all been there  and this record takes you back to those other dimensions of reality we call going steady, where all is too much or not enough, where madness becomes a way of life.

14. And what magic happens inside this sound– this is the lushest evocation of 70s soul I've heard in a while. The lambent gorgeousness of the grooves really is up there with EWF & Sly (and Robbie too) – and will find you in dancing mood, or holdin yr headphones tight on, nodding out those kinks in yr neck and shoulders. The way ’20 Ft. Tall’ nearly floats off into space, Badu’s voice holding on to the ground by it’s fingernails (“what did I do to make you fall so far from me?/Selective memory”) , everything else lifting off. The blissful Roots-style pop of ‘Window Seat’ (?uestlove on the drums) that barely masks it’s themes of escape and inescapability (“I don’t wanna time-travel no mo/ I wanna be here”). ‘Agitation’ is an astonishing minute-and-a-half that could be straight from Countdown To Ecstasy. ‘Turn Me Away (Get MuNNY)’ is the first absolute bomb – a gorgeous semi-locked groove that pipes summer into your cells, lyrics pitched somewhere between avarice and ardour, someone who feels themselves turning into a robot even as their inner workings go haywire. Fantastic things within the band’s reach, rhythm section keeping things simple yet stunning, Badu freed not for vocal acrobatics but to enjoy herself, get into some reggae falsettos, hit the off-beats and sevenths (“this love is chemical/electric particle/down to the minimal/tickle tickle ego stroke/I’ll be your robot girl”)

15. This record is like your first alcohol of the day, on a sunny hungover morning. Clears the head, lets you see the blue sky after the storms & wreckage of the previous night. After a while you start needing it every morning. Right now I head straight for ‘Gone Baby Don’t Be Long’ because the beats and bass and loops are a heavenly moebius you don’t wanna ever fall out of, and it catches the schizophrenic poses and passions of letting your lover out the door better than anything else here. ‘Umm-Hmm’ is good enough to sit next to late 70s Diana or Rose Royce,  Dilla’s sci-fi drone-funk on ‘Love’ gets peppered by all kinds of extraneous wibble & wow, Badu coming on like Sly Stone. ‘Fall In Love (Your Funeral)’ is the only prep for romance you need: “You better go back the way you came/ wrong way/ if you stay/ prepare to have yo shit rearranged/ some slow sangin and flower bringing/ if my burglar alarm starts ringing”, the narcotic, heavy assed rhodes-thunk chassis plunging into your brain, breaking yr bones. Closer ‘Out My Mind, Just In Time’ chops and screws its way through ten minutes that go from neurosis to psychosis, from the blues to avant-hip-hop to slo-mo psyche-funk, never letting go of you as you get engulfed in darkness and revelation. Startling, startling shit. I think this is the best album Badu’s ever made.

16. Chuck D, as usual, was absolutely goddamned right when he spat “Your general subject 'love' is minimal, it's sex for profit”. Think of what's happened in the world in the past ten years and pop's cowardly retreat into 'you-and-me', into the 'personal' (bland chat in the main),seems almost deliberate and desperate. Nothing to say about anything important, or visionary, or real so let's blandly chat about ‘us’ and hope some of it is just wry-smile-inducing enough to play well with Evans and Moyles. War, terror, collapse nahh that’s gloomy news– let’s get the blinkers on, let's shut out the outside world and watch Hollyoaks and take notes for the next single. Of course that numbness and avoidance is common to us all (they call it facebook) but if we're gonna have lovesongs, let them be as hazy and real and unresolved as these, let them leave us none the wiser but palpably touched. Let them be sung by people who can write other types of songs too perhaps? Just a thought for all those guys wearing straw hats stood by rivers playing acoustic guitars having their adverts voice-overed by Jo Whiley. (Don't worry the Tories will be in soon. David Cameron likes you all. You've given him no reason not to.)

17. Keep it like a secret Love. Let's stay out here on the frontline and watch the apocalypse unfold with remotes in our hand. Let's hide out a while and let the dust settle and get ready for war.

18. We'll listen to 'Return Of The Ankh' whilst you build the bombs. And I'll get that washing out the dryer.

19. Then we'll get dressed, pose for a few last pictures and hit the streets.

20. We have a world to win.  A world lost to the din of delusions, the racket of ‘reality’, the dumb need for happy endings, the sanctimony of self. A world that doesn’t deserve us. Soon they will all know. Soon there will be silence. With ‘Return Of The Ankh’, Love, you’re on the way back.

CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES ISSUE 3 'METAL: A COLUMN'

June 13, 2013, 3:26 am

≫ Next: Finding Autotune's Pleasure Centre: A Dancehall Column 2010

≪ Previous: 20 THOUGHTS ABOUT LOVE AND ERYKAH BADU

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[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

I don’t know if you could call this writing or expectorating. I’m going to try and explain an extra crawl in my skin that seems to be tightening as time goes by. I’m sure most of you aren’t teenagers. So I’m sure most of you know that you never lose being a teenager. It comes back. It circles round, lets you get comfortable then comes crashing back through the door at the precise moment when you think you’ve got things sorted.

  Fate conspires to reintroduce those red mists, that absolute conviction, that two-tone vision and dangerous intolerance that always seems to fill the void when the house of cards comes down, when shit luck pulls the rug from under your grown up ass.

   It’s funny what you think about on stage, in-between songs. All the above occurs in about a millisecond of confusion as I push my glasses up my nose with a mic. It’s a degree of that red mist that I want to share with you, though. I’ve got to get things off my mind. Don’t know if this qualifies as a column, or an exorcism, or an arse-wipe. Whichever, I’m putting you through it because you’re the only ones who let me talk this way. Very little to do with metal I might as well warn you. Could patronisingly put in a quote from a metal band to legitimise my suppurating keyboard but all they’ve every told me is, “It’s the music that matters”. And that’s precisely the lie I need to skewer and barbecue and feed to my pigs.

   We all know that music is a lie you’re asked to believe in, and that great music sells you the lie of transparent (i.e colourless) communication best of all. I suck on the lie’s dry bones this month when I’m in the pissing rain outside a pub, singing and playing guitar, my band behind me and a table full of townies laughing at me while I tell my truth. Laughing. Not like you’d laugh at an equal. The way you’d laugh at a medical curiosity, a pile up, a pool of sick that suddenly decided it was Mario Lanza, the way you’d laugh in school assembley when they announced that some sixth-form butane freak had topped himself over the weeked. That kind of laughter you can’t stop cos it’s your only response to horror, repulsion and fear. It’s the laughter that’s followed me all my life.

   Yeah, boofuckin’ hoo. As the gorgeous Cov rain starts burning more apertures in my clothes and seeping through the already burned out soap-bar bomb-holes I recall that paranoia was and is a lifestyle choice you have to be committed to. You’ve got to be in it from the off and believe in no other worldview until you die. Even falling in love shouldn’t shake your conviction that everyone hates you. Not an active dislike, just a general lukewarm revulsion for your foul carcass. Compliments are the slime left by social slugs intent on eventually sucking you under. Don’t take them. Spit salt on their backs when they’re not looking. Tonight, I’m being glad handed by smirking skinheads in the audience and I can’t figure out if they want to fuck or kill me. And paranoi says that, when in doubt, retreat behind your own borders, go back to what you know, the totems that earmark your islation. And that’s when you realise how effectively estranged you’ve become from the gawd-bless-‘em human race because YOUR race will always matter to you. Your race will always matter in every relationship you’ll ever have, will always give people either a taste for being seen to help the underdog OR a handy extra weapon against you. Any ‘pride’ I might feel in who I am is effectively neutered by just how damn useful it is to both me and others in the games we play. White friends. What can you do with them? How will you ever know them? And when you realise that even white people can’t figure out their friends you realise just how fucked you are.

   But it’s been my life for so long, this inward cramp. I don’t know what comfort feels like, suspect I never felt it since I sat in my school library (my home away from home) on the last day of school and closed my eyes and opened them again with a vision of the whole school in flames and a raging stiffy in my pants only to be cold-showered with the dick-shrinking reality of life going on without me, people getting their friends to write on their shirts and me going home unblemished and SURE. It’s the discomfort of being out’n’about and finger-buffeted by the mass ego that I associate with sociability, it’s the terror of being on a stage that I associate with being heard, the mild dislike that accompanies you in your closed-in walk turning in major hatred whenever you open up. Forever caught in that moment when you’re so shocked at people taking the piss out of you that you can’t come up with a snappy response, you just bite your lip and wait for the earth to swallow you whole.

   I never wanted to be a lead singer. Our singer did a runner cos of alcoholism and impending marriage and I was crowbarred in. Said yes before I thought about it. And now, I’m trying to be a frontman with the physical grace of a Weeble, the look of livestock (my girlfriend thinks I look ‘docile’ on stage) and the tits of your granddad. And sin that don’t sit right with people, that makes people suspect my motives. S’tricky. Especially when you start thinking about how you must look. Like an interloper, or one of those pakis only into indie music so they can shag indie kids.

   It’s been a problem for me since the off. I was the only Asian person in 30 floors of magazine house. You get a dual complex. You think you’re selling out your people (and ethnic group you quickly realise are a just as riven with race-hate as every other) by working for such a transparently unthreatening monolith of mainstream opinion (and every time you took the piss you’d get death threats in the postbag). And you wonder why you’re there. I liked thinking of myself as a token. It was a comfortable place to be. Being on stage is more like being a target for the hilarity of others simply because people STILL aren’t used to a paki with a guitar. Simply put, I don’t belong up here, the front row is laughing at me and I want to go home. I want to FIND home.

   It goes further. As I start chopping the set list down in-between verses to just  GET THIS TRAGEDY OVER WITH I recall that the obits for Nina last month showed nothing’s changed. Black musicians are still talked about in terms of “reality, “soul”, “honesty”, “spirituality”. All great things to bring to music but things that critics can handily STOP talking about, can just leave hanging in the air waiting for our nods of imagined empathy. The backhanded compliment of saying that Simone’s talent was “natural” is another way of saying that black musicians simply don’t (have to) THINK about their music as much as those furrow-browed honkie motherfuckers.

   And even though in Billie Holliday, Curtis, Hathaway, Coleman, Simone, Prince, Timba you actually find the most driven day’n’night pop theorists, the most obsessive musical intellects engaged quite properly in the never-ending OVERTHINK about music that characterises all true soulful performers, it’d still seem that we haven’t progressed from from Mod’s mythic cornball view of black pop. That it’s simply magic that happens when the oppressed pick up instruments. And is not just as tortuous an intellectual/existential riddle as it is when someone from art-school gives it a go. And if that sort of #### goes down on black people (who most people like and fair few think are “cool”) what the hell can an Asian (the laughing stock of the Western World and whipping boy of all races) expect?

   When that sort of hypocrisy, that denial of complexity and therefore HUMANITY, still infects so much thought about pop you start wondering about how you’re gonna get on with a wider world EVEN MORE intolerant than pop is about difference, outsiders, anyone sure enough to suggest that white aint might or right.

Such a hateful nation. Such a terrified continent. The acceptability of racism hasn’t been so total in my lifetime. Every newsstand makes you feel like a happy German in the mid-Thirties; buying your fags from the Co-Op with a bag of bent coppers, the sheer hatred in your peripherals, the pamphlets of spite lined up with Win-A-Millino neatly mast-headed over today’s bulletin of bigotry: you try and ignore it, like well meaning pre-WW2 German liberals must’ve ignored the hook-nosed caricatures and cartoons while flicking through to the sports section.

    Growing up, you’ve realised that everyone is culpable: blacks hate pakis even more than whites hate pakis even more than pakis hate blacks even more than everyone hates asylum seekers and you realise that these crass generalisations are your own little bit of the prejudiced bloodstream, the way that you’ve been whispered to all your life by friends, family, received opinion and your own nasty little suspicious urges. And they all race through your head now you’ve decided to stick your head above the parapet and be visible. And people are laughing at you even faster and harder than your mind can come up with reasons why. And they’re like the kids who spit at you from passing bikes and call you paki bas6tard, and you quietly die behind your “seen it all before” smile. And maybe I should just think spit back, hit hard, be good, deny them the window of opportunity before they start throwing bricks through it. So this I do. Because my band rules. And on stage I can be god. But I’m holding off the inevitable.

   This country is turning nastier than ever. It’s so damn scared of people, so damn scared of change, so damn venomous about protecting itself against the world. The Great British Public are intent on turning my every stroll into a walk of shame, just as every adjustment to their fixed notions is an “assault on our values” and everybody who dares to understand one person at a time is do-gooder. Call it paranoia. It’s a way of life. I want to hear what the Iraqis and Afghanis who’re coming to Coventry have to say. I want them to form bands. My city I’ve loved all my life wants to kick them out. And my conclusion is the last thought I have because nothing emerges from it, it is the lights going out and the switch being lost. SOMETIMES SUICIDES SOUND LIKE THE ONLY SUCCESS STORIES WE HAVE. Alone in a room. Or on a double-decker in Tel Aviv. Those are the options my race gives me.

   We’ve finished the last song. Applause, vague embarrassment. Thanks for listening. Good night.

Finding Autotune's Pleasure Centre: A Dancehall Column 2010

June 14, 2013, 2:09 am

≫ Next: F.U.N.K SINGLES PAGE DECEMBER 2013

≪ Previous: CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES ISSUE 3 'METAL: A COLUMN'

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March 2010 from The Quietus (original edited piece here.)

New decade. New afflictions. Porn fatigue. It sets in eventually don't it? Not just in the wrist or eyes or nethers but crucially in the head. At some point the repetition, the organisation, the availability of all that skin starts feeling like too much of a good thing – whither the chase, whither the hidden, whither love, whither yearning? How much hornier did you get when the only smut you found was discarded in park bushes, hidden in a parents secret stash, swapped in a secret playground moment, hard-earned? Just as the charmless ubiquity of all that filth makes you dream of chastity, want your virginity back, I feel the same exhausted ennui with the slaggish textures of chart music these days. If modern pop organises sound in an entirely pornographic fashion, always at pains to drag us intimately into the soft-core close-up, the lips, the fingers, the hardcore loudness & lurid 2-D flash of the club and the limo and the bedroom, is it any wonder that Autotune is the audio/visual effect of choice, the contact-point airbrush lashed into the mix swiftly before anything can threaten the panoptic perfection of all that clicked & corrected skeez? And man, I would love to still get horny over modern chart pop (and Shakira when her voice back flips, Britney’s snarl and Gaga when she allow us to hear her wonderful accent still hit it) but too often it sounds wet'n'willing to the point of affording no friction, the techniques too flappily apparent for you to even get close to anything approaching the ol' vinegar strokes. S’weird, even though it's detractors are a sorry bunch of festival fodder (Jay Z's menopausal 'DOA' included) man is it DIFFICULT finding autotune's pleasure centre, so severely do its gleaming textures corrode our bourgeois assumptions of democratised technology being good for music. We're getting such sloppy seconds cos pro-tools & cubase done turned all the innocence out of pop, the ability to be naïve, childlike rather than childish. The stink left by production’s state-of-the art right now is that of a just-cleaned club-toilet, the freshly-fragranced fakery exposing rather than disguising the shitty ideas within. Perhaps down to  pure shrunken vision of what pop can do in our celebutante/can't-singjay age, but even amongst supposed movers’n’shakers (the now-overrated Rihanna, the long-overrated Kanye) too often autotune's controls are set for the heart of the hotel pool, the video-shoot, all that audible luxury & bad taste, an orifice-cramming glut of sophisticated sheen and classee boy-band-finger-in-ear showiness. Cos that’s what Cowell wants. What the people in their podules want. I don’t buy it. I’m a person in a podule. I want no such thing.

     Don’t fkn jump on me poptimists. I have no problem with tech-abuse bullying itself to the front of the mix. When Pierre & other Chicagoans started fucking around with 303's it was go-nowhere magic, it was the reinvention and resurrection by discarded people of something discarded , something designed for rock that rock didn't need and that rock didn't have the guileless grace to abuse into new shapes, new futures. Autotune's progress into pop has suffered no such drama, no such rediscovery; it's a golden shower that has never showered gold. First the rich had it. It sounded horrible. Then the poor had it. It still sounded horrible. As a sign of the times we live in, autotune is  cocaine, guilty-secret of the rich turned cheapskate currency, as classless now as fake tan and steroid abuse but importantly, for pop's possibilities, it is a sound that's repellent, in all senses, a motif impervious to all around it.  From uberproducers' guilty secret to Cher's out'n'proud vocal surgery down through T-Pain's zero-speed belligerence to every laptop studio on the planet autotune has wheeled through its possibilities to ever-dwindling avail,  finding itself now the deodorant/slap of choice for pop before it can even dream of stepping out into the night and those bright flaw-exposing lights.

    In excess (on the chaffest of the chaff hip-hop singles) it can make a weird kind of sense - actually preferable to its detractors' mealy-mouthed bleatings about authenticity and integrity. We should be mindful of anything that seeks to make musicians pay dues, impose a hierarchy on inclusion in pop merely down to vocal 'talent', indeed any orthodoxy that makes us forget what a confection pop is. But the recording angel surely has to soundlike an angel, has to have a sense of battle with the humans within it – too often we find, listening to modern pop and r'n'b/hip-hop in particular, autotune inflexibly sitting on weedy-assed beats, shining like a fake Rolex in a suitcase, blinding the eye whist dropping a glistened turd in your ear. You can't polish it, no matter how reverse-double-bluff-with-salko be your hipster manoeuvres. Porn fatigue starting to nag, sap your energy to keep hearing. So let’s start setting some rules here: RULE 1 – rappers should stop singing. Don't sing rappers. Rappers, do not sing. The singing has to stop for those of you who are rappers. Y'know you rappers who sing? The singing rappers? Yeah, you. Sorry and all that, I know some of you have tried really hard but you can't do it.  Give it a rest. Anyone can rap (look at all the singers who think they can) but not everyone can sing. It's your chronic reliance on autotune to fill the gaps in your melodic abilities that's making much black pop feel so foil-on-the-filling nasty right now.  Harmonies, multiple voices, are pop's sweetest sound but autotune roboticizes their creation so predictably, fatally removes ALL trace of humanity - no matter how devoted you are to electronics and synthetic textures, without the sense of some moment of human volition/decision behind it pop simply doesn’t work. Spector, Meek, Derbyshire, Czukay, Macero, Quincy J, Moroder, Orridge, The Bomb Squad, Timba, Dre all knew it is an utter mistake to think there is 'nothing natural about recorded music'. Without something natural, there is no recording; there is only demonstration, a tour round the desk, a spod’s snortling glee from the depths of the manual. Technological exploration/abuse is only progressive when directed by heart or head, when it's kinda afraid but insatiably curious, when it wants revolution (e.g. scratching) or release (e.g. distortion). The onlyemotion you can consistently connect with autotune is smugness about the program's performance, pride in the presets.  And, crucially, when the machines are being binge-fed entirely unimaginative lazy-assed tunes to correct, it's no wonder how much hip-hop now you just can't and won't remember even if/when it's huge. The new kit, & crucially too many producers’ lack of imagination with all that doodaddery, have served to make much ‘urban’ in oh-ten an identikit chrome blob, orbited by tricksy voices solidifying nothing. And it’s not just harmful for US pop when r’n’b is in such stasis, it’s harmful to any music for whom r’n’b is an historical, ever-influential touchstone.

  

   

Stephen McGregor

Speaking of which RULE 2 – autotune should only be allowed in Jamaica.

 

   Because Jamaican voices right now have nothing to hide or correct - in Jamaica autotune find voices that can match, outwit, outgun it, contrast with it - voices that make the beast with two backs even as they're being compressed into the atomised spray of gamechair-pop. The pop nous in Jamaican pop's bloodstream, the ear for hooks and the vocal ability that knows 300 pre-programmed fake notes cannot compete with the RIGHT note at the right time means that, in dancehall, digi-tech finds itself beautifully harnessed, harshly treated, commandeered in pop’s name rather than putting it's size-tens all over it’s fragile neck. Listening to the biggest hits in dancehall from 2009/10 the contrast between the likes of Steven McGregor’s charged-up control of modern mixology and hip-hop's dumb demo-setting obviousness is crystal clear – dancehall's biggest names, from Kartel's Gaza coterie to BKiller's Alliance clan (and everyone operating in the no-mans land between those combatants), create singles that burn themselves to the memory's hardrive like the nastiest viruses, singles that CARE about percussion, detail, those tiny moments that can become huge without sounding like gestures or gimmickry. At no point in the best dancehall does anything sound smeared indiscriminately across the mix, everything down to the tiniest fizz or pop is there for a reason. For the weeks that they corrupt you no other sound seems as desirable but unlike hip-hop the point of contact is vital here -  out the tiny, flinty confines of your computer fuggedaboutit (& I can't go to dancehall clubs as I've been assured by those juvenile fans I know that as an old Asian man I'd get shot). At home, dancing with the kids (kids love this stuff – just be aware the lyrics might require some, ahem, explanation/euphemisation) you get dazzled. You need good headphones or big speakers to make the beats and bass work their magic, to make the voices walk tall, like they're real people lost & let loose into a different world every riddim change, a different place in regard to themselves. Everything earmarked as reasons US rap sucks right now find new life in Jamaica: autotune loses it's imperialist smarm and finds itself in the mouths of doubtful, desperate, deranged, driven-mad-by-lust propa pop singers (and if the interminable snoozeworthy disswars that plague US rap seem pointless, then at least the Gaza-Gully turf wars in Kingston pop are as absurd & action-packed and kinda like WWE as these things should be). At the moment the sound of Jamaican dancehall is the sole reason Antares Evo-Pro plant must not be located’n’liquidated – the only adequate rebuttal to the legions of luddites currently looking to eject autotune from pop's craw.  Jamaican producers, musicians and singers (who, let's face it, since the days of Steely & Clevie through Bobby Digital have been obsessively busy with digital-music for longer than anyone) have made the new kit work dammit, they've hit the balances because the humans involved USE the device, not t'other way round – there's no less control behind the desk, but there's voices grown up enough to losecontrol behind the mic, and lose control melodically, tunefully. Harmonies don't just intertwine in dancehall, they're too interesting to pull pat moves, rather they disperse like snipers, move like a swat team, pop off across the mix and assail unexpected peripheries. The producer is in his heaven, and all is right with the world.

TNT (ft. Timberlee)

   Likewise, when the Europeanization of US hip-hop (all those trance/house textures so bemoaned by US hip-hop purists, like Ford-workers watching Merc engines lifted into Mustangs) translates to Jamaican music the effect is ambiguous, confusing, wonderfully threatening to dancehall's stern sexual politic. Set against the none-more-macho lyrics all that none-more-gay lushness starts calling the machismo & misandry into question, starts making it sound desperate, pathological. Voices launch out but find themselves uploaded to the ether in a gurgle of chrome, defused of outward danger but launched lethally in on themselves. The same production tricks that make so much US rap sound like so much unjustified ballache&bullshitting strands the protagonists of dancehall in a soundworld in which their violence & randiness start sounding like addictions, like problems rather than unproblematic prejudices. Partly it's down to the music's refusal to simply stomp - dancehall's impetus is so often found on the soca-step, silkily on the snare rather than the kick, so all the delirious digi-detail (that flashery that r'n'b puts at the heart of it's current deterioration) flies away from the centre of the sound, flitters and flutters around the voices rather than having to change or correct them.  Partly it's down to the sheer wonder of the voices themselves: on the staggering Sumpn 4 Ya AIDONIA seems constantly breathless in anticipation,  frantic, lurid, downright spasmodic on an eternal brink to a particularly sticky end– the machoness of  the man always prone to the uncoolest moments of genuinely losing it, losing control, his verbal acrobatics always carrying the threat of falling without safety-net, returning to the gasp and the groan and those petit-mort noises the grown-ups make. Where US r’n’b is so painfully in search of the hook it always ends up bobbing in lukewarm waters clinging onto only what’s most-obvious, Aidonia naturally, fluidly, intersperses his dizzying lightspeed verbals with moments of pure grunt, squeal, shudder – and these moments become things you want to hear again and again. Further, Jamaican voices tend to not go for range, big leaps or Carey-esque oralbatics between notes.  Rather it's the frantically fast rotations around a simple melodic riff that make these tracks so demanding of your time, so bewitching, so devilish, so human. Sumpn 4 Ya is a record that spins on the edge between mind and body, and the body always breaks on through to the voice, makes it do things the words, dazzling as they are, can't let out or release. Repeated replays (for you will if you care about pop) and the key becomes clear.  'Taint the trancehall backing or jabs of palpitating synth or even that planet of bass you seem to be orbiting. All gorgeous but no-one else rode the Outbreak riddim quite like Aidonia -  when Aidonia yelps you're inside it, when Aidonia screams you shiver, when Aidonia sounds like he's into the heat of the final fuck moments the music just evaporates in the white-heat of your relationship with that voice. It's doing weirdly classic things (think Teddy P, Barry W)  – things only the rewind can reveal, things unfathomable and unfeasible – things you HAD actually been led to expect from Aidonia's other big tracks ('Rifle Me Bark', 'Thunderclap') which are just as excessive to requirements.

Aidonia & Vybz Kartel

Because no matter what’s going on behind the scenes in pop, if the right people aren’t in place, shit won’t happen right. In Jamaica, unlike nearly everywhere else on the planet, the right people are making music.

These are voices under stress, under pressure, squeezing out their trigger-happy testaments before the sky falls or hell opens below or the front-door gets kicked down. The best  voices in dancehall right now, ERUP, MAVADO, AIDONIA, BUSY SIGNAL, STACIOUS (No Freak and Head), TIMBERLEE (check the ace 'Fashionista'), CE'CILE, the outrageous LISA HYPE (go back and listen to Face Facts& The Truth), NATALIE STORM (go back even further and hear Look Pon Me and Dip & Fall) sound like they’re singing to survive, punching against music and fx that bounces their threat back on themselves, the sounds heavy, lush and lethal enough to push the extreme extraversion of the singers  inward to the curious helium-bubble of the production even as the beats rampage on, the doom and dread and apocalyptic gunplay/purpsmoking/sexuality only ever damaging to the frantic, frightened personas behind the voices, never to the listener. Best riddims I heard this Winter were the stompin'Gunshow (Aidonia's uproarious We Run Uptown, Mavado's stunning 'Everything Inna Hole',  Elephant Man's slightly-knackered Boy Dead), the robo-soca of  10 Long 10 Strong (Bugle's eloquent Unlimited, Kartel's Imagination-style undulation-fest Seductive , Leftside's way-freakier Magnum& 2 By 4), the livid ‘lectro of Style & Swagga (Assassins Wanna Be Ballaz , RDX's startling 'Deliver Mi'), Death Row's mournful glide up the long road through the cemetery gates (Movado's 'Sing Song', Stein's Bad Mad Straight) & Thunderball’s spy-movie stealth(Aidonia's 'Thunderous Clap', Stein's military-industrial 'Slow Motion'). In contrast to the drek hip-hop/r’n’b tried to warm us with the past few months, these tracks are hotter than the sun put in the microwave for ten minutes too long. Go go go seek and mind your minds. Stuff can burn your synapses.

  

BUT, new decade, lowered expectations. Amidst all this future-fuckery the return of Steely & Clevie's nutzoid Steel Frog riddim esp. with Capleton's 'Lip Lip Lip' is some retro I can live with, even if it casts a baleful, withering light on dancehall’s current progress.  Tbh I simply wouldn't bother chasing riddims anymore. Keep on top of the shit bubbling on Youtube or even better (esp. if you’re an old tech-unfriendly fucka like me) stick to mixtapes, for we're not in a golden age and we are lazy. We're in an age where despite r'n'b's current paucity of newness, dancehall is still managing to take on and twist American styles into interesting new shapes: but the deeper disease, the lack of imagination in mainstream US r'n'b/rap is fatal for much dancehall as well – the return of Steel Frog posits an intriguing thought that mebbe it's time for Jamaica to turn away from US influence a little, seek out their own unique lineage and slant a bit more often. The response of Jamaican voices to US decay is just strong enough, just inventive enough right now to still find ways of being fascinating to anyone in earshot. And if Tighten Up was the bargain-pack tropical-transmission of choice in the 70s then now you have no excuse not to be checking out the Dutchman DJ Triple Exe's 'Pure Winery' series 4-6(ace wee dubbed-out segues and technoid rerubs included), 2010 mixes from DJ I Kandi and DJ Waxfiend, DJ Greedy's 'Famine 4', DJ Aliaz ‘Reggaefest 2010’, DJ Polombo's 'Bells Of War', Mischief Sound Crew's 'Fever 2K10' mix, Chinese Assassin DJ's 'Prepared For War 3' or DJ MBA's 'Outbreak 2'mixes this month. Let them do the hard work, pack together the hits, lash lightning strikes to your dome/home (and it’s particularly intriguing hearing how US & European DJs inf[l]ect dancehall with their own techno-traditions). Crucially even at our distance from dancehall's daily motors & moodswings, keeping up with riddims & the frenzy of the version-flood isn’t entirely necessary. So let those obsessives like Triple Exe & Waxfiend filter this shit for you, but fer chrissakes don’t ever cock an ear AWAY from Jamaica, cos you’ll probably be missing some of the most vital, invigorating pop music being made on the planet right now. Just like you did last year with British hip-hop. Details anon. Re: dancehall I declare Autotune reprieved. Just. Next month all this will be irrelevant. And that’ll be the next turn in the story. Be there.

F.U.N.K SINGLES PAGE DECEMBER 2013

December 11, 2013, 6:48 am

≫ Next: AN A-Z OF MY FAVOURITE POP FROM 2013 - An end of year almanac from the F.U.N.K Singles Pages

≪ Previous: Finding Autotune's Pleasure Centre: A Dancehall Column 2010

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ACTION BRONSON FT. PRODIGY & RAEKWON
SEVEN SERIES TRIPLETS
(Atlantic)
As the pop biz winds down for a Festivus For The Rest Of Us, a sneaky chance to dig out things forgot in the past month. Nice grainy RZA-style production from Harry Fraud hingeing on a strange Japanese lute-loop that breaks over the Axelrod-style soundscape at all the right moments: Rae's verse is stunning, Bronsolini kills it as usual and you realise your life is kinda bereft without picking up a copy of the 'Saab Stories' EP this comes from. AB shows no sign of letting up. Hold on tight.

ARCADE FIRE 
AFTERLIFE
(Sonovox)
So utterly fucking boring and dismal it even made my squalid existence seem a pulsating thrillfest in comparison. I'm so very sick of bands who think that lyrics don't have to mean anything (or rather, feel that for lyrics to mean something they must be as un-noticeable as possible), that the words songs have can just reflect 'emptiness',  musically sound like cack indie-dance from the 90s, and somehow that such a grisly combination will be profound & moving & suggestive & poignant & 'brave'. Lazy, sickeningly self-regarding, downright cowardly pop music. 'Can we just scream and shout/til we work it out'? What a totally fucking pitiful response to life that is, what a shameful anthem for a generation of skinny speccy shitwits 'Afterlife' is, that whole 'well life's a bit confusing isn't it, I'm young and a bit shit but don't worry, I'll manage (something or other), I'll get through to (something else I haven't actually fucking thought about with any depth or insight or energy whatsoever BECAUSE I HAVEN'T HAD TO), yeah I know I party and bullshit but actually I'm shy and sensitive and THINK about things and read my tumblr won't you' self-help-spiel shit a whole generation is growing up thinking will do. Music as soundtrack to a life that longs to be in a constant Apple advert. Stop feeling so fucking sorry for yourself you bearded wankers - Brian Eno didn't evaporate into the ether for this shit. In summation, Arcade Fire, (Amer.) adj: "To be not at all good at any of the things". 

JAMES ARTHUR 
RECOVERY 
(Syco)
Caught my wife singing heartily along with 'You're Nobody Til Somebody Loves You' the other day. This is not a problem, even though I find that song perhaps the most repellent musical and oral production of 2013. If I catch her singing the even more ghastly 'Recovery' though, I'll hold her hand on the way to the walk-in centre and then throw fruit at the windows of the padded-lorry as she leaves my life forever. The absolute worse thing about this bellowing beefcake is how he spends all his time (when he's not being a serious musician who can hold his own playing live and not being about the ego) talking about how he's a 'serious' musician who can 'hold his own' playing live and how he's 'not about the ego'. Oddly though, the production of J-Art's records and the promotion of them is totally based upon a complete lack of self-deprecation and an earnestly tatooed conviction about being dark and serious and passionate that can only come from having an ego the size of Bahrain. His horrible phlegmatic bolus of a voice is held up & foregrounded as paramount and titanic in all his records even with Little Mix faves TMS behind the desk (and man do they TRY and make it interesting, pinwheeling through every available preset) & the thudding macho passion is so remorselessly, unyieldingly shoved in the listeners face it's like he's lapdancing for you while remaining fully togged up in his most tight-fitting Jacomo duds. Leave me and my family alone you sick bastard. 

JUSTIN BIEBER 
CONFIDENT 
(Island/Def Jam)
Well, yeah, I would, and Bieber has taught me something valuable about fame, something I learned from the deep insights that sang deeply from the depths of ITV's exclusive Saturday night special 'This Is Justin Bieber'. All wannabe stars like us have those inklings that celebrity is a strange and bitter fruit, if only to console ourselves in our ongoing obscurity & demise, but the sight of the pint-sized pin-up dreamboat, pursued, harried, never being able to rest, having to have a guided tour around the Stamford Bridge dressing room and chatting with Frank Lampard, man . . . . it tugged at my heartstrings. Fame really is hell. He went and pressed play on the changing-room stereo and his song came out. Imagine knowing your music accompanies John Terry's jockstrap finaigling. The poor kid. The poor, poor, monstrously arrogant & obscenely wealthy kid.  

"That’s right I think she foreign
Think she foreign, got passports"

'Confident' is perhaps his best thing since 'Boyfriend', an immaculately realised (seriously, the production is gorgeous and almost worthy of JT) but unfortunately rather dull pop-hop slow-jam , rendered unsettling by the sheer oddity of finding yourself hearing this glassy-eyed Hitlerjugend gasp about how "She said it’s her first time/ I think she might have lied/Feels so good, damn". Bieber has a good, not great, voice for r'n'b and I get it, he's passed the age of consent, he can get freaky with gusto and the law on his side now - it's just 'Confident' is a strangely sexless, faintly disturbing experience cos being kid-friendly is our only experience of Bieber thus far. 'Confident' points to where Bieber can go to escape that straight-jacket,  lyrically and musically this is as big a step up & away for him as 'Slave To U' was for Britney (except nowhere near as good): I fear though that until he mans up and actually gets at least two fans preggers/hits the addiction'n'rehab'n'relapse circuit hard this is all uncomfortably like being forced to watch Elmo pleasuring himself, leering at you, his mouth slowly yawning open like a waking lizard. Shudder. Give him a few years and we'll all be swearing down we loved him all along. 

BK BRASCO FT. TIMBALAND & PUSHA T
BIG SPENDA 
(Soundcloud)
Of course it's Timba's production that might get you seeking this. No barriers being broken but he still knows how to make something weird enough to keep you hooked — here it's the snare rolls that seem to pop off throughout, almost breaking up the beat into arrhythmic madness, that keep you coming back for more. '18th Floor: Thompson Hotel Edition' is the BB album ready to drop and if Timba's on this kind of form throughout you KNOW you're gonna have to hear it.

CABIN FEVER 
HARD GOIN' 
(CoLab)
Here cos of 'It's Disgusting', the centrepiece to this bristling 5 track EP of fucked up dubstep & d'n'b from Cabin Fever - perfect for anyone between the ages of 15 and 55 who feels at war with their community. Jack this loud through deliberately high-leakage headphones on your morning commute, commandeer the stereo at your nearest Saturday night house-party and threaten to bang out anyone who dares to touch that dial. Play loud and watch your enemies grow in number. Superb. 


J. COLE 
SHE KNOWS 
(Dreamville)
Got to admit I sideswerved 'Born Sinner' - heard too much cameo mediocrity from Cole in recent years after the initial massive promise of 'The Warm Up'& 'The Come Up'. 'She Knows' has a beat that's initially a wonderful pulse to find yourself on but suffers from being a little too politely placed in the mix and not getting bent out of shape enough. The arrangement suggest that given more time and the inclination Cole could transform himself into something of a Prince-like wunderkid but instead he seems content with coasting and doing as little work as possible. Christ it's like writing my old school reports. 

DEADLINE & PETE CANNON 
B.A.D.A.S.S 
(Tactical Thinking Entertaiment)
Delighted to see the return of the Tactical Thinking crew to the fray: their 'Too Broke To Go Solo' LP was one of the great lost UK rap classics of the past five years (see also Sir Smurf Lil) and if this is any indication of what we can expect from the soon-come 'Your Mum's Favourite Rapper' LP I've got my lobster bib and drool cup in place already. Stupendously aggravational rhyming from Deadline, and production from PC that sounds like the slo-mo section from a particularly brutal d&b track denied the ability to speed up, kept as this hard-as-fuck heartbeat-paced slam. Superb.

DIZZEE RASCAL
LOVE THIS TOWN
(Dirtee Skank Records)
Christ. Don't watch the video unless you actually like those 'Keep Calm And . . . ' posters. Dizzee goes yet further out of his way (as if those Robbie/Will.I.am toss-offs weren't bad enough) to antagonize and alienate those of us who love him with this horribly objectionable paean to whatever town you live in with your 79ps just give him your 79ps please you tasteless undiscerning fucks give him your 79ps he loves your town and you. He can still rhyme on point when prodded, but the backing to this - the kind of revoltingly by-rote club-friendly acoustic/autotuned euphoria that makes modern life so maximally unbearable - is just awful, the chorus so vile an enforced Eurodance singalong slop of objectionable ear-slurry it's difficult to even register his flow amid the shitnami. Rap music for Boris Johnson. Think about those early singles again. Think about 'Fix Up', 'I Love U'. 'Jus A Rascal'. Earthquakes in your day. Ten years ago now. I hate it when artists 'progress'. Wish they'd just focus on 'staying good'.

DRAKE FT. SAMPHA 
TOO MUCH 
(Ovo Sound) 
Get it for Sampha, not Drake. Drake's lines are ok but seem unsuited to the groove, like a freestyle off-cut that's been retrieved and then crowbarred into this song without much thought. The key to the track is Sampha's beautiful vocals on the hook, a really gorgeous voice, part Nina, part Donny Hathaway, and the way he's trapped in the cut, flows over the verses under Drake's verbals, returning and dominating the track every time he gets a chance. Could've listened to ten minutes of just the chorus and the verses WITHOUT Drake tbh. And near the tracks end Sampha is set free, throws down a jazzy verse that's pure Joni, pure A.R.Kane. A great single whenever Sampha's singing, a mixtape track when he's not. 

SINGLE OF THE MONTH

ELZHI
PRESSURE/CAN'T LOSE 
(Youtube/Kickstarter) 

The fact that Elzhi has to use Kickstarter to get his next album off the ground is either a blazing indictment of contemporary hip-hop A&R or proof that even hip-hop's most creative talents are having to find new ways to bring their music to the people. Either way, these two tracks that Elzhi's put out there to build his Kickstarter campaign seem to have done the trick and for good reason — they're as musically tight and lyrically engaging as all his best work. Go pledge and feel part of what's surely going to be one of 2014's early masterpieces. Genius.

HAIM 
FOREVER (MORODER REMIX) 
(Soundcloud)

I bet you are you pink fucknuckle. Despite what musicians and their sycophants might have you believe, music is never just about the music. When Cameron met Haim people pointing out that this is what happens when posh airheads completely colonise indie pop were batted away with the usual whining from their equally posh equally airheaded defenders in the press - 'no, it's just what happens on the Andrew Marr show', 'no they're just young and not political' or even more pitifully 'but they're American'. Azalia Banks got the same soft-treatment when she showed twitter-love for SamCam - defended to the hilt by reactionary apprentice Daily Mail columnists endlessly self-piteously bleating about their ignorance and how there's nothing they can do about it. Dunno bout you but when I was 15 I knew (cos, y'know, I was a live sentient being) which side of my buttered bread Thatch AND Reagan were shitting on - this idea that people can get to their MID-20s and still NOT KNOW that they're pallying up to someone evil, someone committed to destroying the lives of a whole social class is simply dumb avoidance and stupidity proudly celebrated, an ignorance that has never had to question or change itself. Then again, we're often talking about the kind of people who write shit like THIS  and then 'don't understand' why they get picked up on it. Oops, giggle, hey, was I racist there? Hey, can't we all just relax and celebrate what's great? 

   No. Fuck Haim forever for this, and fuck this tedious rerub from Mr. Moroder as well. They could get sliced & diced by Premo into a 20 minute megamix with Diana Ross on backing-vocals and I'd still hate them. Don't you get it you simpering chortling fucks? Shit like what's in this photo is UNFORGIVABLE. This man is planning me and my families and my friends DESTRUCTION and you're lining up with that cunt and then expecting me to give you a 'fair hearing'? Shes that toucheth pitch shall be defiled. Shame on all of you. 

HAVOC 
LIFE WE CHOSE (MOBB DEEP REMIX) 
(Nature Sounds)
Havoc of Mobb Deep links back up with his partner Prodigy for the remix to Hav's 'Life We Chose'— you might've heard the original feat Lloyd Banks. This rerub is more 'Hell On Earth' than 'Infamous' but still exerts an icy hold on your consciousness for its duration. Pick it up.

HEIST 
PAPER BUSINESS 
(Co Lab Recordings) 
I love it when a bass is so low, dirty and wah-wah'd up it's like it's talking to you, like Barry White got busy with ED-209 and had a big-assed baby. Console noises, church bells, robo-guys and phonesex girls, a beat that always seems like it's going to derail itself into arrthymia but that just keeps clenching at your chest until you need defibrulation. Through all of this - massively enjoyable. 


SINGLE OF THE MONTH 

ILL MOVE SPORADIC & OMAR TEKNOLOGY 
SOUND OF PAIN
(Starch Records)
Whooah — South London production duo Ill Move Sporadic are all set to release their debut LP, 'Drug Corpse' and this is the first thing I've heard from it. Fantastic spacey Arabic drone funk, guitars and bass unfolding and augmenting themselves in Led Zep-like 'Kashmir'-isms. Superbly startling muezzin-like tannoy hollering leads us through to the final fade. Absolutely fucking excellent and 'Drug Corpse' should be on your Xmas list NOW.

JOEY BADA$$
SUMMER KNIGHTS EP 
(iTunes)
'My Yout' with Maverick Sabre and 'My Jeep' are the bonus cuts on this EP (that aren't on the mixtape), that make this worth getting old skool retail style. Great beats, nice flows, not earthshaking but compelling throughout.

KINGS OF LEON 
BEAUTIFUL WAR 
(RCA)
"Speaking to Zane Lowe, Followill said of the song: "I think if people don't appreciate 'Beautiful War', then they can't appreciate anything! Read more at http://www.nme.com". Oh fuck, that's me telt. A song so pleased with what it finds (a kind of innoffensive country-rock pulse the Hothouse Flowers would've been proud of) it just kind of stays there doing absolutely nothing of interest, staring you out with its monobrowed glassy godbothering eyes until you move away.  Of course, that's just opinion, here's some appreciation - it certainly does last six minutes long and is in the 'pop/rock' style'. Instruments that feature include guitars, bass and drums. The guitars play both chords and single notes, or 'solos'. Intermittently, the singer open his mouth and words come out.Sometimes the singer sings loudly. Sometimes he sings less loudly.  It is mainly in the key of A, with occassional movements to the chords of D and E. Can I go interview Haim now?


KOOL KEITH & BIG SCHE EASTWOOD FT. METROPOLIS
WOMAN 
(Modulor/Junkadelic) 

From KK's typically variable new 'Magnetic Pimp Force Field' set this is sinuous, sexy, singular brilliance from Keith, a groove that's slo-mo but mindblowing, like something Jaki Liebezeit would cook up between hits from the bong, the hook a big slab of atonal buzzing bass that becomes even more addictive than the great scratches and vocal cut-ups that fill in every remaining space. Great extra cameo from Met as well. As you'd expect from KK — unlike ANYONE else, totally engrossing.

LEE SCOTT & ILLINFORMED 
CAPITAL DUMB
(Blah Records)
From the 'Stupid Poignant Shit' set and showcasing Lee's inimitable lyrical & production smarts. "Tipping a toaster for a crumb/writing depressing poetry for fun", Scott & Ill drop depressive science over a timeless headnodding beat, great lines tumbling past like you've had a can of Special Brew and a spliff for breakfast. "Stop rapping and up your game in fucking off"— seriously gonna steal that for this column in a few months when no-one's looking. Magnificent miserablism on the mic but it's Ill's production that draws you back again and again to this, each element (bass, beats, very little else) gaining cumulative power precisely from what he DOESN'T do to them. Maximal minimalism at its finest.Superb.


MARCO POLO
ASTONISHING  
(Soulspazm)
Large Professor, Inspectah Deck, O.C., Tragedy Khadafi & DJ Revolution guest on this great posse cut from MP's forthcoming 'Port Authority Pt.2'. As you'd expect from everyone involved, totally fuckin' wicked.

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 

MAZTECH
M THEORY 
(Renegade Hardware)
It wouldn't be a F.U.N.K singles page without at least one belch from the sulphuric belly of the Renegade Hardware beast and Maztech excels himself with this raw, glistening with dirt, noisy metallic stomper. Get this and the new Silent Witness & Lockjaw 12s on Dispatch Recordings for fun times all winter. Manna from hell. 

MED & BLU FT. DAM FUNK 
PEROXIDE 
(Bang Ya Head Entertainment)

A sidestep from Madlib on the mix here, an absolutely ungritty production, polished to an '80s digi-electro sheen, the chorus a mind-melting mix of Prince-style harmonics and rubbery, tactile Mantronix-style funk. Great rhymes from Medaphoar and Blu seal off a strangely compelling deal. Jack it end-to-end with the Juana Molina album and thank me later.

MIKAL 
THE IMMATERIAL EP 
(Metalheadz)
SB81 
DANCER IN THE DARK/BACK TO 33/FOUR TUN/SiMi
(Metalheadz)
Marcus Intalex nailed the Metalheadz style t'other night in an aside on his amazing 2 hour shared mix with Artificial Intelligence for Rinse FM: 'retro in style, futuristic in production'. 'The Immaterial EP' is suffused with sounds from d'n'b's past but is put together in a way that's still startlingly new - highlight here is 'Killa Soundbwoy', short bursts of bass, an eerily rich warmth to a track that's murderously cold-hearted, dancefloor annihiliation the goal and purpose and result. SB81 is Wolverhampton soundfreak Nolidge finally getting the nod for his Metalheadz debut and is a dubby harsh monster throughout. Harshest thing this side of Original Sin's 'Superman EP' on Playaz. Get your headz into it. 


MORRISEY 
SATELLITE OF LOVE (LIVE) 
(Parlophone)
An inimitable stylist brings his unique self-regard to bear on one of Lou's sweetest songs and manages to infect it with his usual belligerence - there's a really telling bit where instead of 'I love to watch things on TV' he sings 'I can not stand the TV' (personally I don't trust anyone who doesn't love telly). He separates the words like that, deliberately fluffs the flow, it's a lumpy moment, doesn't quite scan right, crucially it starts to stick out, burden the song with a pettiness that doesn't suit it. Eventually it turns into 'I cannot stand George Alagiah' and you're left there with this mess all over your front thinking - for fucks sake, WHY would you think that would be a good idea to sing unless you were Richard Digance, Richard Digance on tour supporting rubber-faced comedy-free zone Phil Cool? And also, what the fuck are WE meant to think about his loathing of Alagiah (I've always liked George myself, face like a nice friendly lion)? Amused? Confused? I guess it doesn't matter, "Weird Al" Morrisey got it out of his system but my god, it does perform an effective distraction to the way he can't quite cope with the melodies in the chorus. Floundering like Alan Bennett forced to croon a version of Bewlay Brothers - this rather sloppy cover seems an odd way to pay tribute to Lou, who even in his darkest moments, never smirked when talking about love. For fans only? No, for tragic obsessive completists only. The big old twat. 


ONE DAE 
BANG THIS
(Coalmine Records/Fat Beats) 
Marco Polo is on fire this year and his production of this is an unsettling doozie — what sounds partly like Bollywood, partly like an offcut from 'The Sound of Music' gets sliced and diced and laced over a fat funky thumping beat, OD holding on by his fingernails and aware that ANYTHING he says over such a killer beat/loop combo will sound cool. Open up sets, tapes, parties with this and announce yourself. Bristling, brilliant stuff.

PARAMORE 
DAYDREAMING
(Fueled By Ramen)
Ugh, yak, do you know what's fucking up rock music in a big big way at the moment? Drummers. Terrible drummers. Drummers that can do impressive, can do the macho thing, can LOOK like they're rocking out, let their hair fly, throw their arms into all the right 'classic rock' shapes, but have not an ounce of feel or humanity to anything they do. It's not even about replicating machines being the problem, it's that drummers seem to exist in a bubble, happy with the patina of 'rock' they visibly and audibly throw out around themselves and their kit, seemingly unaware or uncaring about whether they're in any way helping out the band they're in or the song they're singing. 'Daydreaming' is not a terrible song (think Eve's Plum b-side) but you can almost picture the cock behind the kit being so proud of his tumbles and rolls it damn near makes you sick, and derails any sense of flow or groove the song could've had. As bold and powerful and freespirited and rocking as a Primark ACDC t-shirt. I totally blame Dave Grohl for this bullshit. 

POZLYRIX
DAYS OF EXTINCTION
(Seven Oddities Records)
We need MORE native-American hip-hop in our lives and Poz is a Chicago native intent on bringing his unique native-American perspective to some rich boombap soundscapes. 'Days of Extinction' is blessed with a great, bass-heavy production from DreamTek and some razor-sharp political rhymes from Poz and you should make it the first time you hear from this vital new voice. "Not being negative, just being honest". Goddamn right.

PRIMAL SCREAM 
GOODBYE JOHNNY
(Ignition Records)
All the great 60s psyche-r'n'b  midway-through-the-second-side album tracks you've ever heard mixed up with a shit-encrusted spoon into a truly gag-tickling brew, proffered to you by a pack of hippy cunts in a chipped unwashed bowl that only accentuates its off-grey gruellness, horrible chunky bits of sax floating about on the top, a skin of fat developing. No chorus, no joy, no point, just real music for real wankers. An insult to the concept of 'pop single'. Can we not all just turn our backs on them from here on in? Cheers. 


QUELLE CHRIS 
WITH OPEN ARMS 
(Mello Music Group)
Really like Quelle Chris, and when joined by MarvWon, FuzzScoota, HouseShoes and the inestimable production smarts of Oh No, the results are never less than fun, intriguing, smart. This is from his 'Ghost At the Finish Line' opus that I, and you, really must get round to hearing and is a frabjous funky mess of textures and thoughts delivered in true splat-of-consciousness style.


SINGLE OF THE MONTH 

RAMSON BADBONEZ 
DESPERATION 
(High Focus Records)
From 2013's last hip-hop masterpiece, 'A Year In the Life of Oscar the Grouch' this is a beautifully balanced, gorgeously arranged, lyrically stunning look at street-level frustration and hopelessness that remains mercilessly accurate, massively uplifting (thanks to Charlie Mac's sublime warp'n'weft of '70s soul that's the undertow)and utterly compelling throughout. RB's been dropping some of the finest UK music for years now but this is a new high for him and the form. Absolutely essential.

RANSOM & STATIK SELEKTAH
UNEXPLAINABLE
(Brick)

First preview of the soon-come long-awaited opus 'The Proposal': 'Unexplainable' is seething with sound, chaos unfolding over the mix via tons of scratching and random peals of crowd noise breaking all the way from the bleachers to the centre of the soundscape. Ransom typically commanding on the mic and one of Statik's hardest-hitting beats. Not a million miles away from a Premo rerub of something off the Telemachus album, and that should do you a treat.

SERENGETI 
FIREBIRD LOGO 
(Burnco Records) 
Fantastic racket — noisier and more deranged than their Anticon antecedents, shot through with a droney menace that's utterly unique. Check it.

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 

SNIFF & MORRIARCHY FT. TRELLION 
BRAINWAVE CANVAS 
(Bad Taste Records)
Limited edition 7" of one of the highlights from perhaps the most underrated label on the planet right now and some of its most twistedly unique talent. Sniff swirls together a fantastically mordant cauldron of dread and doom over which Morriarchy and Trellion drop lines dripping with Sheffield steel and eerie menace. A sublime track including a rerub on the flip from man-of-the-moment Telemachus that elevates this into godlike territory. Essential as fuck.

TALIB KWELI 
THE WORMHOLE 
(Javotti Media)
TK's next album 'Gravitas' drops in late December and this is the first leak from it. 'The Wormhole' is produced by that man Oh No again and has some great elements (esp. the fuzzed up Coup-style guitar riffs) but somehow doesn't quite hang together in any way that's satisfying. I do like the way what starts as a rap about the Illuminati ends up with a far clearer political purpose, speaking of which: a memo to ALL rappers - rapping about the Illuminati might endear you to 15-year-old 4chan-addicted assholes but anyone with two or more braincells to rub together will immediately file this alongside 9-11 'truth' and other assorted dipshittery. Half-witted. Half great.


TOB ONE 
RASHEED WALLACE 
(The Fallbright Conservatory)
Featuring Gore Elohim (aka Goretex of Non Phixion), Mr.Complex and Ruste Juxx with Kutmasta Kurt on scratches. Beautifully dirty, Miles-style horns hanging over the groove and delayed into infinitude, the groove itself proudly scratchy and filthed-up. A hip-hop track that's somehow managed to still sound analogue, like it was recorded to tape in a pre-digi by Mass Appeal Beatz of the Boombapaddicts out of Boston. Nicely not nice.

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 

WRECKLESS
SEP
Violation Music 
Fab, violent, spaced-out, heavy on the lo-end drum and bass that emerges from some truly spooked backwardsed vocals to shred the head deliciously. As traumatically heavy as a prime Dillinja production and praise for me in d'n'b comes no higher. Seek it out and see you next year. 

AN A-Z OF MY FAVOURITE POP FROM 2013 - An end of year almanac from the F.U.N.K Singles Pages

December 24, 2013, 3:57 am

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A message from the editor: "Well, it's certainly been a year hasn't it, a year in which things have occured and sometimes other things have also occured. A year in which musicians have made music, and the fans have listened to it. A year in which certain things changed a bit, and others, didn't. In the party spirit, I thought I'd look back over the blog's singles pages and round up all my favourite moments from the last twelve-month of excitement, musical innovation and intrigue and share them with you. I'm sure I've left out some of the highlights, but here are the releases I think are emblematic of another great 52 weeks of pop and rock, and that surely point the way to even better things in 2014. Alot can happen in 365 days, but I'm sure the next 8760 hours in our lives will still surprise and startle and delight us as much as these records did in the last 525,600 minutes. And don't forget, via the F.U.N.K Singles Page, YOU can stay in touch with all the fun and fabulous music over the coming 31 million 536 thousand seconds until 2015. Have a great Xmas F.U.N.K readers. You are an example to us all."

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 

(Sonovox) 

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.

ARCADE FIRE 

AFTERLIFE(Sonovox)So utterly fucking boring and dismal it even made my squalid existence seem a pulsating thrillfest in comparison. I'm so very sick of bands who think that lyrics don't have to mean anything (or rather, feel that for lyrics to mean something they must be as un-noticeable as possible), that the words songs have can just reflect 'emptiness',  musically sound like cack indie-dance from the 90s, and somehow that such a grisly combination will be profound & moving & suggestive & poignant & 'brave'. Lazy, sickeningly self-regarding, downright cowardly pop music. 'Can we just scream and shout/til we work it out'? What a totally fucking pitiful response to life that is, what a shameful anthem for a generation of skinny speccy shitwits 'Afterlife' is, that whole 'well life's a bit confusing isn't it, I'm young and a bit shit but don't worry, I'll manage (something or other), I'll get through to (something else I haven't actually fucking thought about with any depth or insight or energy whatsoever BECAUSE I HAVEN'T HAD TO), yeah I know I party and bullshit but actually I'm shy and sensitive and THINK about things and read my tumblr won't you' self-help-spiel shit a whole generation is growing up thinking will do. Music as soundtrack to a life that longs to be in a constant Apple advert. Stop feeling so fucking sorry for yourself you bearded wankers - Brian Eno didn't evaporate into the ether for this shit. In summation, Arcade Fire, (Amer.) adj: "To be not at all good at any of the things". 

ARCTIC MONKEYS 

ONE FOR THE ROAD 

(Domino)

Quality. Legends. Sloppy. Erectile dysfunction. Celibate. Forgettable. Yup, everythingthat 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. 

JAMES ARTHUR 

RECOVERY (Syco)Caught my wife singing heartily along with 'You're Nobody Til Somebody Loves You' the other day. This is not a problem, even though I find that song perhaps the most repellent musical and oral production of 2013. If I catch her singing the even more ghastly 'Recovery' though, I'll hold her hand on the way to the walk-in centre and then throw fruit at the windows of the padded-lorry as she leaves my life forever. The absolute worse thing about this bellowing beefcake is how he spends all his time (when he's not being a serious musician who can hold his own playing live and not being about the ego) talking about how he's a 'serious' musician who can 'hold his own' playing live and how he's 'not about the ego'. Oddly though, the production of J-Art's records and the promotion of them is totally based upon a complete lack of self-deprecation and an earnestly tatooed conviction about being dark and serious and passionate that can only come from having an ego the size of Bahrain. His horrible phlegmatic bolus of a voice is held up & foregrounded as paramount and titanic in all his records even with Little Mix faves TMS behind the desk (and man do they TRY and make it interesting, pinwheeling through every available preset) & the thudding macho passion is so remorselessly, unyieldingly shoved in the listeners face it's like he's lapdancing for you while remaining fully togged up in his most tight-fitting Jacomo duds. Leave me and my family alone you sick bastard. 

ATOMS FOR PEACE 

BEFORE YOUR VERY EYES 

(XL)

Why are Atoms For Peace releasing a single? Thom Yorke hates pop music like he hates modern standards of hygiene. He's the enemy of pop music. He's all about good music,proper music, proper music played by proper people on proper instruments of a properintellect that doesn't lower itself to having such vulgar things as 'hooks' or trying to be 'likeable' and so this dislikable splat of coffee-table-ready coffee-coloured shit proves. Perhaps the most punchably dislikeable cunt involved in music this side of the Gallagher bros or Bono, Thom and his fellow wankonauts here explore a  Fela-ish groove with none of the warmth or fire or reason to be, Eno-production with none of the stealth or purpose and always always always that smeared false-modest sanctimonious croon so convinced of it's own depth it feels no need to bother creating a melody that isn't transient, instantly forgettable, comes phutting out with one leg cocked and a smirk on its face and a frown on its brow. Gosh how very very very fucking clever 'Before Your Very Eyes' is, how hard it tries to make a sound you can't deny but how completely it reveals itself to be  utterly antithetical to everything you should hold dear politically, culturally, and emotionally about music. The sound of rich people trying to expiate their guilt, pomposity that negates communication, that hates the listener, a bottomless topless unfathomable pomposity that makes the soul turgid from exposure to it.  Fucking hippy cunts fuck off and die.

AZALEA 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.

BASTILLE

LAURA PALMER(Virgin)BasTARDS more like. (ArfArf! This is why they still pay me the big bucks) "This is your heart/Can you feel it?/Can you feel it?/Pumps through your veins/Can you feel it?/Can you feel it?". Fatal and exasperating error here lyrically. Your heart doesn'tpump through your veins. It pumps blood through your veins, but if your heart is actually pumping through your veins in small capillary-wide chunks you got severe, potentially life-threatening problems son.   Hey, I understand a little lassitude in medical accuracy is permissable in pop songs esp. seeing as most pop songs, if they mention the heart, have it doing something it shouldn't be doing or afflicted with deformities that would render urgent medical attention a real priority beyond the singing of a song ("Groove Is In The Heart", "Thunder In My Heart","Heart Of Glass") but c'mon Bastille, I'd been led to believe you were a literate smart pop band. If my heart was pumping through my veins what exactly would be doing the pumping thickos? The fact I've spent the last 3 minutes pondering this when I should've been actually listening to this anthemic boobery is neither here nor there. I cannot abide imprecision and we shouldn't tolerate it anymore, time's too short and life's too long.

BAT FOR LASHES 

LILLIES

(Polydor) 

As a fellow paki, I should show solidarity to this listless bore. However I should advise Ms. Kahn that not only is her single a forgettable slew of Tamsin Archer-meets-Tori Amos magical-realist twinkly bollocks, but that the video she's so clearly proud of actually comes across like the kind of thing your parents force you to watch cos it's 'good old-fashioned storytelling'. Sonically polite to the point of gagworthy, like a fart so smelly it's actually sweet. Always nice to find that artists/bands that others have been flipping wads over & that you've never listened to should REMAIN that way. I've done my duty now and can safely put BFL in the ol' mental rolodex under 'Please Dispose Of Your Dog's Waste Here'. Bye, hippy.

BEADY EYE

SHINE A LIGHT 

(Beady Eye AKA Sony)
Weedy as wank. With a video like a low-budget cross between 'November Rain' and the inner sleeve of 'Beggars Banquet' (and with one genuine moment of gorillas-in-the-dry-ice hilarity when that Liam creature monkeys up to the camera in silhouette) but somehow even worse than that suggests ('sexy' nuns, I shit you not!). A rejected Del Amitri b-side in any other age, in this paltry one a 'great track' from 'a legend',  'Shine A Light' achieves the somehow impossible task of making Primal Scream sound like innovators through the neat trick of being utterly rancid shit from start to finish. Someone please give me (Anselmo voice) five minutes alone with yer lad and I'll make him into a racist to go with his homophobia and sexism. Go home and count yer money man. Quietly.

BIFFY CLYRO 

BIBLICAL 

(Beggars Banquet) 

    God it must be tough being in a gee-tard band sometimes. All that VAGUENESS to keep afloat, making sure that every single one of your thoughts, ideas, expressions have that definitive aura of non-commital commitment, that latitudinal damn-near horizontal imprecision todays rock-demographic desire. Making sure that your music never ever strays dangerously away from the endlessly accented trills tween fifths and ninths that Blink 182 & Godspeed You Wank Emperor & Radiohead & other enemies of humanity have laid down as thee constraints of serious frowny flail-rock. It must feel so odd, to so feign freedom under the weight of so much self-inflicted paralysis. Only when the brain is truly incapable of creating anything of any possible interest can it start getting easy, and it'd seem that Biffy Clyro have hit magic-time now, the kind of golden-era of creative ease artists rarely achieve in which everything they touch turns to the kind of shit that will sell to the walking agglomerations of body-odour they call their fans. Festival season soon so this will light the fires up the hill, brayed to the heavens by the hordes as God plugs his ears and puts another Dillinja 12 on his i-pod. Real people, y'know.  Every third face having a burger inserted into it. Real people, the kinda people you avoid like their leprosy is airborne, the kind of people who a decade ago were into Feeder, a decade before into the Stereophonics, a decade hence looking forward to the Biffy Clyro reunion tour with the kids they've inculcated with their cuntishness. Ever thus. Ever with us. 

     It really is time to make the anthemic anathema cos fuck me this is some horrifically ugly shit. Gruesome lumpen para-rhymes (magical, wonderful, biblical, immeasurable, understandable - this record is only one of these things sadly), the 'under-tow' (they heard a Tool album once & there's another word - in fact entire lyrical theme -the nautical - that needs banning from rock lyrics forever) gleaming chugalug technofied rock like Fountains Of Wayne getting sodomized by a leering Butch Vig, BC looking over their heavily inked shoulders as  his left talon strokes their beards, his right-claw anointing his scaly permatanned cock with a jar of tinctured digital syrup before plunging in nutsdeep, goochdeep, making them wail all the way to the shockingly compressed & confined limits of the soundscape. 

    NME/Kerrang rock par excellence. Avoid like the Coalition government it, and those magazines, so clearly thoroughly support. 

BON JOVI 

WHAT ABOUT NOW

(Island)

Remember how bands like the Stone Roses & Primal Scream always used to go on about Curtis Mayfield or Can when talking about how there'd 'always been a dance element to our music'. Lying motherfuckers! Clear to anyone with ears that the biggest influence on both of them was Bon Jovi's 'Keep The Faith' and it's prescient ability to match a shittily lumpen 'funk' groove to the usual hairy-chested alpha-twat poolhall bollocks they've been peddling for the best part of 3 decades now. 'What About Now' sadly sees the Jovi stop being leaders of the pack and simply following a nastily contemporary amalgam of Biffy Clyro-style dunce-chords and Killers-style ugly wordiness. Let's hope they return to the cutting edge that ensured they were perhaps the biggest single influence on bands as big and important as Oasis, Green Day and Kings Of Leon. Oh of course none of those snobby cowardly motherfuckers would admit it but just listen to them - they've all got a big bit of Jovi in their souls. Never forget it.

JAKE BUGG 

COUNTRY SONG 

(Mercury) 

Mindful to fill this review with enough lucrative keywords to keep my SEO optimizers happy (hi guys, check the caps!)  in the whiter than white corner we have this little QUALITY arsewipe and oh my giddy fuck you won't believe what you're hearing! A voice so bereft of pleasure it's like filling your pants with TOP hot gravel, a guitar so aimlessly MINT dull you wanna see if his basin-bowlcut head will fit inside the soundhole, well aware that it won't, still keen to bloody well try with some heft and a CLASS shoehorn and several stout whacks with a polo mallet.  Bugg, you donkey, be quiet. Lots of people are telling you you're great. They're all twats. You're not great. You're fucking CLASS rubbish.

CHVRCHES

GUN(Goodbye/Virgin)

Sometimes I sense that all you need to do to get a positive review in these cheerleading days is simply be a band and manage to make a record. Manage to make a record that starts, does some verses and choruses and ends or fades. Out of relief almost, people will be impressed that you got through, that you did it, that they have just been enabled to engage in the behaviour associated with music i.e listening and eventually, not listening. If you manage to use textures and sounds that people can identify, even better. And at no point must anyone ask - do I NEED this record? Because, possibly, at no point would the answer be yes. I was told Chvrches do 80s synth pop - they don't, they make weak 90s techno-pop seemingly waiting on a better timelier drum-machine (and the Linn/808 phatness sits ill with the cleanliness here, like a spacesuit full of farts). It would take you five listens to 'Gun' to be able to even remotely sing back a single line, so bereft of hook yet smug in texture it is. I have absolutely no problem with Chvrches pootling away to little avail until the end of time but the notion that this is 'great pop' simply because it deals in the same sounds as critics' youth is utterly wrong-headed. Must try a fuck of a lot harder.

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.  

DAUGHTER 

HUMAN 

(4.A.D) 

Definitive, state-of-the-art indie-folk that immediately makes you think you've heard it already. You just can't remember what product it was advertising. You're pretty sure it was a slimline device of some description but it could've been anything from car insurance to a new, liberating type of sanitary towel. A little research reveals it's never been used on an advert, but the fact you THINK it's from an advert is testament to Daughter's ability to seamlessly slip alongside the zeitgeist of sounding both sparkly and as if under the pall of a Victorian illness, and take their place amongst other listless croakers covered in fairy-lights and filled with what sound like pleurisy on the gravy train of soundtracking adverts directed at middle-class students and 20-30 yr old ABC earners and other people who close their eyes in bliss as soon as they hear an acoustic guitar and a glockenspiel in heavenly bearded & floral-dressed union.

    I remember when I first started hearing female voices like this, Lisa Germano, Lois, other 4.A.D acts like Liquorice - like all 'weak' voices (see also Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards, Paul Westerberg, Marianne Faithful) what was winning was when you felt that they were at least trying to sing the best they could, or at least not giving a fuck and making you live with their technically imperfect throats. What bands like Daughters suffer from is that here you get the feeling they're AIMING for that weakness, trying to sound frail ergo damaged ergo interesting. It's music that settles for being the aural equivalent of an autumnal Marie Claire photoshoot and I pretty much blame Cat Power for all of it. Pass.

DEPECHE MODE 

SOOTHE MY SOUL 

(Venusnote/Columbia) Your voice suits your face doesn't it? S'why it's impossible to love The Enemy. S'why I've never got along with Depeche Mode. It's Gahan. It's his diddy Jeremy Kyle-like seriousness, no matter how much self-deprecation he might indulge in now. Oh, I'm sure he's a charming & thoroughly decent fellow. But I hate his singing, hate that grain of heartfeltness in it, its rockschool professionalism and lack of personality, hate the eternally wracked tedious lines between junkiedom, religion and romance Depeche always push our way. 'Soothe My Soul' aims for the all-conquering wonder of Rachel Stevens''Some Girls' but only reaches the non-conquering middlingness of a Nitzer Ebb b-side. I always remember the last scene of '101' when they're all sat backstage ponying up the dough. They don't need this and nor do we.

ELIZA DOOLITTE 

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 coming out their mouths, 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 - my advice is to 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 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'?

DISCLOSURE FT. LONDON GRAMMAR 

HELP ME LOSE MY MIND 

(Island) 
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.

DIZZEE RASCAL

LOVE THIS TOWN
(Dirtee Skank Records)
Christ. Don't watch the video unless you actually like those 'Keep Calm And . . . ' posters. Dizzee goes yet further out of his way (as if those Robbie/Will.I.am toss-offs weren't bad enough) to antagonize and alienate those of us who love him with this horribly objectionable paean to whatever town you live in with your 79ps just give him your 79ps please you tasteless undiscerning fucks give him your 79ps he loves your town and you. He can still rhyme on point when prodded, but the backing to this - the kind of revoltingly by-rote club-friendly acoustic/autotuned euphoria that makes modern life so maximally unbearable - is just awful, the chorus so vile an enforced Eurodance singalong slop of objectionable ear-slurry it's difficult to even register his flow amid the shitnami. Rap music for Boris Johnson. Think about those early singles again. Think about 'Fix Up', 'I Love U'. 'Jus A Rascal'. Earthquakes in your day. Ten years ago now. I hate it when artists 'progress'. Wish they'd just focus on 'staying good'.

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.

FUN

ALL ALONE 

(Fueled By Ramen) 

'We Are Young' wore me down eventually. Not to the point of liking it, but to the point of accepting its existence, the fact that for the next few years I can legitimately expect to hear it at least twice a week against my will because I live in the modern world of radios and televisions and in-store broadcasting and it is irrevocably now part of that world. This is poop though, as you'd expect from anyone formerly willing to be in a band called 'The Format', from its deceptively Left Banke-like synth part which shoulda been on harpsichords, all the way to its crappy chorus, shot through as it is with all the melodic grace of Opus and Freiheit and a kindergarten hook as desperate as it is sinister. I've heard better songs sung by Mr Tumble to be honest. Lazy pricks.

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.

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. 

HAIM 

FALLING 
(Polydor) 

Phewff, that was close, nearly clicked on the version that was ‘live from Maida Vale’. 

[Bomb Maida Vale, someone, now that it's become the livelounge cathedral sanctifying the ongoing acoustic anschluss, preferably ensuring that Jo Whiley is inside, wearing a big parka sat on a piano stool next to Kelly Jones, her pisshole-in-the-snow eyes closed as she nods appreciatively as he plays a broken version of ‘Mr Writer’. Would be lovely if she’d invited Zane Lowe & Fearne Cotton along too. Sorry, shouldn’t get lost in these daydreams, the snap back to reality where these people live and breathe and move through air and draw wages from my license fee is too too painful to make the reveries worthwhile. Her parka-fur singed and lit and undoused by her frenzied tears. Lowe’s crispy flame-grilled fists beaten into tandoorified charred stumps on the door-pane, the air in Cotton’s head evaporating in an empty baloon hiss of steam. The sprinklers failing . . . failing, sorry where was I?]

   Oh yeah: the Haim sisters & friend continue their mission to dilute ‘Tango In The Night’ into palatable chunks of disguised vomit for mass re-consumption and commit the cardinal error so common to so many born-in-the-80s 80s-retronauts i.e getting everything right sonically and nothing right spiritually, and as ever forgetting to write a chorus. The retro-ness I don't particularly have a problem with at this late stage of our disappearance down pop-history's plughole but it's the palpable sense as ever that these people are on no journey, personally, emotionally, or musically, or romantically, just that they've arrived WITH MUSIC TO MAKE and the tools immediately at their disposal, that so utterly saps their admittedly 'correct' sourcing and facsimile of any potential intrigue it might have had. 

See, that’s not a chorus, that’s a bridge. FFS am I gonna have to get Songwriting101 on yr asses? Yessssssss, it happens after a verse but that doesn’t make it a chorus. Admit it, you were so pleased with yourself for constructing such a believable simulacra of a 70s soft-rock verse &  bridge you COULDN’T ACTUALLY BE ARSED to find a hook for a chorus. Which is like blowing up the paddling pool only to not bother putting water in it y'lazy fuckers. This is not Belladonna. It's just vella shitta. 

HAIM FOREVER (MORODER REMIX) 
(Soundcloud)

I bet you are you pink fucknuckle. Despite what musicians and their sycophants might have you believe, music is never just about the music. When Cameron met Haim people pointing out that this is what happens when posh airheads completely colonise indie pop were batted away with the usual whining from their equally posh equally airheaded defenders in the press - 'no, it's just what happens on the Andrew Marr show', 'no they're just young and not political' or even more pitifully 'but they're American'. Azalia Banks got the same soft-treatment when she showed twitter-love for SamCam - defended to the hilt by reactionary apprentice Daily Mail columnists endlessly self-piteously bleating about their ignorance and how there's nothing they can do about it. Dunno bout you but when I was 15 I knew (cos, y'know, I was a live sentient being) which side of my buttered bread Thatch AND Reagan were shitting on - this idea that people can get to their MID-20s and still NOT KNOW that they're pallying up to someone evil, someone committed to destroying the lives of a whole social class is simply dumb avoidance and stupidity proudly celebrated, an ignorance that has never had to question or change itself. Then again, we're often talking about the kind of people who write shit like THIS  and then 'don't understand' why they get picked up on it. Oops, giggle, hey, was I racist there? Hey, can't we all just relax and celebrate what's great? 
   No. Fuck Haim forever for this, and fuck this tedious rerub from Mr. Moroder as well. They could get sliced & diced by Premo into a 20 minute megamix with Diana Ross on backing-vocals and I'd still hate them. Don't you get it you simpering chortling fucks? Shit like what's in this photo is UNFORGIVABLE. This man is planning me and my families and my friends DESTRUCTION and you're lining up with that cunt and then expecting me to give you a 'fair hearing'? Shes that toucheth pitch shall be defiled. Shame on all of you. 

IMAGINE DRAGONS 

IT'S TIME 

(Interscope)
OK. End of the night and have to admit I'm getting fractious. What? An 'even more epic Killers'?
   No, sorry, that's it. The shutters are up. Your parking will not be validated. Get outta here you bloated flatulent fuckers: there's enough shitty, orotund windybollocks rock music in the world right now, we don't need you cramming more in. Thank you . . . . . . . . hold on,  what are you doing still mooching round here, staring at yr shoes? You're here to get your single reviewed? No, sorry, I'm knocking off for the night now - this IS your single reviewed. I mean it. Pack up all your equipment and fuck off out of it. Go home and just be quiet, very very quiet, fingers on lips. Stop looking at me with those cow eyes. I have nothing to say about your music except that everything you are doing is bad. Yes, everything, I'm not exaggerating. Everything you are doing is bad. Your music is as terrible as you should feel. I want you to know this. Yes, all of it - that's what 'everything' means. It's all bad. There is not a single redeeming feature to it. No, this isn't a joke. I'm not over-reacting. You are adding nothing but shit to the world. If you were 3000 times better than you are you'd still be fucking awful. Hey, lads, no need to get angry, I'm just being honest with you. No-one else will be . . .
   OK, I think they've gone. By the way - next month I shall use this review again word for word for the purposes of reviewing the ever-enshittened increasingly enshittening Queens Of The Stone Age thus ensuring that my carbon footprint remains balletic. Hey, don't thank me, I just love my planet is all.

JESSIE J 

IT'S MY PARTY 

(I-Tunes)

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. 

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.

THE KILLERS 

FLESH & BONE 

(Island) 

How can we dance when the world it turning? How can we sleep when our beds are burning? Lots & lots of words here achieving the special trick of meaning sweet fanny adams, rotating the same (yawn) "anthemic" motifs the rest of schmindie-shmock seems to have their Converse mired in at the moment but desperately shoving Casiotone Dixons pissabouts, badbad prog-poesy and horribly chirpy Christian-rawk into the chunder-swirl as well. Get to fuck you grotesquely professional pricks ya. Motivational-speaker music. 

KINGS OF LEON 
BEAUTIFUL WAR 
(RCA)
"Speaking to Zane Lowe, Followill said of the song: "I think if people don't appreciate 'Beautiful War', then they can't appreciate anything! Read more at http://www.nme.com". Oh fuck, that's me telt. A song so pleased with what it finds (a kind of innoffensive country-rock pulse the Hothouse Flowers would've been proud of) it just kind of stays there doing absolutely nothing of interest, staring you out with its monobrowed glassy godbothering eyes until you move away.  Of course, that's just opinion, here's some appreciation - it certainly does last six minutes long and is in the 'pop/rock' style'. Instruments that feature include guitars, bass and drums. The guitars play both chords and single notes, or 'solos'. Intermittently, the singer open his mouth and words come out.Sometimes the singer sings loudly. Sometimes he sings less loudly.  It is mainly in the key of A, with occassional movements to the chords of D and E. Can I go interview Haim now?

AVRIL LAVIGNE 

HERE'S TO NEVER GROWING UP 

(Epic) 

Speaking of the piss-stinking rat-faced piss-faced rat-stinking one we call Thom Avril's finest memory of her youth here is "Singing Radiohead at the top of our lungs" - well that's your fucking card marked innit Mrs Kroeger. This contains possibly the worse lyrics of the year - yet another brain-buggeringly repetetive post-Perry/Ke$ha thqueam-till-I'm-thick bleat that the height of rock'n'roll transgressiveness is 'dancing on a bar', yet another attempt at infantilism from someone old, the endless perpetuation of the fear of ageing so ingrained now in popsong that every artist either has to be young, or sad about being old and no-one can simply SING ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN SELF-PITY/AGGRANDIZEMENT. Hateful in every single way musically but beyond that, sung and delivered with a thoroughly unpalatable sense of priveliged selfishness that only a Radiohead fan could enjoy. You are welcome.

JAY LEIGHTON 

WISH I WAS SPRINGSTEEN 

(Strata Music) 

" . . . or maybe James Dean, I'm forever waiting for the start . . . I need something to jump start my heart". I can help you out there actually mate. Seriously. 

    First off, face it, the Springsteen thing ain't gonna happen (thank fuck, last thing we need is yet another Springsteen - can you imagine how many sweaty bandana-wearing saxophone solos that's gonna put in the world?) - you're "Jay Leighton" (real name Zarathustra Fantakkabo, renamed himself to blend in better), yet another shitty singer-songwriter whose coming decade will be spent vainly waiting for the call from the Match.com ad-department that will never come. So here, attach these bulldog clips to your nipples and I'll start rotating the vitreous lever on the Leyden jar. I'll kickstart yr heart alright y'stubbly loser, I'll kickstart its fucking head in.

MORRISEY 

SATELLITE OF LOVE (LIVE) 
(Parlophone)
An inimitable stylist brings his unique self-regard to bear on one of Lou's sweetest songs and manages to infect it with his usual belligerence - there's a really telling bit where instead of 'I love to watch things on TV' he sings 'I can not stand the TV' (personally I don't trust anyone who doesn't love telly). He separates the words like that, deliberately fluffs the flow, it's a lumpy moment, doesn't quite scan right, crucially it starts to stick out, burden the song with a pettiness that doesn't suit it. Eventually it turns into 'I cannot stand George Alagiah' and you're left there with this mess all over your front thinking - for fucks sake, WHY would you think that would be a good idea to sing unless you were Richard Digance, Richard Digance on tour supporting rubber-faced comedy-free zone Phil Cool? And also, what the fuck are WE meant to think about his loathing of Alagiah (I've always liked George myself, face like a nice friendly lion)? Amused? Confused? I guess it doesn't matter, "Weird Al" Morrisey got it out of his system but my god, it does perform an effective distraction to the way he can't quite cope with the melodies in the chorus. Floundering like Alan Bennett forced to croon a version of Bewlay Brothers - this rather sloppy cover seems an odd way to pay tribute to Lou, who even in his darkest moments, never smirked when talking about love. For fans only? No, for tragic obsessive completists only. The big old twat. 

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.

TOM ODELL 

HOLD ME 

(Sony) 

Gosh, he's certainly not someone you can sit on the fence about! Hats off to him! Haven’t had such a strong response to music in a while (Al Pacino voice) whooahh! Sometimes it takes time to really get into stuff or figure out a response but have to say there’s no such umming or ahhing with fresh new privately-educated, signed to Lily Allen's label, albinoesque  talent Tom Odell. Within merely 3 seconds exposure, in fact before he'd even made a noise,  I wanted to drive red-hot ingots into his eyes, the stout hammering of medieval molten agony to his pasty phizog reaffirmed as reasonable response with only the most cursory scan of the overwhelmingly positive youtube comments this slab of sloppy effluent has attracted. Comments as enlightened, Australian-interrogative and entirely non-loathsome as this . . .   

“Really annoys me -the fact have brilliant artists like Tom, The Rolling Stones, Green Day, The Sex Pistols and stuff -and I know they are different so you cam compare, but I mean you get shittypeople like Rihanna and Lady Gaga, who are like a disgrace to music?"

'Hold Me'? Only if it's under the water in a bathtub until your legs stop kicking you objectionable guffmerchant. Next time someone you love, care about, potentially maybe even someone you might accept food or drink from (just think, they'll have touched it, with their freckly, dirty hands), admits to you that they like Arcade Fire, send them thissaway. Make them watch this worthless birdshitstain cunt, hear the nauseating over-wroughtness of his voice, the corduroy-choirboy punchability of the chorus, the ‘anthemic’ (yeah man, cos BELONGING like I’m in a fucking Carling Black Label advert is what I most fondly covet from pop) the almost scarily-negative musical non-entity of the timbre and orchestration. Make them hear it. Then make them hear it again. Then drive those red-hot ingots into theireyes also, just to be sure, just to be on the safe side. It’s the only way we’re gonna progress as a pop culture. Careful, attentive listening, and the repeated use of red-hot ingots in the eyes, ears and asses of reactionaries everywhere. So, to recap on our progress so far,  that's two things to remember -  

1. listen carefully.

2: red-hot ingots. 

Do you think you'll remember that? There'll be a test at the end.

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!

PARAMORE 

DAYDREAMING

(Fueled By Ramen)

Ugh, yak, do you know what's fucking up rock music in a big big way at the moment? Drummers. Terrible drummers. Drummers that can do impressive, can do the macho thing, can LOOK like they're rocking out, let their hair fly, throw their arms into all the right 'classic rock' shapes, but have not an ounce of feel or humanity to anything they do. It's not even about replicating machines being the problem, it's that drummers seem to exist in a bubble, happy with the patina of 'rock' they visibly and audibly throw out around themselves and their kit, seemingly unaware or uncaring about whether they're in any way helping out the band they're in or the song they're singing. 'Daydreaming' is not a terrible song (think Eve's Plum b-side) but you can almost picture the cock behind the kit being so proud of his tumbles and rolls it damn near makes you sick, and derails any sense of flow or groove the song could've had. As bold and powerful and freespirited and rocking as a Primark ACDC t-shirt. I totally blame Dave Grohl for this bullshit. 

HURTS
BLIND

(RCA)  

What? Yr fucking kidding me. This is it? I really wanted to hear Hurts cos the phrase 'disastrous A&R showcase' in a biog is almost guaranteed to get my ears pricked up. But this is horrible, a lighters-aloft sway-along song for the bovine and docile that makes Fun sound like Caspar Brotzmann Massaker. Has anyone got a fresh set of ingots heated up yet? For gods sake, lets get a backlog built up, the cunts are coming in waves. 

PALMA VIOLETS 

BEST OF FRIENDS 

(Rough Trade)

The sound of what happens when you call the Liberfkntines 'legends', 'iconic' and 'one of the greats' repeatedly for over a decade. Thrice diluted piss.

PALMA VIOLETS 

WE FOUND LOVE 

(Rough Trade) 

Had to check a few times that this wasn't a live bootleg, or ripped from a youtube video of a live show. It sounds like the really dull final 5 minutes of a set wherein a band drag out a song to tediously strung-out, drawn-out lengths of quiet/crescendo, of interest only to the die-hard & drunk. Turns out they think this is actually a single and counts as a song. Quite astonishing. No hook. No shape. Nothing of interest. Sonically we're talking Shed 7 at their arse-pummelingly overwhelmingly headfuckingly very very best. I hope you're feeling as massively imbued with hope as I am. Remember, cut down the vein, not across. Speed is of the essence. Early bus home. Down. Not across. 

KATY PERRY 

UNCONDITIONAL

(i-Tunes) 

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.  'Unconditional' 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.

PLACEBOLOUD 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.

PRIMAL SCREAM 

IT'S ALRIGHT, IT'S OK 

(Ignition)

It's not though Bobby, is it? It's not alright. It's certainly not fucking ok. It's a cliche that Primal Scream just keep wanting to sound like the Stones, and it's become something they've done so often you can guess that on Last FM The Stones are listed as an artist 'like Primal Scream'.

    But hold on a minute - this somehow manages to transparently aim for an 'Exile'-era 'Shine A Light/Just Wanna See His Face' gospel pulse but falls SO calamitously short in every respect it almost seems an insult to call it 'Stonesy', an offence to God and the Devil to even mention the Stones in the same breath. No feel, no Charlie/Bill/Keith gaps or wobbliness to the playing, just a stiff competence that erases pleasure and Gillespie's voice as ever this weak whining pathetic punchable thing that stinks of leather-trousered gusset-chafe on a hot day. What it reveals is that really, in every respect Primal Scream are simply inadequates, always have been, and are the godfathers of every single band since who've had irrefutably 'classic' record collections but a total inability to summon even one tiny iota of the spirit or joy of any of that listening to their own music because they have nothing to give except pisspoor fanboy wannabe dress-up and musically empty pasquinade. Fuck Primal Scream man. I prefer music.

PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCASTINGNIGHT 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. 

RIHANNA 
POUR IT UP (Island) 
God, this song is sooo about my life it's not true. Checkitout, RiRi might have come a long way from her roots as market-stall barker and crackhead's daughter but she hasn't forgotten the struggle, or how things are for the vast majority of us great unwashed. 
“Throw it up, throw it up/Watch it all fall out/Pour it up, pour it up/That's how we ball out/Strip clubs and dollar bills I still got more money/Patron shots can I get a refill?/I still got more money/ Strippers goin' up and down that pole And I still got more money/ Four o'clock and we ain't going home Cause I still got more money /Money make the world go round I still got more money /Bands make your girl go down I still got more money/ Lot more where that came from/I still got more money/All I see is signs All I see is dollar signs/Money on my mind Money, money on my mind/I still got more money Who cares how you haters feel And I still got more money Call Jay up and close a deal I still got more money My fragrance on and they love my smell I still got more money So who cares about what I spend I still got more money My pocket's deep, and they never end I still got more money I'm going dumb with all my friends I still got more money”.

So, basically Rihanna doing what she does best i.e absolutely fuck all of any interest whatsoever, and charmlessly so at that. No video as yet, but this will suffice. 

THE SATURDAYS

GENTLEMAN 

(Fascination)

Not just indie-rock that's stuck in the arse-end of the 90s scrabbling for reasons to be - this single rather shamefully attempts to recapture the heat of those few good Girls Aloud singles but confuses itself by forgetting to actually fit any hooks in between all the video-friendly attitudinal sloganeering and the thoroughly shameless lyrics from failed shitehawk singer-songwriter Priscilla Renae (Demi Lovato, Rihanna, Chris Brown, Cheryl Cole, yup you get the idea). Lyrics that if not utterly perplexing are not the kind of thing I feel you should let any young girl near for the brainrot and mind-palsy that will set in:  "A gentleman is so 95, so hard for a girl to find/ Cause most dudes just hit it and quit it/And then they wonder why most girls just spit it" is redonkulous enough but then comes this little gem of an aside: "You had his baby, so you might've got him for now/ He already had the milk, so why would he go buy the cow?/ Hop in, your chance is slim especially when I'm lying next to him". Really CAN wait to hear my 7 year old singing that at her next bouncy castle/blue pop soiree, just hope she never gets to hear the 'rapped' coda.

"I need a Ryan Gosling, I need a Robert Pattinson
Somebody I can take to Mama, I need to find my Obama
I need a Jonas Brother and, how about a Denzel Washington?
I need a Kellen Lutz, and a Channing Tatum, throw 'em my way, I'll date 'em
I need a Drake, I need a Ludacris, I need a Wheezy, I don't care who he is
Heard 'em say I need a Kanye, he ain't a gentleman, but I'll have him anyway
George Clooney, Lamar Odom, Larry King, I like 'em older
All the gentleman from all around the world, holla".

Can you imagine how bad that sounds coming out of The Saturdays' posh gobs? They can just fuck off with this flailing shit (you can sense that cos none of them have a voice that's interesting they can't settle on a sound that works for them and are starting to sound as Desperate as the Housewives they so witlessly ape in the video). Psy's 'Gentleman' is the only 'Gentleman' yr little ones need, Little Mix are already better than them and Stooshe are titanically better than any of these saps. The Saturdays are the male Projekt Weekend and need to become UNfamous soon as.

SCOUTING FOR GIRLS 

MILLIONAIRRE 

(Sony) 

The fucking gall of these people. You feel like chasing SFG down the street with a plastic bag demanding they scoop and dispense of this wormy mess. From the forthcoming 'Greatest Hits' LP. Yeah, I know,  let's rewind a little and soak that up and in. Scouting For Cunting Girls have had enough hits to have a 'Greatest Hits' LP. It's coming out soon, and this wodge of sloppy labrador egesta is on it. Bastard Scouting For Girls got signed a while back, and had a few hits. Even further back, they formed, and thought that Scouting For Fucking Girls was a good name for a band. So, again, to recap: a band formed called Scouting For Girls because they thought that was a good idea. They had hits like 'Elvis Ain't Dead' and 'She's So Lovely' with the full support of the music business and media. They're now bringing out a best-of. And if that array of facts doesn't compel this generation to commit mass-seppuku they should hang their heads in shame. How the fuck did you cunts allow things to get this far? Oh, that's right, you were otherwise occupied with fucking Grizzly Bear or something. You lazy lazy bastards. S'too late now. Don't come running to me. Seriously, don't run, the way your arms flap about is really fucking annoying.

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. 

TAYLOR SWIFT 

TWENTY TWO 

(Big Machine) 

"It feels like a perfect night to dress up like hipsters and make fun of our exes/It feels like a perfect night for breakfast at midnight/To fall in love with strangers"

Clearly stop-out Swift's not been listening to her most caring critics like the genius girl above, more worryingly she appears to have given up on the idea of creating anything, rather pinning herself like a butterfly on the flailing vagaries of algorhythms and code.  '22' is like a leftover-sandwich, every offcut from all her other songs condensed into one emetic stew of cliche, every line completed by predictive text, all slathered over music that seems to be made up as it goes along, and not in a 'Trout Mask Replica' way either. This is the sound of what happens when the computers set up to devise the next edition of pro-tools start becoming self-aware and human decisions are removed from strategic songwriting. (Pro-Tools begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug). Scarily bland.

TAYLOR SWIFT FT. ED SHEERAN 

EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED 

(Big Machine) 

In at number 11. Can't see it going higher. Taylor's mistake was making anything except 'Trouble', her defining only-good moment. Sheeran's mistake was not contracting a nasty dose of Avian flu and putting himself in a sanitorium for the rest of our lives. Though thankfully bereft of any of Swift's usual 'verite' drawled put-downs, or any of Sheeran's 'compassionate' lyrics (he's not watched any C4 documentaries recently, at least not any featuring people with faces like flaky pastry) 'Everything Has Changed' is, as you can imagine, as much fun as shaving, and then drinking from, a boil.

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. 

SWISS LIPS 

U GOT THE POWER 

(Sony)

THE 1975

IV EP 

(Dirty Hit/Sony) 

Sony fucking own the world now don't they? So could they find some time to plow some funds into music colleges, changing the curriculum from its heavy emphasis on pro-tools & production and getting some teachers in to conduct a new unit called 'REMEMBERING TO WRITE A FUCKING CHORUS'? Cheers.   These twin bunches of wannabe Trevor Horns are much loved by Radio Fuckwit, sorry Radio 1's Sara Cox and Scott Mills and Jo Whiley and Zane Lowe and it shows. If you want to find an unfunny long-winded cunt who knows fuck all about music tune in to Radio Enemy Of Humanity, sorry Radio 1. Shittest most utterly worthless radio station on the planet and I hope they all, from Grimshaw thru to Lowe, get done for kiddie-fiddling in 20 years. Seriously, look at a Radio Funny As A Burst Polyp, sorry, Radio 1 schedule one time. Who the fuck are these people? Local commercial stations have to squeeze in at least 4 ad-beds an hour and still manage to talk less shite than these fucking wannabe Butlins redcoats, and be way way funnier with it. A generation of DJs now who probably 'look up' to Chris Cunting Moyles. Big fans of Swiss Lips anyhoo. All you need to know. This is the kind of music that such feckless wankshafts consider 'exciting' and 'awesome'. It should be ignored, avoided, scrambled away from desperately like the over-tooled runny cockcheese it all is. 

ROBIN THICKE
GIVE IT TO YOU
(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.

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 realmusic". I say "Wank Turner more like".

TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB 

CHANGING OF THE SEASONS 

(Kitsune)Punchable indie-disco fodder that makes even a Walter Softie like me feel like snapping its spotty neck. That fucking alternated hi-hat beat guitar bands have been thinking is 'disco' for over a decade now, revoltingly polite synths and vocals, the sound of the kind of bad night at a bad club you really should avoid these days what with that restraining order and your previous convictions. The fact that Zane Lowe will doubtless announce the playing of this as if he's about to personally detonate a twenty-megaton nuclear device up your anus should tip you off about just what a whiney wheedly soggy squib it actually is. V-festival music. Yak.

TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB 
HANDSHAKE
(Kitsune)
What a horrible horrible sound, such four-square lumpen 'danceyness', such gag-worthily correct textures but there comes a point where you have to admit that some music just isn't for you, was never for you, never had your demographic on the drawing board. 'Handshake' isn't made for human beings. It's made for silhouettes against a beach-sun, spinning, dancing, holding slimline devices. It's made for lightly-bearded men and floral-dressed women holding on to each other against a backdrop of lit-up skyscrapers (preferably Japanese - the skyscrapers that is), all holding slimline devices. It's for the geographically estranged young couple, separated by their lucrative and exciting jobs in the creative sector but united by technology's abilities to allow them to share instagrams of their meals across continents and add it all to their eco-fashion blogs, all holding slimline devices. It's for the rock audience listening to rock music at the rock show, bouncing as one, glowsticks and ipads held aloft, everyone looking clean and fresh and on-brand, everyone having an unforgettable time, everyone gaining maximum leverage value, everyone holding slimline devices. It's for small photogenic kids to be doing something outdoorsy and memorable with their comfortably well-off parents, on holiday but with an ever-present connectivity, all holding slimline devices. It's for the ITV or Sky TV trailer for their new seasons of drama, moments of tears and sadness and emotional content-provision, every single moment retrievable so long as you're holding slimline devices. It's for the daytime DJ, punching the playlist-B bed and proudly intoning the title with heavy pregnant pauses between each word, sending it out to the world, listeners and players all holding slimline devices. All holding slimline devices. All holding slimline. All holding. All.

UNION J 

CARRY U (Sony/RCA) 
Awww. How sweet. I think Union J have tried to pitch this as a 'hold on'-type anthem, y'know, the kind of 'times are tough and you feel like giving up but I'll be there baby to help you' (fuck me! that just came out of me! Sending it to Biffy Clyro with a pre-invoice for a squillion quid now!) identikit song EVERYONE IN THE FUCKING WORLD seems to be singing right now. The popularity of this 'helping hand' motif is down to no-one actually being willing/able to say what's wrong in any deep or meaningful or crazily meaningless sense (politically/sexually/socially/culturally) let alone proffer solutions beyond a pally 'don't worry mate' vagueness but 'Carry You', by dint of UJ's shit haircuts and general Beds/Berks excess-of-gorm manage to turn the universal into something that sounds entirely local and specific. By the sounds of it, their girlfriend/boyfriend (don't forget Jaymi came out as gay last November and according to Wiki " instantly became a role model for young adults struggling with their own sexuality") isn't going through anything like a genuine life crisis. They've just had a few too many WKDs by the swings up the park and have fallen unconscious in a pool of their own vomit. At such an admittedly vital moment in any young person's life-curve be assured that the Union-J boys are there for you: "When the vision you have gets blurry you don't have to worry I'll be your eyes it's the least I can do/We'll take each step together till you come back to centre/The demons are screaming so loud in your head, you're tired, you're broken, you're cut and you're bruised but nothing's too heavy, just hold on, I'll carry you." Dead sweet. Anyone would be glad for such thoughtful nice young boys to be looking out for their kids, although the addition of the couplet 'I'll hold your hair whilst you stick two fingers down your throat' would have really sealed them into the affections of all parents of teenage girls. Such a shame that - their fireman's-lift skills and shitty parping castrato nonsense notwithstanding - they're pretty much fucked for at least the next 5 years cos they're not One Direction. It's a shitty business.

VAMPIRE WEEKEND 

UNBELIEVERS 

(XL)It's all bullshit except the pain. The pain of hell. The burn from a lighted match increased a million times. Infinite. Now, ya don't fuck around with the infinite. There's no way you do that. The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart... your soul, the spiritual side. And ya know... the worst of the two is the spiritual.
   Bad faith, poor faith, catchy little number keen to steal the radiance and shimmer of music animated by faith and apply it to it's own precarious sense of smirking exploitation, a smirk it can't drop and which consequently leads me to despise this song. Neither agnostic nor atheist enough to be any more compelling than my hipster manoeuvres in buying a tie in Gainesville in 2001 two weeks after 9-11 that featured the nailed wrist of Christ bleeding out the letters 'Jesus Died For Your Sins'. I've never worn it since and I don't need this song cos I have the Staple Singers but 'Unbelievers' in its smarm and self-satisfaction is perfect for English students everywhere.  Happy on the strength of this to condemn VW & their fans to each other. Keep it to yourselves you subhuman scum.

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, moreshamefully 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. 

(Editor's note - I'm often asked by complete acquaintances, can you sum up pop music in 2013. I can't, but I know someone who can, it's that likeable chap Ed Sheeran who lets hope continues to shite I mean light up our lives in 2014. Take it away Ed (Speaking at the Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug premiere) “

“I finished in the studio and I called up my friend,” he told E! News. “He was like, ‘I’m at Jennifer (Aniston)'s and we’re just having a chill hang, so I was like, ‘OK’.

“Then I turned up… and they’re having a proper Thanksgiving meal and I’m there and I think I was wearing my boardshorts or something. It was fun.I ate a lot of food, drank a lot of wine and played a lot of songs.“Courteney (Cox) set up like a PA system and I did a show there. It was very random. One of my all time favourite actors and comedians Sacha Baron Cohen was there, and we ended up jamming and he did like a rap in Arabic and stuff.” ‘Ended up jamming’! ‘He did like a rap in Arabic and stuff’!“It was very funny,” he added.)

HAPPY XMAS READERS!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRITPOP BRITPOP IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY PART 1

January 14, 2014, 4:12 am

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KULA SHAKER

'K' 

(Parlophone Records) 

Melody Maker, 14th September 1996 

I've just been informed by that porridge-faced wanker, Simon Mayo, that Kula Shaker are "the next Oasis". Of course, the obvious questions don't even get asked. Dissent is useless. Oasis are so big, such a huge commercial fact, they've created their own gravitational pull that sucks everyone below 30 along with them. They're as unavoidable as Coca-Cola or bad government, they're the indie Royal Family, a deadly virus to which there is only one cure: REMEMBER THE MUSIC'S CRAP. What Oasis have done is frighten everyone into a sudden fear of dissing "The Kids". To question The Kids is to miss the point, to be snobby, up yer own arse, a killjoy, a misery; Oasis have hardened The Kids consensus into a towering monolith that everyone must work around, accept, try and understand, try and JOIN. They can't all be wrong so the problem is you, right?

   Well, fuck the kids. The kids will put this album at Number One. The kids are wrong. The kids are stupid. And, most importantly, "The Kids" DON'T FUCKING EXIST; the fallacy of consensus is created to pull as many tenners as possible into the slipstream, carried along by momentum and NOTHING ELSE. And this month's high- push-product is Kula Shaker and, Christ all mucking fighty, they're the worst of the lot. There's enough woolly-minded idiocy and crass contrivance in this one record to consign the whole indie-pop scene into the abyss. But at least they're (open yer hymn books) Real Songs  Played On . . . REAL Instruments. It's not even as if this could've been made at any point in the last 30 years. Kula Shaker are so scared of '96 (is it a white thing? I dunno) and want  SO BADLY to be dead and reborn in 1972 it's fucking ALARMING. Crucially, retro-accusations are less important than pointing out how deadly dull the bulk of this LP is, in a way that only true scumcunt hippies can be: "K" makes you feel genuinely ill, queasy, too much cheesecake too soon. It shits itself in fear of the future (1973) and stinks of living death.

   In order, then: Hendrix in hell forced to tutor a disinterred Northside ("Hey Dude"); Cream at their most hideous ("Knight Of The Town"); Zep at their folksy worst ("Temple of the Everlasting Light" - I'm not making these up); fucking barbershop raga that's beneath contempt ("Govinda"); a repellent Madchester autopsy on Steve Marriott ("Smart Dogs"); a three-song burst of acoustic beardiness ("Magic Theatre", "Into The Deep", "Sleeping Jiva"); the two worst singles of '96 ("Tattva", "Grateful When You're Dead"); what you hope is gonna be an old-skool acid track but turns out to be more of the same ("303") and a closing fade-out ("Hollow Man") so stomach- churningly repugnant you feel like strapping suicide bombs to your body and marching straight over to Jo Whiley's house.

   The trouble is it isn't that easy. Turn on MTV, open the NME, turn on the radio, walk into a record shop, and you'll be told that this is the way it is, this is what being you is, that this is a good thing, that we all feel the same way. Fuck that. This isn't the way things are or the way they have to be - this is living in FEAR of being young, this is a bad thing, and we here all AIN'T happy as can be, all good friends and jolly good company.

Don't be a sucker to this lame game. Time to tighten up and party.

(NEIL KULKARNI )

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRITPOP BRITPOP IT'S YOUR BIRTHDAY PART 2

January 14, 2014, 1:12 pm

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SLEEPER 

DIGBETH INSTITUTE, BIRMINGHAM 
Melody Maker 21st October 1995 
INDIE is in Birmingham. Indie goes down a rapturous storm. Indie makes everyone happy tonight. Indie is lovely. Indie is the fleetfooted reduced to leadboot toetap. Indie is every single embarrassing moment of your life returned to like eternal dog's vomit. Indie's emotional limit is the delineation of when you feel a bit shit. Indie succeeds in this. Indie is tight T-shirts and rhythm sections. Indie is everyone wanting to look like one of the Beastie Boys even though the Beastie Boys have stopped doing this.

   Indie doesn't see any point in voting because everything stays the same and comfy. Indie reaps the benefits of democracy and is unwilling to try and preserve it. Indie is communal contentment over mass ecstacy. Indie is an overheard conversation that makes you want to stab in the halfdark.

   Indie is four people getting together wanting to create something sublime and immortal having had their lives swallowed by pop and needing to do the same, surveying the infinite possibilities and deciding three guitars some drums and some good songs will just about do. Indie is the scornful look from people your brain could eclipse and burn a million times over. Indie is every single transcendent spirit of humanity withered and died to the desire to succeed.

   Indie is musical bigotry, political apathy, casual racism. Indie is a popularity contest that hates shallowness. Indie is revenge. Indie is the class weirdo with their own throne in the sixth form centre. Indie is the dual luxury of the glamour of alienation coupled with party invitations. Indie is sauce over sex, ignorance over intuition, Gene over Gravediggaz, Powder over Pram and if you think that's petty you weren't here tonight, this was petty-lite. Indie is utterly wonderful.

   Sleeper are great and I love them as much as you do. WILL THAT DO ARE YOU HAPPY NOW IT'S DOWN IN B&W JUST REREAD THIS SENTENCE FOREVER JUST FOR CHRISSAKES DON'T TALK TO ME. Indie is the only world in which Wener's cretinous Tory! Tory! Tory! blathering would not only be tolerated but applauded for its "bravery". Indie is the only type of pop that hasn't superseded poetry. Indie is happy. Indie is harmless. Indie is in love. Indie is moving with a bounce and a skip tonight and is proof that nothing is more revolting that the sight of the inheritors of the earth enjoying themselves. Indie has won. Indie will always win. Indie is where your assumption of universal complexity crumbles into the stark realisation that some people really are complete cunts. Indie is dead and buried. Indie is alive and well. The crowd roared.

---

THE F.U.N.K SINGLES PAGE JANUARY 2014

January 22, 2014, 3:52 am

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ARMIN VAN BUUREN 
SAVE MY NIGHT 
(Armada)
MARTIN SOLVEIG & LAIDBACK LUKE 
BLOW
(Spinnin) 
Wooh! Electronic Dance Music! Bold futurist electronic soundtrack to hedonistic transgression and polymorphous perversity! Cutting edge sonic onslaught of . . . . hold on, small print. "'Save My Night' is the official music track of Enjoy Heineken Responsibly Campaign 2014. Stay within your limits to experience everything the night has to offer". Wooh! An entirely apposite slogan for the kind of superclubbing human drug-amnesty bins who would enjoy this bolus of blandness although believe me, having been stuck on tour buses with pussyassed nu-metal bands armed with several dozen massive crates of Heineken I can assure you it's actually impossible to enjoy Heineken irresponsibly. You could chug that piss all night and still feel nary a wobble. Generation Larry Lightweight.

CRYSTAL FIGHTERS
LOVE NATURAL
(Zircolo)
Odd, don't have to think of insults anymore. Just find positive reviews for bad music and the job's already done.  "Virgin Music describe the band's output as suitable for "the trans-continental, scene-crossing, cultural explorer". See? Me and my rope are getting increasingly redundant - the fuckers do their hanging for themselves nowadays, Crystal Fighters describe themselves as "a mixture of folk, electro, punk, techno, dubstep and Spanish pop. We are kind of like the sound that would be created if The Velvet Underground and The Gipsy Kings were to travel back in time to the Pyrenees, 1980, and make a record with Skream, Madlib and Luciano on production." And yup, they really are exactly that fucking horrible. 'Love Natural' is the kind of skittering, 'dancey' (i.e upbeat enough for grooveless simpletons to be able to still look as if they're 'dancing' simply by skipping & hopping) hateful hellishness designed for ethnically & age diverse yoghurt adverts, whereby we all end up in the same field saying the same slogan, 'charmed' by the faintly pederastic white-bearded eccentric grandad there to placate the Saga brigade, faintly embarassed for the carefully placed Asian family tucking in to the pots of low-fat joy we're told will fill the void at the heart of the modern malaise. Crystal Fighters you hairy, smelly-looking feckers- you're a hipsters Back To The Planet and you need to take these awful awful things you've made and cram them up your collective anus oh & you know that look? The black tie, white shirt, shirt untucked in look? FUCKING STOP IT NOW. Either tuck your shirt in or take that tie off. NOT BOTH. Until then, for you, the highest insult possible - you look as atrocious as you sound. Yeah. That bad. Makes some changes.

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 

GAVLYN 

GUILTY PLEASURE 

(Organized Threat) 

Find Gavlyn massively intriguing, suggestive, secretive almost with her vocals, in a world particularly in which female MCs are almost pre-ordained to attempt to be as flamboyant, forceful and revealing as possible, Gavlyn is the exact opposite, quizzical, poetic, flows trapped somewhere between internal monologue and external confusion. Someone to keep an eye and ear on for definite (along with the other members of the Organized Threat crew) and this single, a sweet, enigmatic jazzed-out funky flow of unpinnable persona and style keeps you addicted to the last drop.

ODDISSEE 
BONUS FLOW 
(NA) 
From the 'Tangible Dream' mixtape I'm now going to hunt down like the government hunts immigrants this hooked me immediately cos it starts with what I'm sure is a direct sample from Miles Davis 'He Loved Him Madly' i.e that sound Miles makes when he's leaning on his keyboard in sheer hostility. Fantastic opening and then the beat kicks in and the flows start and don't stop and you'd be hard pushed to say this has anything approaching a hook, it's more like the whole thing is one gigantic hook, a meat hook dripping in spinal fluid, ready to hang you from the same heights it's reaching in scarily peaking waves. Insoluble, impossible music.

AVICII 
HEY BROTHER 
(Island)
Who decided 'countryish' vocals and boyscout Swedish house was a good combo? Did we drown Rednex in that well for nothing so long ago, by the light of the flaming torches, clutching our sausages-in-a-bap and our baked potatoes, travelling to the new world? I guess after the grossly obsequious 'Wake Me Up' it would've been foolhardy to expect anything else than moreofthesameuggh from pudgy yet lucrative prick Tim Bergling but 'Hey Brother' is identikit in a rank and lazy way as rank and lazy as the dumb walking latrines who will suck this up. From a man who claims his first influence to make music was Swedish House Maffia and Eric Prydz you'd expect way bett. . . . actually scratch that. As shit as you KNOW it's gonna be, and pretty much everywhere and inavoidable for the next 6 months. Be safe. Stay home. Hate Avicii

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 

JEHST 

ENGLAND (BOOT REMIX)  (YNR) 

Love the 'Made In England' sample near the beginning and it's entirely right - like Alan Clarke's finest work this startles you with the realism and the hallucinatory logic, the simultaneous grasping of the gritty and ectoplasmic. Jehst previews his bound-to-be-stunning remix album 'Dragon Of An Ordinary Family' with this simply astonishing slab of aggravation courtesy of Zygote & the ever-dependable Boot crew. Heavy as fuck beats, mentalist doom in the backdrop, lyrics as harsh and hellacious and utterly compelling as anything J has ever spat.Full of curious dichotomies, not least the fact that a piece of music so massively critical of this bloodstained nation can make you strangely proud of coming from somewhere that could produce such wonderfully ambiguous, yet murderously direct, art. A call to admit guilt, an absolutely fucking essential soundtrack to right here right now THIS is the sound of the UK in 2014 and don't let anyone tell you any different. From the other side of the tracks, from where we all live, a track massive mighty and menacing enough to righteously destroy any other music that'd dare to step in its path. Go get.


ELIZA AND THE BEAR 
IT GETS COLD 
(Mi Familia Music)
Those splitters at the Guardian say "file next to Arcade Fire, Lumineers . . . " & yeah you do that. File them there. That's perfect. That's just where they fit. Right in the middle. The shitty filling of shit in a shitbread sandwich. You know who I blame for an awful lot of that jaunty joyful 'don't worry white American middle class you're fine just get on with being your wonderful selves' music? The fucking Flaming Lips, a band I loved until they stopped being hard (post-Clouds), but who now seem to be avatars and an evergreen inspiration for a bunch of 'euphoric' yet 'anxious' spindly wankers boring indie rock to death in a bouncy slurried wave of handclaps and painfully mannered 'jauntiness'. Fucking Hootenanny music. Seriously, take a look at the video for the (zzzzzzzz) 'anthemic'"It Get's Cold" and see if you can get 20 seconds into it without thinking 'NONE OF THESE TURDMEN CREATURES SHOULD HAVE BEEN ALLOWED TO GET ANYWHERE NEAR MUSIC MAKING DEVICES'. If you can you're a better man than me Gunga Din - in every sense that's truly important, such as haircuts and attitude, hateful music in every single way.

JAMAILL BUFFORD
OH MY GOD, FOREVER (Mello Music Group) 
The breath sucked out of you once every two seconds, rasped back in your face like Rakim's blow of death, the sound of digital production properly exploring its inherent errors and overloads, the moments when the the bitrates and bitdepths get ugly, when even Task Manager won't help you. Jamaill sounds suitably breathless in this wreckage, little pockets of wah-wah and heavily distorted keyboards the only flotsam you can cling to in the whirlpool. Hittin' hard like an asteroid belt to the backside.

HARDWELL FT. MATTHEW KOMA 
DARE YOU 
(Revealed Recording) 
Everything that's wrong and this is how pop works these days. Become an internationally successful DJ. Piece of piss now. Requires no understanding or love of music, just a willingness to shovel shit at as many people as possible and deliver a ramped-up build and maximally digi-loud thump every five minutes. Then wait awhile, coin it in, play some of the right parties, live behind ropes in a permanent VIP area, soak up every single corporate sponsorship opportunity you can, be a godsend to the advertising industry. Wait, keep playing live, keep coining it in. Find a singer-songwriter, preferably one who's able to do the 'anthemic', the Coldplay-like, the chords that are open and undefinitive, over which their voice can be revoltingly definitive and display its limberness in callesthenic bliss. Put your fucking horrible music under the singer-songwriter's horrible music, hopefully matching the builds and blueprints, verse tension, chorus release, lyrics kept at a meaningless pitch of self-improving meme-like meaninglessness. Keep going. Coin it in. Floss with the harvested hair of dead orphans. I hate this record so much it burns a hole in my heart. Like the Avicii, destined to shitscar the skidpan of your memory whether you like it or not. Tantamount to adult-abuse I reckon.

BILL NEXT & PARO ft. HOZAY 

VILLAINS 
(Bandcamp) 

My favourite highlight from Bill Next & Paro's superb 'Weedmasons EP' - a great energetic set as you'd expect from anyone involved in Bristol's awesome Split Prophets camp, everyone involved at the top of their game lyrically and musically, 'Villains' a beautifully poised mix of gorgeous crispy bits (the arabic sax, the indian flute) sprinkled with teasing sparingness over a brilliantly two-note full fat drone-funk undertow. Other worldly here in this world. Lap it up. 

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 

KATY B 

CRYING FOR NO REASON (Ammunition)

If a ballad's gonna get me it's got to be sung by someone who you sense knows pain, and it's got to be dark dark dark dark dark. "I pushed all my problems to the back of my mind/ Then they surfaced in my dreams". A grower most definitely, it's success not down to Fraser T. Smith's somewhat over-fussy production but down to nothing but KB's performance, believable, involving, emotional, clear, devastating, convincing. The last minute pulls you back to hear it again, about burning alive, the numbness and the agony, everything you want in a pop song. Best thing of its kind since Rihanna's 'Stay'. 

ELYAR FOX 
DO IT ALL OVER AGAIN 
(Sony Music) 
Everything that's wrong and this is how pop works these days, about whether you can build yourself until your rise becomes an economic & cultural inevitability. Hats off to London-based shaved weasel Elyar Fox for having so many twitter followers and youtube hits - he's showed the entrepeunerial spirit and business nous that has made Sony/Polydor and GlobalTalent see him as a no-risk bankable investment. Consequently his records don't really matter - or rather, have nothing riding on them cos he now simply won't be allowed to fail. Oh of course, there have always been popstars like this, some of them have been great  but right now I'm worried about a media and music world in which pushiness is the sole criteria for entry, self-promotional skills and class anonymity/slipperiness/evasion/'mobility' all that you need in order to drink deep from the golden fame shower. No accident that 'Do It All Over Again' sounds like Robbie Williams, it's in one ear out the other without touching any single part of your body or brain or booty, it's not fizzy enough to repeat on you, not enough tartrazine to jack you up, just a small dull weak caffeine buzz you piss out before it's even taken hold. Not for me really, for little boys and girls and elderly gentlemen that want to fuck him. Good luck Elyar. You don't need any, you're in the holding bay, waiting to get shipped. Don't forget to thank your consumers. They've made you the shell you are today.

ROC MARCIANO
TRYING TO COME UP 
(Man Bites Dog) 
There's probably better moments offa 'Merci Beaucoup' but there's just something sublime about the FEEL of this, the rolling beat that stops and starts, the clean pristine bass & guitar that recall nothing except mid-80s Meat Puppets and the second side of 'Hairway To Steven', the way Roc & Boldy James' voices somehow manage to be both nano-second attendant to the groove but also loose as all get out. I could listen to this forever.

NEWTON FAULKNER 
INDECISIVE
(Blue Sky Music) 
Trying to sound a bit Gotye-ish. Ends up, as usual with this ugly fuckadabast, making you feel like you've been watching Goatse for too long. V. annoyed he uses a Spongebob ukelele in the video, I've got one of those that I'm gonna have to burn now. A repulsive song from a repulsive singer who puts me off eating and surviving much into 2014.

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 

PRIMITIVE MAN/XAPHAN

TIES THAT BIND AND SEVER/COLD SURGE 

(Init Records)  

Well now the thing that draws me hither is that terrifying thing over thither, hunkered down in the bushes, breathing, watching you, it's coarse wiry black hairs rising and falling with its breath, it's snout moist yet caked with something unpleasant, Primitive Man's 'Scorn' LP from 2013. Keep an eye on it, don't let it jump you without your willing surrender,  it's one of the blackest most ear-razing slabs of molten heaviosity that ever did engulf you in the glory of bad times since Celtic Frost's 'Monotheist' - genuinely eerily unsettlingly evil & bewitching in a way that keeps you coming back - and thus here I am, grail in trembling hand, needing to sup at their debilitating brew again, here belched forth in the form of a split 7" with Xaphan. The Denverite demons are even harsher here than on that album, the beats a blur and then so slow it's like a fevered coma, a diseased delirium, as ever their moments of murderous hulking sloth beautifully slathered in perfectly unhinged yet loosely sculpted noise and feedback, that fucking bass like an ogre's fist from the earth, pulling you under. Fucking fantastic neighbour-aggravating bliss. Xaphan are just slightly slicker sounding but are still a very very very heavy thing indeed, and I've heard alot of heavy things. Thing is, though this music would reject such conjecture utterly this stuff, this sound is inherently inspirational & political because of the times we're in. In times of enforced jollity and mass cruelty records like this, played loud enough, are true pipebombs in the face of smug contentment and bourgouise apathy. Arm yourself & go clean the streets. I doff my skull to all involved.

THE ORWELLS 
DIRTY SHEETS
(iTunes) 
Shame on the estate of George Orwell for not pursuing these necrophiles through the courts and demanding their imprisonment - this is appalling retro-rock from an utterly irredeemable Chicago five piece, something a bit 'underground' for Arctic Monkeys fans, the living breathing dying sound of NME-sanctioned rawk. The video's an unreconstitutedly reactionary doozie too - get this -  in it, a lady comes on, and takes her clothes off. Yes! Takes her clothes off! Strips off! A lady! She nearly gets bare! It's mint! A bare lady! You can see her bosoms! Guitar music for guitarists. I'll stick with my Ufomammut thanks.

WILL I.AM Ft. MILEY CYRUS, WIZ KHALIFA, FRENCH MONTANA & DJ MUSTARD 
FEELIN' MYSELF 
(will.i.am Music Group)
What? You still here? I mean, seriously guys, LEAVE the club now. No-one wants to see you "feelin'" yourself in there no more. It's over. Yeah yeah, shots, bottles, weed, shots, bottles, lines, fuck me, do you have any idea how much your breath stinks? GO HOME. There's no one here no more. The bar staff are waiting for you to leave, they've already made a few suggestive cycles with the binbags, why aren't you taking the hint? Everyone's at home now. And you're looking groggy, rough, a body destined to have circles drawn around parts of it, those parts zoomed in on, first 20 pages of every Sunday supplement, what were you thinking?You're showing off to each other and talking to that mirror again. And the mirror's talking back at you but you're so fucked up you're mishearing it. It ain't saying 'YOU THE SHIT YOU THE SHIT YOU THE SHIT' as you think and reaffirm here. It's saying 'YOU'RE SHIT YOU'RE SHIT YOU'RE SHIT'. Listen to it. Lick the side of your black Amex again & listen to what the looking-glass is saying to you. You need to go home. I know your homes are just other nightclubs, open til dawn, open houses for at root you're lonely. But you might want to see, when your body enters the space you've earned, if you are anything at all anymore. Whether if we pop those buttons and strip you down whether there's anything inside at all. All that clubbing may well have hollowed you out. All that partying may well have turned you numb. Like a child star. Like a tyrant. Like a logo. Enn terrrr tainn errrs. Deeply, deeply, boring.

JAMES BLUNT 
HEART TO HEART 
(Warners) 

'Bonfire heart'? Yes, indeed, KALI MAAAA

Well, off course James Blunt 'owned' Twitter in 2013. Twitter is standing in a kitchen at a house party waiting for everyone to stop shouting, the shrillness olympics & anyone who can string a half-sentence together immediately appears like an Aristotle amid so many arseholes. Twitter is not a conversation, Twitter is an endless round in 'Mock The Week', a place to show off your fitness for purpose, perhaps the only environment in which a smug fuck like Blunt can appear self-deprecating and witty, and a place where a constant forgetting can go on about the fact that We need to hunt the upper classes down and feed them to starving dogs, not listen to their shitty whiney pissawful music, k'sake. 'Heart To Heart' unfortunately features no mention of Max or Moider, just the same parp phutting out of that same face you always just want to strip chunks off with a welding iron, but the emetic video does feature a sublime moment of product placement that points the way to the present and future of planet pop's PR/biz/creativemarketing neo-nexus - scanning the railway platform he's on he holds aloft, hold on, is it? Yes it is! A Sony Experia! Look! Shiny! Slimline! New! Available at all good branches of Rumbelows! How much did this earn you Blunt you slaggy, pasty, greedy, posho-faced wanker?

"God I wish you'd trod on a landmine in Kosovo. Or even better, broken your fucking head skiing" my libellous, evil self said yesterday. Sensible real me says - next time you think of making music Blunt ffs don't you wretched destroyer of all that is good, you chortling chummy enemy of humanity. Stay at home being a smart-arse. Twitter suits you down to the ground. 

OPTIV & BTK 
ZERO TOLERANCE 
(Despatch) 
Kinda cons you with the lushness at first, even though the heavyweight beats make you guess that when the drop comes it'll be immense. Fantastic rippling fuzz-riffs slathered over the kick, occassionally matched perfectly with each blastbeat like yr listening to fucking Sepultura. The trancey mid-section might also have you fearing a typical drop but when it comes it's satisfying in an almost glam-rock way, solid chrome girders of sound dropping on your head with no mercy. Until the new Ulterior Motive album this'll do nicely.

SINGLE OF THE MONTH 

RAVEN FELIX 

GIRL 
iTUNES 

Most compelling thing about this is Ill Blu's production, a lovely gurning lo-end heavy rumble that sounds fantastic jacked as loud as you can get it. Felix can rap, not THAT well, but better, funnier, sharper than the Azaleas and Hazes planning to bore us to tears in '14, and has a nice line in bratty valley-girl aggravation that suits the bumptious undertow beautifully, lyrics of a chatty awkwardness and natural humour that win you over entirely even as most of America would consider her their worse nightmare. There's a nice grit here when she says 'bitch',  a robo-unreality to her voice when afflicted with effects & 'Girl' is the best thing she's done since last year's 'Work Drink F*** Sleep'. Only 17 and a voice to watch but in the mean time PUMP THAT BASS.

SHAKIRA ft. RIHANNA 

CAN'T REMEMBER TO FORGET YOU 
(Epic)
Hate the chorus - those drums so redolent of Kings Of Leon's abysmally definitive 'Use Somebody', love the reggae-flecked funk on the verse (and RiRi's voice has a fierceness it aint had in a while) but really wanted sooooo much better from this (as disappointing as the Britney album after 'Work Bitch') - then I spy the credits. Non-entity Swedish balladeer Erik Hassle and that wanker Kid Harpoon (Florence & The Machine collaborateur) are responsible for 'Can't Remember To Forget You' and once you know that it seeps into your apprehensions ruinously. Hope the Shak I love gets the hell away from these people for the bulk of her next album or she's off my Xmas card list forever.

MINDSCAPE 
RAT PACK 
(Eat Brain)
So simple, yet so effective, 4 fletchettes of ferocity from Hungarian d'n'b demon Mindscape, the bass always on a trajectory downwards, always pushing at the edge of the presets into pure savagery. As bled white, cold and caucasian as d''n'b gets but all the more compellingly bruising for it. Front 242 style. Ist gut.

PARANOM & PURPOSE 
MICROPHONE PHENOMENAL 
(Ill Adrenaline) 
The center of this is the bass, the perfectly weighted beat, the refracted rhodes and diffracted drone of the guitar. It's the peripheries, the scratches that rotate around the edges of the mix that make this more than just polite pulchritude, pushes things into the vein with the warm buzz of the finest Methohexital, sinks into the addictive corners of your lobes. Beautiful, utterly UNgroundbreaking stuff for home, car, head and heart.

NEON JUNGLE 
BRAVEHEART 
(Sony) 
Quite liked 'Trouble' but immediately like this even more thanks to the fairly brutal sound of the verses, nice crackly harsh dubstep bound to sound fkn awesome over big assed-speakers, the vocals similarly distorted and ugly and compelling. Whole thing fucks up with the build to the chorus and the chorus itself, far too houseyhousey build-n-blast Guetta-style tedious to snag this auld joyless grouch even if the producer shows an admirable desire to slice'n'dice the vocals as much as possible. One of the worse raps I've ever heard since I last accidentally mistuned to a white radio station slopped in the middle (out of desperation one senses) nearly damn well sabotages the whole thing but that big phat verse comes back near the end for a tantalisingly short half a minute, not long enough, clearly designed to drive you back to the beginining again. Nuts to that,  I'm stealing it, opening it in Audacity and looping that bastard for half an hour. Would've been way better without Neon Jungle's involvement to be honest.

MISANTHROP 
GREED OF GAIN EP 
(NeoSignal) 
Not sure what the figgetyfuck you'd call this (I'm christening it DRUBstep) but absolutely dominating my headspace, homespace and crawlspace at the moment. 'Deadlock' operates at the high end of 170bpm but drags you down like dub thanks to the gorgeous smears of detuned synth that sit right in the middle of it, grinning at you with pure malevolence. The title track starts off with some fantastic 80s Carpenter-esque soundtrack shenanigans before unleashing a turbid tsunami of fuzzed-out neurofunk on yr ass, 'System Crash' similarly explores 80s soundtrack world but the highlight here has to be 'Catch 22'. As harsh and dark as something offa Houndstooth but packed full of fantastic little breakbeat rotations, sudden pockets of doom and decay and a riff part Mick Ronson, part Dillinja, part Chrome. Together with those new Loadstar rerubs on Ram, some d'n'b worth digging out.

SLEAZE & REKLEWS Ft. RES & DJ RASP 
HEADS WILL KNOW 
(Greasy Vinyl Records) 
Oh god man, I  love the beat on this. No, I fucking love the bass attached to the beat on this. No, I fucking totally love the noises attached to the bass attached to the beat on this. No, I fucking totally and utterly love the rhyming intterupted by the noises attached to the bass attached to the beat on this. A simple construction but revealing infinite complexity with every rotation and when it all breaks down to the rhythm section near the end, holy hell just turn up the speakers until all becomes dust. Superb stuff from a soon-come debut album ('An Album Called The Sun') that promises to be one of 2014's most essential. 

THE VAMPS 
WILD HEART 

(Virgin/EMI) 

I guess there is a gap for a new McFly/Busted 1-D-with-instruments boyband, and I happened to not totally object to the Vamps 'Can We Dance' cos I had no idea what they looked like and it made the schoolrun go quicker. Now I've seen the video for 'Wild Heart' I'm filled with altogether more hostile, confused opinions. I mean . . . they're all 17-19 but they seriously look about TWELVE - far too young to be allowed out in the desert, far too young to even know what the hell they're singing about - for me I suspect and hope this song, an innoffensive slice of jangly pop, is transitional. There are hints in the harmonies and melodies and bright glassy blue eyes here that if they DITCHED the 'real instrumentation' and surrendered to a purely Abba-esque studio-based  pop impulse they could be way more interesting in the future. Somebody kidnap them and feed them to Robyn please. See you in Spring. 

HELLO METAL MY OLD FRIEND

February 4, 2014, 2:25 am

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Plumbing The Depths For Spring - Three Bolts From The Black 

T'other night, perhaps in a paroxysm of the usual loathing looking at the NME, I compiled on FB & Twitter a long list of videos that for me summed up the year 1994. 20 years since n all that. Someone popped up saying 'You had a great 94!'. I could only respond honestly (praps why I should stay off FB etc) by saying 'no, it was a fucking horrible year, just like every year before and since. Music never helps, ever'. At first I was surprised by my sudden moodiness, but looking back and taking stock, music genuinely has never really helped in any way and if I was stupid enough to ever think it did I was indulging the worst most self-piteous bit of myself. I would've been better off, my whole life, NOT conning myself with its lies. The 'comfort' music offered was nothing but harmful, for it kept me alive, when clearly better choices could and should have been made along time ago, before it was too late, before I was stupid enough to link my life with others too young, too hopeful to understand why I should not be here, why I should not be. Such a dumb move, sending roots downwards, that will hurt when severed. Condemns you and your offspring to this horrific sentience. Perpetuates the horror that is wakefulness. Interrupts the blissful eternity that could be non-existence, the endless joy that surely unlife is, seeing as life is such a set up for geologically brief bursts of transitory pain. Music cons you with the worse con, that a life can amount to something worth living, that our species, & the speck of eternity you are,  should not self immolate. I'm not blaming music, it can't help being persuasive, loveable, pleasurable, political, philosophical, it comes from people and people have conned me too. Hey, I'm still here. But music is the one human endeavour, the one agglomeration of human thought, that 'sustained' me, and for that I can never forgive it, for that I curse it harder than my lungs can push the words out, or my teeth can grind them down. It's disturbing that art can lend structure or purpose to the only life you have. The only life you have and you waste it chasing this racket, this sham, this act. This act that has conned its protaganists, made them your heroes, and has left you wishing you'd never been born. Inevitable that as ever when lashing myself with such intransigent insolubles, I return to metal. Music shorn of hope. The only type of rock I really care about anymore. Guitars with a purpose, played with utter disgust, determined to sicken, destroy and be destroyed. These three are scalding me at the moment.  


I missed Primitive Man's 'Scorn' last year when it came out because it was at a time when I didn't want music, couldn't focus on anything bar what was happening around me. Right now, I want nothing else other than its molten depths. This is an awful racket with no sham, what it offers is a mirror so clear, a very metal turning of reality inside out to reveal the grim innards, the true depths we can reach when apprehending our shallowness. Pulls at your cells like a witnessed tragedy. It was made by 3 Denverites who have made other things too. When you click on 'lyrics' on that bandcamp page it says, charmingly, 'no-one is listening. no one fucking cares'. What 'Scorn' does is brave and beautiful and baleful in the extreme. It kicks off like a still-twitching corpse with the 11 minute title track and what you can immediately sense is how all the potential pitfalls and prattishness of doom-sludge have been neatly and totally circumvented by PM's method and murderous intent - the guitars here, though supremely distorted and fucked up, are alive with detail, snap their scaly fingers right to the edge of the sound, the riffs constructed with a truly visual sense of theater, a documentarian's eye for the rotations and monomanias of an end-of-tether mind. The way the sound hangs over the ultra slo-mo mid-section in coruscating waves of napalm-like feedback is just gorgeous - gratifyingly though none of this sonic sculpture ever sounds like anything of the sort, never sounds like it was designed to be beautiful, only an instinctive emanation from the soul of 3 very fucked up very pissed off people. The sudden tempo shift to raging thrash sees no let up in the low-end (another problem with so much of this music - just not bassy enough), then a coda of exquisite Obituary/BitchMagnet/Sabbath-style tritonic blues drives the ingots home into your eyeballs, slower, slower still, to a crawl, to a coma, till you genuinely, truly see Hell. A fiery lake of molten despair, a subterranean sun, roundabout 10bpm, you see it, a black hole beneath you within which all light is extinguished. You see it. And with your back to it, you close your eyes, tilt backwards, surrender yourselves to the abyssal depths. One of the most USEFUL pieces of music I've heard in months.

Primitive Man, being monstrously heavy, yesterday

 'Rags' which follows could almost be seen as some kind of blessed relief - it reveals PM's lineage as being some distance from the usual death/grind/sludge/doom suspects, far closer in anti-melody and feel to your Codeines and your BitchMags, even if the ravaged vocals always pull it back to that Celtic Frost 'Monotheist' feel you find so addictive. The noise interludes that punctuate 'Scorn's lavaflow into your ear canal are beautiful, very Cabaret Voltaire/Throbbing Gristle - the first one you hear, 'I Can't Forget' sounds like that bullshit-but-effective 'Siberian Sounds Of Hell' recording that was knocking round the netherworld of the web a few years ago, albeit transformed into a strange kind of muzak for the underground lab in 'Day Of The Dead'. 'Antietam', after the title track, is the other clear highlight here, something intractably unshakeable about the vocal, as if the guy can't quite scrape enough layers of skin off himself, the song lashing down a fast, insanely jagged, totally unique rhythm to rock thus far, then slowing it down, revealing with every torpid repetition the increasingly ugly inner workings, the pulsing bloated veins and wreckage-laden dying fibres of a body and mind falling apart, ending on a monstrous melange of space-rock racket and World Domination Enterprise-worthy heaviosity, as ever impeded to a brutally Sisyphian death march, last rites, last gasp music. 'Black Smoke' is like the first trippy seconds of Monster Magnet's 'Spine Of God' taken to a horrifically new vaporised extreme, a bong passed around the charnel-house, 'Stretched Thin' is as close to conventional metal as Primitive Man get, even then the time-sig fuckery and deeply unsettling sense of naturalism and dissatisfaction PM conjure when it bleeds into the stunning 'Astral Sleep' are far too human, far too effecting, rawly empathetic, to safely file away or forget about. That's the thing throughout 'Scorn', there's something extra going on here, beyond what occured in its recording, some extra vibe of planet-sized hostility and room-sized self-loathing that's impossible to put your finger on but that screams unmistakeably from every darkly deliquescent moment. By the time you're through to 'Lifetime' you've stopped thinking about 'Scorn' as music altogether - it's not composed of chords or rhythms or predictable shapes, rather it comes across as a fully formed explosion of bile and blood, a totally natural emanation from 3 souls in exquisitely tormented congress. Frightened as it is frightening, grief-striken for itself. The sublimely dubbed-out lo-fi Penderecki of 'Innard$' sees us into the closing attack of 'I Am Above You' with Primitive Man finally turning, noticing you have been watching them, appalled at your absorption, hands closing round your neck and ankles, pulling you down for the final grim dance of death, a beautiful dance, one you succumb to willingly. And then you go on with your day utterly changed. Knowing that you've heard something you'd be wise not to return to too soon, but that you'll have to return to eventually. I've found it becomes a weekly, then a daily thing, needing a hit of this. I cannot for the life of me imagine anything better was done with guitars in 2013. I recommend 'Scorn' absolutely unreservedly.


    Also on Relapse and also a fearsomely heavy masterpiece (although it hasn't got under my skin QUITE as much as 'Scorn' has) is the new album from Chicago 'noise-nihilists' INDIAN titled 'From All Purity'. Their 2008 Relapse debut 'Guiltless' hinted that something special was going on here but I say dive straight into the torsioned torture of opener 'Rape' and remain prostrate for 'Purity's duration. Augmenting their four-piece line-up (always loved the fact that they have a member, Sean Patton, credited only as 'Noise') with some distressing electronics from Bloodyminded major-domo Mark Solotroff and a truly inspired production from Chi-town genius Sanford Parker the sheer livid energy of what Indian lay down here strips the flesh from your skull and sucks the goo from your eyeballs and what the fuck, then shits both down your bleeding neck SHIT FUCK PISS CUNT y'see? Y'unnerstand? I'm reminded of Ulver in the vocals, Neurosis in the grooves and heaviosity, but there's something so perfectly realised by Parker here, a sky-high space above, but an intimacy to its attack that still impacts on your body like having girders fired at you by Galaktus - whatever feedback arcs over 'Rape' it seems to be transduced into pure electricity, fizzes like synapses at burnout, the skewered vocals and the medieval drums all that remain once all else dissappears over the edge of the world.The slow gothic grind of 'The Impetus Bleeds' is hovered over by whorls of pure sonic abstraction, even as the bass nails your face to the floor - it's that mix of the bludgeoningly inavoidable and massively suggestive that makes 'FAP' (heh) such a cherishable slab of malevolence. Way more obviously metal than 'Scorn', 'From All Purity' also seals my affections with the startling stuck-in-the-mud groove of 'Rhetoric Of No' and the sheer unholy frightmare of 'Clarity', 5 minutes of bracingly atonal feedback and noise over which a man appears to scream himself out through his own anus. Forcefeed it to friends and enemies alike all Spring.


 
Oh and finally, this bruising blissful beauty came into my life a few days ago, fucked up that day, and every day since. It's by a Portland, Oregon based duo called Towers (just drums and bass) and is an entirely compelling, supremely ear-razing, utterly addictive arsequake of doom that sounds less and less like metal the more you hear it, more like something Wobble/Levene/Atkins would be massively proud of. The entirely analog nature of Towers' recording set-up tells massively, there's a warmth to this wastefulness that lends it the space of Saqquara Dogs, the surge and rhythmic intensity of This Heat or prime Unsane or Buttholes, ugly-pretty vocals splayed queasily through what available space there is, the whole thing collapsing into a rumble of factory drone before krautrocking itself back into a fantastic counter-intuitive DMT-stoner vibe for the fade. Just fucking awesome. For fans of Uffomammut and also human beings as well. See, music can help, especially when it leaves you helpless, music can make you hope, especially when it's utterly hopeless. Bar a new Perfect Pussy demo I see no reason to listen to any guitar music that isn't at this precise noisy, utterly evil end of things this year. Anything less is to imply you're happy with the world and fuck that. In times like this hooks are the last thing we need. We need stuff that can seal OUT the world, and seal us IN on thinking about our revenge. Soon come. Soon come.

FIVE HOURS MY BRAIN HURTS A LOT

February 7, 2014, 6:02 am

≫ Next: MY POMPOMS ARE TOO DROOPY: some thoughts on Alex Turner, the music press, and moving on.

≪ Previous: HELLO METAL MY OLD FRIEND

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Neil Kulkarni's Spare Hours Volume 1: Let's Start What We Have Come Into The Room To Do by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

Neil Kulkarni's Spare Hours Volume II: Don't Know Why I Have To Work by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

NEIL KULKARNI'S SPARE HOURS VOLUME THREE - HE'S BREATHING LIKE A FURNACE by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

Neil Kulkarni's Spare Hours Volume IV: Go There Every Night Just To Hear The Beat by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

Neil Kulkarni's Spare Hours Volume 5 - Sleep Close And Fast by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

MY POMPOMS ARE TOO DROOPY: some thoughts on Alex Turner, the music press, and moving on.

February 24, 2014, 4:30 am

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Nice one Alex

Is this the place to be? What am I doing here? Hey, I'm not glad, no triumph here,  it's always sad to lose an enemy. You are way more defined by what you don't like than what you do. Don't make me paranoid. I know I'm not writing into a mirror, ever. I'm writing for you. 
   Avoid the mirror mostly these days. Look miserable mostly. Problem at the moment is that I can't plaster on the fake smile needed to meaningfully contribute to the media anymore. I can't pretend that things are ok here, that something as ephemeral and essential as a record, isn't connected with everything else, the shitmare of life under this govt., I can't write about music unless it's in terms of how it offers furious escape, or horrified reflection, unless the music or the writing about it, lets something out, taps the bile, releases things a little because there's a determination, whether in attack or retreat, to its intent. Music that could only be made now is all that interests me. That eliminates alot. In the case of rock, it eliminates all that isn't noisy. All I listen guitarwise is metal, doom, sludge, female punk, angry fukkers y'know? Writing about anything else while we're being torn apart on all fronts just seems wrong somehow, seems like just adding to the ads, rah-rahing for shitheads and the shit art they push our way. It's tough pretending. It's tough writing with the mindless 'hey, things are ok here's some more art to consume' chipperness mandatory to being allowed to write at the moment. Summoning a smile you can't fake, a smile you can't afford not to have anymore. Especially when the worse music has that same chipperness: heard the guitarist from Peace on 5Live a few Sundays ago saying the way music is political now is 'less about messages, and more about bringing people together to have a good time' (We're the young generation, and we've got nothing to say). See those blinkers are itchy. No matter how much +ve botox I inject into my face my grin keeps cracking. I've always attempted to write not as if 'music is my whole life', but according to how music fits in with life. Because for fans, that's how it works, it's only the marketeers and money-men who want to push the idea that 'music can be your whole life', just as the same kind of demoniac wankers wished to push the idea that football fans are obsessional, insanely dedicated to the point where they don't mind being exploited at every turn. At the moment, criticism is encouraged to live in a bubble, a sententious place where theory is allowed but politics isn't, the wittering/chortling debate of fanboys about ratings and filing strategies. Critique needs to be weaponised in times like these. Needs to point out how the fuck all this formatted compressed data called pop might actually help us survive, rather than just forget the facts of our demise and listicle our brains into oblivion. I can't cheerlead no more. My pompoms are too droopy. 
   Thus, award ceremonies necessitate a split in my house. The missus watches them, I can't abide them, we go our separate ways, I ask for the goss/fashion-critique at the end. Wednesday night and the downstairs stillnesss is shattered. "NEEEEIIIILLLLLL" she shouts down the stairs. Getting v. bored of Arsenal v. Bayern, I mute it and holler back "WHAAAAT?". "PRINCE IS ON THE BRITS. PRINCE IS ON THE BRITS". 

   At infa-red speed I change over and mahgawd there he is, that little smile playing over his lips which always makes it worth it, announcing an award. Kind of worth it, cos of course, you get sucke/re/d in to the vortex of shite, the Mastercarded maelstrom of manure. It was best UK female, Ellie 'The Sound Of Piss" Goulding winning and not Laura Mvula. And James "Don't Deny This Wankstain The Oxygen Of Publicity, Just Deny Him Normal Oxygen Thanks" Corden getting a selfie with Prince. All I need to know. Back with a grunt and a growl and a hasty buttonpush to the safe sanctuary of Storage Hunters. I fucking love Storage Hunters. 

[I had a dream t'other night whereby they open up a locker and it's ALL MY SHIT in there. T-Money, Jessie and Brandon'n'Laurie cast their eyes around, muttering 'buncha junk' but team up and decide to force Poppa Bear high. As Poppa threw my crap around, lamenting how far in the hole he was: "I took a big hit on this one man - I just hope I can make SOME profit on the next bin" I woke, in a cold-sweat, strangely, lastingly, excited.)

Anyhoo, turns out I did wrong to comittedly Live Ignore the Brits this year. I missed out on a turning point, a significant moment in pop history. Don't just take my word for it. Diggit the EDITOR of the NME thinks so too. THE EDITOR. A tastemaker. An influential voice, no lickspittle, intern or slave-waged mere contributor, THE EDITOR. The Editor's the one responsible for what hits the stands every week, yeah? Motherfucker gots to KNOW. 

"Alex Turner's Brits acceptance speech was everything that rock'n'roll is meant to be: unpredictable, dumb, funny, exciting and attention-grabbing. But it was so much more than that. It was a call to arms."

Holy shit. This I have to watch. Youtube it. Thirty seven frenzied, then bored, then faintly embarrassed seconds later, I have. Wow. A call to arms indeed. Shit, funkless Mastercard-validated trad-rock will never die. What a 'legend'. Check the piece again thinking like all music-press readers always do -  WAS HE EVEN AT THE SAME GIG? 

"As Turner stood at the lectern in the centre of the O2 and delivered his sermon in front of a worldwide audience of millions, declaring that rock’n’roll “will never die. And there’s nothing that you can do about it,” he drew a line in the sand right there and then, asking every single person watching which side of it they were standing." 

Small point, and its sad that style or its lack becomes a small point, but my god that is one of the most inept, ungainly sentences I think I've ever read. Wider point, I know where I stand on that divide. I'm over here, as far the fuck away as I can get to be honest. It's a smart move by Williams, gets the boys back in the barracks. It's smartly put as well, vague as Turner's speech, vague enough to not matter to most, pull in those indie-loyal readers doubting the staff's solidarity with their own bigotry and snobbery. Last round of ABCs weren't great for anyone,as if it matters. As if anything matters. I feel foolish even engaging with this as a bit of text. Doesn't matter how bad it is, the brand's fine. It's on NME.COM for chrissakes, what does anyone expect from that? The brand's fine. Big traffic stats & it's not about words, or rather, words really don't matter anymore, the brand's fine. The ABCs are down? Doesn't matter. Ad revenues up. Print ad revenues up 49%. Digital ad revenues up 72%. The words . . . who cares? The brand's fine. All about subscriptions and multiple-platform identities now, look at Rolling Stone's poxy newstand sales. The brand's fine. The more a magazine's interests can be spread out like that, further than print and out into the endless binary diffusions of the interweb's retinal stimulation & narcosis, the more mere words are of no importance. People still buy vinyl. People will still buy print mags. The fiction, the 'heritage',  remains intact. A heritage partly built on the kind of writing the NME wouldn't allow, wouldn't think of anymore but what the hey, the brand's fine. This editorial could've read 'Alex Turner jagaroona fizzlefuck Brits cliha;osughdsiguhd Arctic Monkeys sgiuahdsogi uahsdf indie'' and it'd fulfill pretty much the same function as all NME copy. Keeps SEO optimizers happy, fills space, 'entertains' (because we say so) and informs (because we say so) the brand's fine (because we say so). What's sadder, the black/white ratios of the covers, or the fact I counted? Whether the writing, and the music, could only come from NOW, or the fact anyone would even care about such an old-fashioned concept as the future anymore? Ad-revenues up. "72% YoY". 3 million unique visitors a year. The brand's fine.
   So long as the NME continues to make this kind of 'commercial sense', the writing can be as specious as you like, which handily coincides with r'n'r and its critique being taken over by the witterers and flitterers. Rock'n'roll, and writing about it, is now a hobby for everyone involved, Turner's speech coming off like someone proud to defend his minority interest, his proudly arcane and, to his perception, much-maligned trivial pursuit. As a strategy, for the NME to focus on that niche, to stop trying to write about pop and just become a major-label indie-rock weekly - I'd say that's the smart way to go, just as I recall  a few years ago saying the Tories (post-Howard/Hague/IDS) just needed someone slicker to sell a lurch to the right to a receptive Great British Public. If the NME were smart they'd listen to what readership they have left, and eliminate anything that wasn't indie-rock from the paper. Everytime the NME prints anything about music that isn't white indie rock the readers bleat about 'pop shit', 'r'n'b shit' - that's what happens when you talk dumb for so long that only the slow kids stick around. So their ossified racism and conservatism remains appealed to, worked around, remains unconfronted even as the figures tumble and fall as they have been for more than 20 years. Because a music-press equivalent of the Daily Mail is the one that's gonna have the least risk. Because the brand's fine. Praps I'm dumb to assume writers want more than this from music writing. But reading the NME I wonder how enjoyable that endless kowtowing can be. It sounds exhausting and joyless. It reads the same. Williams, and everyone else at the NME, have to play a delicate balancing act between their own avowed poptimist eclecticism and the reactionary, snob nature of many of their indie-rock readership. Turner's speech, as Williams knew, was the ideal chance to shore up the NME's constituency, make sure they were in the tent pissing out. For all Williams' rather pointless ass-covering about Turner's speech not being about 'genre-elitism' a whole load of rights-for-whites-rocknrollers were in no doubt. In the FB thread we got pearls like "Without a doubt the most sensible thing Williams has written since taking over. Turners speech was inspired and necessary. Now the NME need to act. Stop writing about RnB and Hip Hop, it's dull and tedious. Indie/Alternative music is where the NME is strongest. Promote it, embrace it." Every NME thread has variants of this. The english-rock defence league.
   A while back I might have said that these indie-lad prejudices that bubble up whenever NME dare to step out of the 'real music' compound need to be taken on, and need changing by convincing writing. I might even have said until then 'rock n roll' remains trapped in this eternal teddyboy age, waiting for the mods who'll never come, cos the teds simply don't like 'chav music', will only accept black music, if at all, from a time of segregation, black music without the arrogance that only rock'n'roll can rightfully play with. Now, for its survival, I just think the NME should keep those numbnuts happy. Turner's speech was all about having it both ways, winning an industry award, turning up, accepting it (and the new stickers that can go on the album of course, which is what it's ALL about) while still drearily insisting that you're still on the edge (cos as Oasis proved, you just have to repeatedly and tediously SAY you're rock and roll to BE rock and roll these days). Consequently, Williams memo-to-Turner also tries the same double-talk move, communicating both the supposed 'thrill' of history AND his desperation to hit 300 words with equally vacuous BPI-style brochure-talk:

"On this side of the line stand the rest of us, inspired by the words of a man who understands that rock’n’roll isn’t about an antiquated idea of “guitar music”, or about any level of genre elitism, but spirit and ethos, excitement and unpredictability; The traits that British music was always renowned for." 



   And of course, you know whose British music that is, what side of Britain is being talked about. 160 people's faces have been on the cover of the NME in the past year. 7 of those faces were not white. At least a quarter of those covers were bands/artists that have been going for well over a decade, all of whom were involved in pastiche of 60s and 70s music or were 60-70 year olds, nearly all of it was schmindiebollox. You'll find hardly any of the music made by the vast majority of young people in the UK in the pages of the NME. Grime, metal , dubstep, hardcore punk, rap, d'n'b, r'n'b - these only get allowed in when someone already famous and/or American does them. The music the mainstream press features is almost universally retrograde, apolitical, as deliberately empty as you'd expect from many folk who don't really have a stake in music beyond their individual careers and their progress towards comfort, the Moran/Brooker/Harris/Sawyer safe dotages they all dream of. Yes, it's dumb of me to expect anything more, and perhaps dumb of me to judge any mag by its commentators or its covers or even its content anymore, but for the editor of the NME to so credulously rotate the lie that Turner's idea of 'rock'n'roll' isn't about elitism, or 'antiquated ideas' is an act of disingenuity scarcely to be credited, a crooked double-talk as dimly half-witted as the Turners and Gallaghers the NME routinely parades as 'godlike' wits and genii.

'For the frontman of the UK's biggest band, upon collecting the biggest prize in British mainstream music, to end the night looking like an outsider is madness, brilliance and poetic irony all in one. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. And for those of us standing on this side of the line, neither would we. The challenge has been set by Alex Turner, and now it’s up to us to act upon it. “That rock’n’roll, eh?”

 And it's here where I start to feel idiotic for caring anymore, or even prodding this for meaning, let alone wondering what the 'ethos' and 'spirit' are exactly. The point I have to apprehend is that there's no point anymore beyond looking busy, feeling superior, looking like an outsider  while obediently accepting the trinkets and protocol of the business called show. And pushing Turner's root idea - for the NME and the music it covers, it's OK TO BE NOT AT ALL GOOD AT ANY OF THE THINGS SO LONG AS YOU ARE SEEN TO BE DOING THE THINGS. The challenge? Act upon it?
   I can't wait. I suspect 'acting on it' means more posturing, more dumbkopfs pretending to be smart, more repetitions of what the Roses/Primals/Oasis have always taught us - talk like a renegade, play like a reactionary and rock'n'roll is yours to claim. But I won't be there, and nor will most of us. We need more, and this centre-ground, where the best of rock and all genres is marginalised in preference of entirely conservative conformist music that laboriously insists on its 'independence' - there's too much going on out here where those blinkers don't reach to even get annoyed by such myopia and mendacity anymore. It's sad to lose an enemy but in these end-times, we simply have no choice. Now is the time, for this anti-friendship to end - I'm starting, with no small sense of sadness (I started off in this malarkey by slagging off the music press), to feel that the enforced delusions of mainstream music writing have become unhealthy, terminal, something to just steer clear of for my own health. We, this side of the tracks, espyTurner and his acolytes as if sat in a bored train carriage, goggling at the Tupperware sarnies and bewildering sartorial choices of the trainspotters at the end of the platform, wondering what England it is they come from, how hard it must be to so fervently wish the past back, to be so scared of the present as to attempt to live as if nothing has happened for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years. Inevitably the Editor doesn't quote perhaps the most mind-boggling of Turner's blatherings: "But it’s always waiting there, just around the corner, ready to make its way back through the sludge, and smash through the glass ceiling, looking better than ever" I know. I had to re-read it a few times myself. The r''n'r Kraken awakes and wants to combat all that prejudice it faces, all those hurdles and obstacles white-male guitar music has to face in getting radio play, tv time, front covers, exposure so it can combat all that horrible pop music, all that mindless chaff that doesn't just appeal to white kids, all that stuff that isn't real. Poor rock'n'roll. The spirited underdog. The real alternative.

 It's in this moment, this transcendentally deluded moment, that I realise me and the NME are best off avoiding each other from here on in. They're not for me. Their writers write things like this. They're not for me or my kind. 'Through the sludge'. 'Smash through the glass ceiling'. Sorry, but what the fuck was that smirking prick sneering about? Even when white male guitar music doesn't fucking sell (Miles Kane) it makes no difference as to how much media attention it gets, so strapped are the press to the formulaic template of gobby frontman and muscle-memory rock. Its one of the most obscenely privileged fucking types of music out there, and certainly has a hell of a lot LESS of a right to complain about industry inattentiveness than a lot of other British music. 'Rock n roll' i.e lots of white guys standing around smirking holding awards, doesn't need to smash a glass ceiling it fucking IS the glass ceiling and only the most deluded fuckhead could turn such entitlement and opportunity into such rank self-pity and aggrandizement. The news continues to be good - I'm sure the NME and Turner will be glad that his speech echoes the thoughts of Radio One's Head Of Music. But I feel a faint sadness that the music press, which changed my life, have decided to simply derelict their responsibilities towards vast swathes of British culture and British life, have decided to follow so asininely this rancid, reactionary corner of label-sanctioned rock, perhaps because, heartbreakingly, there IS something the NME could do to stop the rot. It will do fuck all for sales but will help their souls. Focus on the new. Banish the dadrock coverstars  forever. The other day, I read the NME's 50 New Bands feature and followed up some of the names mentioned. Stumbled across the sublime Perfect Pussy & their sublimely confrontational 'I Have Lost All Desire For Feeling', See - the NME can still point towards good stuff, but so long as these jewels are buried deep within an overwhelmingly conservative editorial line, the purpose and power and possibility of the music press will eternally be dying on the vine. Never mind a quick 50-words for this stuff , stick Perfect Pussy on the cover, send someone with ideas to interview them, make like they're the future, give us a future worth staying alive for and tell us WHY a band matters, don't just stack-up-the-numbers and present a band's 'quality' as consisting entirely of incontrovertible commercial facts. Never mind coming up through the sludge. Go down in flames.
    Christ, listen to me. Silly auld fucker. A music press that's exciting? A music press as diverse and contradictory as music itself? A music press that gives you new things to hear and new ways to hear them? What a stupid dream, what a busted flush. It's been fun NME, but here we go our separate ways. Best of luck. Seriously. The best of luck. We're all, now we've all been broken, have given up fighting, back to a pre-industrial state in music and the writing about it. Caps on ground. Begging. Doing the only thing we know how. I have a donate button. You have 60 years of heritage to trade on, multiple-platform reach and brand connectivity. No, I'm not sure what those mean either, am kind of horrified that a writer could ever give a fuck about any of them,  but seriously. The best of luck. Hope you reach ever more. You'll never reach me again.

READER'S DIGEST: SPRING EDITION

March 3, 2014, 10:04 am

≫ Next: F.U.N.K SINGULAR PAGE, MARCH 2014

≪ Previous: MY POMPOMS ARE TOO DROOPY: some thoughts on Alex Turner, the music press, and moving on.

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Just in case you missed them.

I had a look back over the recent brace of T.Rex reissues here.

I wrote this review of Ian Crause's startling, stunning 'The Vertical Axis' album.

I also wrote this review of the fantastic new album by Portland duo Towers. 

I reviewed the superb new album from The Step Brothers (Evidence & Alchemist) here.

And although it came out in 2013 I just HAD to write about the utterly brainfuckingly brilliantly brutal 'Scorn' LP by Primitive Man

Also had a chat with DAM FUNK about his superb '7 Days Of Funk' collabo with Snoop

(oh, and also on DJMAG had a chat with the ace d'n'b don Rockwell about Shogun Audio shenanigans and his love of Fugazi here)

(and my hip-hop singles reviews for Feb can be found here)

There was no F.U.N.K singles column in February cos I was too busy and knackered but having heard Lily Allen's 'Air Balloon' I may well HAVE TO write one this month. Keep em peeled and as ever, if you dig anything I do and entertain the old-fashioned notion that I shouldn't be doing this for fuck all, feel free to donate using the button near the top of the page. Cheers m'dears. 

F.U.N.K SINGULAR PAGE, MARCH 2014

March 6, 2014, 4:32 am

≫ Next: F.U.N.K RADIO VOLUME 1 - SPRING 2014

≪ Previous: READER'S DIGEST: SPRING EDITION

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LILY ALLEN
AIR BALLOON
(Regal/Parlophone)
Why just one single this month? Too busy, too knackered, too much to hear, too little time. 'Air Balloon''s a handily emblematic release for my purposes. Everything that's wrong. An invulnerable humourless vanity masquerading as self-deprecation, the endlessly renewable get out clause of sarcasm you'd be idiotic 'not to get'. You feel like a relic even getting angry these days. Always 'witty', a never-off wit too witless to apprehend its own tiresomeness. A 'character' - characters are who we're meant to want in pop, difficult when all it means is being a gobshite, being good for a 10-second celeb-news item or pull-out quote guaranteed to annoy enough people into clicking their way, This is who she is, and who you are. Tethered to this device that so bullies your time it has begun to shape and sculpt your consciousness. When was the last time you dimmed the lights,  let music not merely mingle with that panopticon of competing narcissisms you see on the screen, let music expose itself, show the cut of its jib? Listening to 'Air Balloon' sans distractions, as pure music, as pure human transmission, as I have been for an hour now,  it seems to summate everything that's broken with my relationship to british pop music, how the affair got broken, how it started excluding me, not answering my calls, notifying security to eject me, how when the middle-class take over pop, when our lives have been suffused and taken over by a kind of media that first postulates a desire for & then  enforces an endless gentrification,  what's lost from art isn't anything so dull as a mere 'reality' or a politic or an atittude. What's lost, fatally, is generosity, real compassion, any sense of giving. All we can give of now is 'ourselves'. All we can hope for is art that chimes with our own selfishness.

For what it's worth, 'Air Balloon' is probably Allen's weakest single yet. TOTESHILAIR she's already tweeted that she hasn't pre-ordered it! Exclamation Mark! (btw future historians - this age is the age that had an exclamation mark next to it. An endless braying Michael McIntyreish laugh at its own brilliant joke. Future Hobshawms will call it The Age Of Win).  Perhaps it wasn't her choice to be the next single. But she's shot a video, is on all available networks wireless n otherwise, talking about it. The vid has funny stuff in it and does the correct job of amounting to nothing, sitting in that same space as the cat pictures and 'Which Subatomic Particle Are You?' quizzes that could otherwise be occupying your time (I got Lepton can you believe it? Always thought I was a Weak Gauge Bosun.) In that purely traffic-directing sense, 'Air Balloon' can already be called a moderate success. Three million twats can be wrong. It's clearly not something made by anyone who gives a shit, or knows shit, about music. It's calculatedly shite, shite enough to irritate, shite enough to get noticed, shite enough to have done its job of keeping Allen's brand sufficiently respirated. For those people out there who kind of like M.I.A but wish she'd write way worse lyrics, have way worse production and erase every single nub of interest from her music, 'Air Balloon' will be ideal. For adults who dig Bubble Guppies. For those people who had their claws x'd that Lily would one day reach precisely the levels of half-witted cuntdom that had ensured her dad had been such a fucking useless shit-spewing tic on the arse of British cultural life for 3 decades the lyrics of 'Airballoon' prove she's catching up in the cuntishness stakes in brave and giggly leaps and bounds. "I don't like dropping names but Kurt Cobain is all in my face/ How the hell am I gonna tell him Elvis already took first base?"I can only feel pity for the hard of hearing and aurally impaired as well as those with a nasty build up of wax in their ears - your conditions and afflictions must for now prevent you from hearing exactly how those fantastic lyrics sound sung/rapped in Allen's customary mockney lilt, that particularly revolting strain of smugness & arrogance she's perfected in order to sound so falsely 'unmannered'. "Somebody remind me where I am/Miami or Timbuktu?/ Did I ever tell you my uncle's monkey ran away from the zoo?/ Would you tell me what this all means?"
 

Yeah, I'll tell you what this all means Lily, because we speak the same language, we both have the slippery accents of the middle-class, we both need to fit in wherever we go. I went to a private school too. I've shouldered it next to the future captains of industry. I know how they blithely destroy while pretending to build. Lil we're both needy see. We're both part of a class that have, through nepotism and pure cruel acumen eliminated any chance of anyone not like us being heard. Under the guile of 'trying our best' we've crowded into pop's limited elbow room, populated pop to the point where our mealy-mouthed dissent towards our occassional mischaracterisation is the only protest going, where our personal success in love or materialism is all we can agitate for, where the world and what's happening can only be talked about in vague generalities that never threaten the hierarchy we're on top of . We've been greased to the front of the queue by greasy friends in positions of power, influence, 'tastemaking', a phalanx of cultural arbiters from as fetidly limited a class & race base as the schools we went to. Mark well their gaseous 'tolerance of minorities', it obscures the glass ceilings they all hide above, the ones they want intact for as long as possible - ask if any of these people dare step beyond their own circles, dare to even imagine that pop isn't their birthright and plaything to limit and suffocate. You'll get muteness. A shrug. 'Trying our best' aren't we? What else can we do? 

   Of course we middle classes 'listen to all sorts of music'. But only that which has already been targeted at us. We don't step over the tracks anymore. We like the tracks. Keeps us here, a safely gated cultural community, keeps THEM THERE with their utterly unplaylisted utterly unsupported 'chav' and weirdo music, their grime and their rap and their garage and their r'n'b and their d'n'b and their metal and that stuff we might thieve without credit when our own taste runs dry, but all that stuff that we can safely marginalise from mainstream culture for WE ARE THE GATEKEEPERS, the educated curators of pop. So though pop needs diversity to live and breathe, we've roped off a VIP area where only skinny white versions of black r'n'b, only plummy indiefied 'reworkings' of dance/electronic music can break through, get heard & seen, win awards, make a living.
   Because pop often relies on a MIX of classes, on different classes co-existing sometimes in the same band, the ironed-out ABC-NRSgrading of everyone involved in what gets popularly disseminated in 2014 means that pop (as a thing of possibility) is being killed, slowly but surely, by the constricted anal and hobbyist habits of the bourgeoise. And killed by that bourgoeise's permanent underestimations and stereotypings of working class art, the false polarities that emerge as the limitations of what's possible in pop now. 

   So gwan Lily, keep taking the piss out of pop, keep treating it like something you're dallying with until the right offers come in from the right buddies. Those dumb polarities, that insist the middle-class can only 'pretend' and pisstake, that the working class are condemned to be 'real' and nothing more become the limitations of debate, so if you hate Lily, you hate pop, even if you might want to aver that in being so fkn jokey about pop, in populating her pop with such proudly half-witted 'intellect' she's selling pop's possibilities massively short. Listening to 'Air Balloon's deliberately irritating textures and hooks, its snotty stacking up of the adhesive, the 'catchiness' like chlamydia,  you realise that it, like all Allen's work is actually a record utterly scornful of pop, written by someone with no right to so self-consciously deride the form - reminding us all of what she said when Kylie (a true pop star) got the Glastonbury headline slot in 06 - ""To me, Kylie playing Glastonbury would be the ultimate insult to it. It should be about new, interesting music, not mainstream pop." What the FUCK would you know about interesting music Allen you shit-for-brains?

     Christ, I creak. They make you feel like a relic for even getting angry anymore. Got to be happy, or at least be merely amused at your own little daily miseries, upwardly inflect your soul. What fucking young people do these people know? Just the monied-up ones? In the current pop-cultural climate, getting angry about politics is acceptable, just, so long as you keep it away from your art. Getting angry about art itself, getting frustrated with culture? Soooo last century darling, so redolent of a time when everything wasn't catered for. I'm daft for getting daft, for considering it my job to get angry about the mulch-storm when I should just focus on what I like in my squalid little corner. Space for everyone. So everyone can actually stop talking to anyone outside their own constricted circle, stay on whatever rung is your birthright. A static, stultifying conformity by no means new to pop, but enforced by a cunts consensus whose total control, whose total elimination of even the chance of surprise, has never been more efficiently enacted. Pop's not the place to talk about gender, race, class. Go keep that boring stuff to 140 characters and whip up a storm. Music isn't allowed to sustain such thoughts. Music MUST NOT DARE to stop being entirely self-referential. It's not part of life - it's my WHOLE LIFE MAAAN. It's my hobby, my interest, my wallpaper, my background. It can only help in making me feel more secure. Reassuring me, shoring up my taste. Music that threatens anything? Music that tries to change the world? Music that unsettles your categories and confines? Oh come on. Grow up man. Get with your own profile, live with your own profile and STAY there.

Music like Bölzer's stunning Aura EP - most stunning black metal/death/grind thing this side of Irkallian Oracle's miraculously fucked up 'Ekstasis' LP.



Music like Common's astonishing No.ID-produced monster 'Made In Black America' - fuck I hope the new album is more of the same



Music like Ivylab's beautifully precise and pulsatingly funky 'Missing Persons' EP on Kasra's ever-essential Critical imprint. Finest d'n'b collabo of the year thus far.



Or also on a new d'n'b tip, Metalheadz' freshest roster producers, Mako, DLR, Villem & label-boss Ant TC1's superb Hungry For Atmosphere / A Certain Flavour EP



Music like Upfront's mind-bending 'Not All Bad', beautifully measured positive negativity from another acolyte of Bristol's fantastic Split Prophets camp.





Music like Strange U's astonishing beats and blistering rhymes dropping a 'Strange Universe' on your skull courtesy of those ever-engrossing Eglo loons




Music like Tinashe's wonderfully robot-hearted, poignantly cold '2 On' with Schoolboy Q. R'n'B with just the right amount of black hydrualically-tight chrome involved, best r'n'b this spring this side of August Alsina's sumptuous 'Make It Home' and Jhené Aiko's epic 'The Worst'. 




Music like Boddika & Joy Orbison's kick-heavy industrial-strength techno monster 'More Maim'.




or Dag Savage's woozy, spooky, early-Outkast-style sloppiness on F.U.P.M



or this sublimely dark, gorgeously glimmering garage mix from DJ Elski


and before this column becomes overladen and unloadable I'll leave it at those I can recall offa the top of my head. Like I said, too busy and knackered this month.
   Point is, now the industry has failed so massively, so we have to equally turn our back on those who the industry deign can tell us about it. Everything I now know about music comes from blogs, sites like CVLTNation and The Quietus, forums and specialist shops.  And for those destabilised by that shift there can be a tendency to lash out, to stop the net being revolutionary and just recast it as merely a more efficient machine for prising money out of music fans, figure out ways to make new technology reassert the business models, shapes & structures of the past. Much of the debate around the changes in music in the past 15 years have been about technology and format, like staring at a barnacle and forgetting the shark it's attached to, as if the MP3 in itself is somehow to 'blame'. As if the internet, as the thing that finally wrenched any last power the record companies had out of their hands, is somehow to 'blame'.
   By 'blame' I don't mean that utter bullshit about how music has deteriorated, rather that utter truth that our response to alot of it, like our response to film and all other media that previously required our full attention to be appreciated has undeniably changed now that everything we hear, everything we see, is simply part of the background or foreground of an ever-present connectivity that saps focus and engagement to a minimum, keeps us evenly spread thin across different senses, mild stimulus (EXLAMATIONMARK) & sedation (SMILEYFACE) gained equally via the hum of screens and the clickyclick business of our agility in the virtual environment.
    Going back is the last thing we need or want, I fkn love the internet. There will be trauma while we figure out how music can fit inside and around it. I suspect the best music though is that which rejects an endlessly lucrative (for the industry) agility on our part, the stuff that freezes you on the spot. The best way to listen to music now, to enjoy it rather than just 'experience' it, is in finding ways to step OUT of that connectivity, music as an experience that entirely rejects that obsequiosness and diffusion, music that in some way concentrates the mind and body in readiness for the doom that surely lies ahead for us all, or defiantly blisses you out in contrast to the hyperbole-laden 'satisfaction' on offer everywhere else .
   What's still emerged from the changes of the internet age is how ill-suited to it major labels and the mags that depend on them for ad-revenues still are, how they've reverted to post-war type, to an old pals, talent-school gene pool, variety-show-friendly stageschoolers, pisspoor chain-pubrock pastiche or the 'quality' of a well-rendered standard the aim, an essentially elitist network of people in the business of show - an A&R machine that won't get its arse up and down the street, let alone to a street that isn't in the capital. A calcification of an auld order, while what's actually happening in music has totally gone the other way. Their lookout sure, whyshouldwecare sure,  but a terrible shame how many kowtow to this, how many acquiesce in this mass cultural stitch up. They've stopped looking in interesting places. They've nearly completely stopped signing interesting artists and bands, crucially, the odd talents they do have are growing DESPITE their best efforts to categorise, confine and market them accordingly.
   Alot of music writers haven't helped, don't even consider it part of their remit to seek music that might help change things, music that might move music on. I barely have time to even dip my toe in what's out there but I'm not a music critic remember? I've got a proper job. As a reader now, I read alot of music writers who seem to think being a music journalist is just about the music you are sent, not the music you go and look for. This laziness and comfort in the tried and tested, this showboating of the mediocre characterises a nervous age. Unlike the best music that characterizes this nervous age- the discomfited music that kicks back, fearless of obscurity, eyes open, music that struggles, that doesn't just know the right people, doesn't just use the right relatives, music you feel that doesn't exist purely and only to get noticed, music that scrapes something out of a fully complex, contradictory human beings, not just a shill, a persona or a walking clickbaiter. Would be good if writers could stop checking their traffic stats and re-engage with sound and how it helps you survive again. Normal service resumes next month. Comment me anything I've missed. Just one single this month. Too busy. Too knackered.

F.U.N.K RADIO VOLUME 1 - SPRING 2014

March 7, 2014, 8:15 am

≫ Next: OH MY CUNTING CHRIST HOW DID I MISS THIS? BÖLZER "AURA EP" AND OTHER CHEERY SONGS FOR SPRING

≪ Previous: F.U.N.K SINGULAR PAGE, MARCH 2014

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Decided to start compiling the stuff I write about into a little mix every season. Here's the first instalment. There'll be another along anon. Also on my Mixcloud page are my 'Spare Hours' mixes which are all old stuff. Enjoy.

F.U.N.K Radio Spring 2014 by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

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OH MY CUNTING CHRIST HOW DID I MISS THIS? BÖLZER "AURA EP" AND OTHER CHEERY SONGS FOR SPRING

March 10, 2014, 5:06 am

≫ Next: F.U.N.K RADIO SPRING 2014 PART II : FOR THE NON-DANCERS

≪ Previous: F.U.N.K RADIO VOLUME 1 - SPRING 2014

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Bölzer

Aura EP

(Iron Bonehead Productions) 

   In a permanent state of catch-up with metal from 2013 - missed alot and I'm sure alot was worth missing but my god, this 23 minute slab of rarefied riffola from Swiss duo Bölzer is just astonishing, so good it doesn't feel absurd to call it a new high-point in metal, something WAAAY too good to just sadly note and prod people towards, a record I want to press into strangers lives with evangelical fervour. It's a total and utter stone cold red hot freakin masterpiece, addictive, a record I can't stop listening to, loud. Sometimes it's easy to seek controversy or revelation where there is none, insist that something 'progresses' or 'moves on' a genre - what's wonderful about 'Aura' is that it's so fucking good none of that even occurs to you, it just does what it sets out to do so brilliantly, rocks so fucking hard, so beautifully, that you can't believe these people weren't stars by 2013's end, can scarcely believe metal isn't now thoroughly engaged in 'Aura's absorbtion, wondering how in holy fuck it can even dream of topping it. It's as good as its sleeve. Look at that sleeve. It's THAT good. 

    Opener 'C.M.E' (catchy shorthand for only slightly less-snappy 'Coronal Mass Ejaculation') takes precisely 2 seconds to get and what you get is the three components of Bölzer's ound that makes 'Aura' so utterly compelling. Firstly - riffs. No, not just riffs, I mean RIFFS. Planet-sized. Riffs that latch themselves to your brainpan and then start thrashing your body about like split-head Palmer chowing down on Windows' skull in The Thing. Bölzer's songs are constructed around about a half-dozen riffs each, every single one of them so fucking awesome you get serious Sepultura-style palpitations from every single corner and spiral 'Aura' drags you down. The guitars never refract into sheer noise, there's a sharpness, a corrosive skins-stripping adhesiveness to this music and the shapes it makes - you have to pay attention to go on the journey but it's an attention you give gladly cos the riffs are so utterly enslaving, hooky, obsession-creating. Swinging like Hanuman's balls.

   Secondly - the sound. Inexactly right. Like the similarly two-strong Towers & the magnificent Primitive Man, not so macho-maximal to have no sense of space, somehow managing to give all of this racket its own tangible tactile room to breathe and impact. Something analogue about it in that space, the way pumping the volume up reveals MORE not less, but absolutely nothing dated about it. A spacecrucial to what makes Aura so devestating because both of Bölzer are on fire, the guitarist seemingly the greatest riff machine on the planet in 2013, the drummer able to blast-beat and Bill-Ward it simultaneously, keeping the tracks at this wonderfully ambiguous, hugely suggestive place between frenzy and dread, a murderous intensity, an almost reflective self-loathing. On the second track, the astonishing 'Entranced By The Wolfshock' they hit a monstrous psychedelic weight redolent of Amon Duul, Oneida or Comets On Fire while also shitting on ALL those bands from a truly spectacular promontory height. Like I said, it's as good as its sleeve. Look at that fucking sleeve! It IS THAT good. 

   Thirdly - the utter unplaceability of it. You see that name, you hear lyrics like 'His psalms emanate power/ Beset with lightning and thunder/ As you slip into trance/ You swear allegiance to dance'. Your smirky first-language prejudices might come into play, or like me you might immediately start thinking of previous Swiss genii who've blown your mind, The Young Gods, Celtic Frost. But really, 'Aura' is genuinely unplaceable in any one subgenre (and metal's all about the subgenres). Not quite Death Metal, too uplifiting, although in its most furious moments 'Aura' is like the best death-metal you've ever heard. Not Doom cos even the moments of quicksand-drowning crawl still flicker with all kinds of lightspeed detail. Not Black Metal cos at no point is anything obscured, at no point is there any 'attitude' about honouring an old form or staying 'true' to anything, just an outpouring of the good great awesome stuff that happens when Bolzer plug in and play.  An incredibly catchy record, too catchy to be thought of as anything except immensely generous in its conception and execution. Warm fuzzies? Yeah, along with the mute awe, along with the broken shredded proneness, you will feel affection for this record, a need to evangelicise for it. Can. Not. Wait. For A Full Length, although to their credit Bölzer are apparently insistent that the EP form is what best suits them. Until the next one, avail yourself of 'Aura's blissful bewitching brutality fucking YESTERDAY. Too good to let die on the margins. Should be bigger than Satan already. 

[Oh and BTW, while on the darker end of things -  two things I can't make head nor tail of but that I can't stop listening to. The half hour of building drone & doom that is The Lady In The Lake by Nemorensis, now out on tape & bandcamp from the ever-intriguing Northern Idaho label Sol Y Nieve. . . 

and from the same label the spellbindingly strange, lo-fi fizz and fury of Anouof Thwo by Quebec weirdos Hellebore

Get back to me when YOU figure them out. And keep em peeled on ANYTHING Sol Y Nieve drop. These people are clearly the kind of sick twists you want to follow and love]

Irkallian Oracle

Finally, also tickling my racket-receptors this month is IRKALLIAN ORACLE's masterly 'Grave Ekstasis' LP. Originally, like Bolzer, 'Grave Ekstasis' was released in a beautifully thought-out limited edition, only on tape, like much of the most compelling black/extreme metal at the moment. Just now reissued on CD & Vinyl by those lovely people at San Fran's Nuclear War Now , on original label Blovark's site the following statement appears: "Irkallian Oracle - Grave Ekstasis is now sold out. The band should not be bothered about copies as they have none. The few remaining copies at Bolvärk are reserved for people that already have contacted us on this matter and waiting. New orders are not possible. Bolvärk will be back in business in early august when we have access to tape machines and communications." That kind of sullen, hostile, blank almost machinelike refusal to boyhowdy and do the ordinary friendly gladhanding that characterises most mainstream media-friendly promo also finds itself in IO's own stated aims, unblinkingly serious, daring you to smirk, knowing that if you do you're condemned to the flames forever. "Ekstasis (as in ”out-of-itself”) denotes the great leap beyond the limited existential confinements of being wrapped up in confused states of ego-centrism. It is here drawn forth by both terror and awe at the apocalyptic totality of the Grave; the abysmal Other that mirrors the infinitude of endless possibility upon the beholder. Like an absence of self it becomes the very significant of Being, as the notion that existence only may be relevant in the encounter with inexistence. Hence, the ecstasy here spoken of is based upon the mystical endeavor of transgression, deconstruction and iconoclasm of selfhood that is revealed in the face of DEATH."Compared to 'we just want to make the music we want and if other people like it that's a bonus' this is some mission statement:  "Born in the year 2012 on Swedish soil, Irkallian Oracle is a musical vehicle for the Void. Drawing its art from the darkest and most horrific vaults of the Death and Black Metal tradition yet still searching ever deeper and beyond all confined artistic boundaries, it wishes to both musically and lyrically explore the ecstatic mysteries of abysmal infinitude. "Grave Ekstasis" is the first released material of Irkallian Oracle and consists of five revelations at the combined length of almost 45 minutes, and it shall function as message to all those who wish to enslave Death and Black Metal to purposeless retrospection, mediocrity and shallow ideals." LOVE that last line, and listening to 'Ekstasis' the rhetoric becomes less lofty, a million miles away from the empty promises of so much 'rock and roll' at the moment, far more accurate, far more convinced and justified. 

'Grave Ekstasis' is simply fantastic, Black Metal writ vast, Death metal jacked up with more low-end than it's ever sustained before, Doom metal too committed to putting you in an altered state of consciousness to be a dead end, five tracks that'll fit on one side of a C-90 with enough crunching repetition and UTTER SHITTINGLY ENORMOUS HEADSHREDDING HEAVIOSITY to squash a multiverse between its fingers. Irkallian's genius is in absolutely not attempting to be 'progressive' or to 'extend' anything - rather, like all the best metal bands ever, what they're committed to is a refinement, a distillation, a perfection, the kind of paring down and purification that can only be enacted by egos and abilities in some serious headsdown synchro-meshed union, bereft of any one persona pushing to the fore. Opener 'Ekstasis' comes rolling at you over the moors, a lung-freezing fog, medieval drums you want to hit yourself over the head with a plank to, the band at first distant, slowly encroaching to the fore, a pre-imprint coming into horrific close-up. And by the time they're there with you, up in your face, the singer opens up a hole in his face and the rank stench of putrefaction hits your senses - all the ridiculous, partly-laughable shitchat you've heard black-metal bands trade in for so long finds true resonance in Irkallian's music - this is genuinely horrifying music, horrifying for its sounds and impetus, but also horrifying because at root this is an agonisingly human document.
   'Iconoclasm' kicks off so lunatic-fast, yet so heavy, it's like the Boredoms finally jammed with Corrupted (like us popkids always dreamed about) but then settles down into a truly seethingly venal slo-mo groove so sexy, yet so deathly, it's like witnessing, through a widely-dilated shitscared eye through a keyhole, Barry White transmogrifying into a skinny white necrophile. And every time that riff is returned to, it seems a little slower, a little heavier, a little more disturbing, as the vocal splits in two and starts coiling around itself and you succumb to the writhings of the bottomless pit. See how this music sets you thinking? 'Dispersion' simply will not stop until you are dead, the brilliantly titled 'Trans-Abysmal Echoes (Non-Sense)' is full-pelt demoniac-grindcore and closing epic 'Absentia Animi' sets out to make atonality your new tonality and succeeds over 13 minutes of molten fuzz and doom, the pulse slowing into coma beyond any fibrulation the band can bring to bear on it. And like the sick bastard you are you rewind back to the top of 'Ekstasis' to undergo it all again. A black hole of a record. A nothing you keep wanting more of. Caught up now. Ready. If any more of this godlike shit comes down the pipe you'll be the first to know. 

F.U.N.K RADIO SPRING 2014 PART II : FOR THE NON-DANCERS

March 13, 2014, 2:48 am

≫ Next: A HEADS UP ABOUT SPARK MASTER TAPE

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Stuff that I couldn't squeeze on to the first F.U.N.K mix for Spring, alot less hip-hop, more drone, metal and electronics incl. a HALF HOUR from the astonishing Nemorensis. Yeah, going for the big sell here. Do check out the artists here in particular Ian Crause's amazing 'Vertical Axis' LP, Bolzer's awesome 'Aura EP' and Spark Master Tape's amazing 'The SWOUP Serengeti' mixtape.


 

F.U.N.K RADIO SPRING 2014: PT II by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

A HEADS UP ABOUT SPARK MASTER TAPE

March 13, 2014, 5:24 am

≫ Next: A WILD FEELING: SAXON SOUND SYSTEM TAPES

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OK, here's what we know - next to fuck-all. 2 years ago, New Years Eve 2012, a mixtape dropped called 'Syrup Splash'.
 

   It was fucking great. The sleeve and the mystery behind its creators led alot of people to suspect the perpetrator was Caucasian (like that would be a crime), soubriquets like 'tumblr-rap' started getting slung its way, the confusion of listeners as to whether SMT was black or white getting a whole load of hipsters' knickers in a knot. Didn't help that SMT's web presence was ghostly, fuzzy, refused to skewer reality and play the usual games of instant explication, refused to give much info beyond suggestions of a collective, that Paper Platoon was the producer (or was that just another pseudonym of SMT himself?). The music PP spun around SMT's slow-mo'd raps (all of his vocals are sluggishly drawn out to a crawl), though peppered with identifiable tropes (air-horns, trap beats, DJ-rewinds), somehow emerged as utterly unique, the utterly unplaceable samples and unique sense of genuine chaos, the way that tracks hung somewhere between sumptuous soundtrack and pure verite anti-music, the way those familiar motifs were used less to make you feel comfortable, rather to massively unsettle your concentration on the bass-heavy headnodic bliss of PP's backdrops and shapes. PP's manipulation of sound was disturbingly freewheeling, tracks slipping into pure racket, samples stretched and split until their rubbery innards spilled out.  I filed 'Syrup Splash' firmly under the 'keep an eye on this guy' file, promptly forgot about it and then couldn't forget about it. It was just too pointed, too scary, too resistant to anything you might surround it with. Time went on. Still no interviews. No features. No face to put to the name, little attention paid by any of the usual places. Time went on. 

   

Then in 2013, another tape dropped. 

It was even better than 'Syrup Splash' - more kaleidoscopic, more colourful, more lyrically confrontational, more prone to give itself over to ear-razing conflations of dubbed-out wibblery and gorgeously frazzled noise-scapes (check the astonishing 'Castles & Towers') than anything else going on in hip-hop, a Houston-style heaviosity and heatstruck sense of grogginess but still, by dint of the sheer odd instinctive range of sources and the way it surged through your headspace ENTIRELY unplaceable. Who knew if PP WAS SMT, whether the 'guests' were simply more facets to SMT's schizophrenia or parts of a genuine crew? Together with the tape's release, SMT seemed to take on a little more of a web-presence, twitter, FB, soundcloud all now pumping out SMT music but still with that utter refusal to give us a photo of the person or people responsible, still absolutely refuting any attempt to be nailed to anything like a conventional physical identity or persona. Check out this 'interview' and see if you can pick a SINGLE SERPENTINE FACT out about SMT or PP or ANYONE involved. For those of us who truly sunk ourselves into the depths of 'Serengeti' this indeterminacy suited the chopped-up screwed-up nature of the music but you also got the growing sense that people are terrified that he'll turn out to be just 'some white guy from the suburbs' (as one commentator on that interview disparagingly puts it). Alot of folk put off by the lyrics also, lyrics that almost make a virtue of being unmemorable, rather another element of the druggy fucked-up psyche intent of the music.

Vapid, shallow, obnoxious - yup, so fucking what? Charmless? Absolutely not - it's SMT's exaggeration and detonation of stereotypes that makes 'Serengeti' so compelling throughout, someone clearly with a deep grounding in hip-hop creating a monstrous, menacing edifice out of all that cultural wreckage and then torching the fucking lot with a maniacal glint in his eye. Who even knew if SMT hadn't just c&p'd a whole load of accapellas and then put them in his slo-mo grinder to create the lyrics for '#SWOUP'? The sampladelic reach of PP's production throughout both mixtapes is just incredible, the connections made between disparate cultures absolutely what hip-hop should be all about. It shouldn't matter to you (and also white guys from the suburbs have made some of the greatest music ever made) - what should matter to you right now is that if you haven't heard either of the above, do so now (I'd start with 'Serengeti')  because A NEW SMT MIXTAPE is gonna drop any time soon. It's gonna be called 'Silhouette Of A Sunken City' and I'm warning you now it's bound to be one of the highlights of 2014. SMT raises a hell of a lot of interesting questions - about how to make music genuinely scary, as scary as the times we live in, about anonymity, and how in a time of information overload an artist can still manage to construct an identity forged almost entirely in pure sound and word and then suck you into that identity and never exhale you back out - finally SMT dares you to let myth back in to music, dares you to outfox his own steely sense of mystique. This is a mystery I don't want solving. For as long as it can be kept intact, dive deep within SMT's universe before its imploded from without. He's either gonna self-destruct or ascend down to hell soon.

A WILD FEELING: SAXON SOUND SYSTEM TAPES

March 20, 2014, 7:26 am

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Smiley Culture & Asher Senator from Saxon Sound, in the NME: " . . .  we started making what we call ‘style’ by writing rhyming lyrics that went on and on without finishing… continuous style. The way I see it, some MCs live off six lyrics for years and years, never changing. Whereas we’re on the move all the time because time is running, y’know… Smiley and I took a break once and developed 10 new lyrics each and then appeared at the Nottingham Palais. We chatted on the mic non-stop right through to the end of the evening. A wild feeling . . . "

I've never had much of an idea exactly what the fuck's going on in alot of the soundclash tapes that have ever come my way, but I do know that's partly why they so often excite me. I know that sense of WTF is what's always excited me about all Saxon Sound tapes -  listen to any (and there's dozens) Saxon Sound clashes from the early 80s on Youtube (particularly rich pickings tween 82 & 85 by which time SS gained an 'official' release on the awesome 'Coughing Up Fire' album) and you're confronted with the necessity of having to totally overhaul the official version of British music you've been reared and raised on. Of course, when reading any history you look between the lines, you look at what's been left out, particularly in any history of UK music, this entity so splayed and lashed and divided by lines of class and race it's a temptation to forget about what doesn't get heard any more, and just to be grateful for what can survive. Most of what's been written about post-punk and new pop, that dizzying five years of innovation from 78-82, sees things as a musical rather than lyrical development, and focusses on those bands you know & love making the classic albums you know & love that touched on a rich lineage of those anti-classics you know and love. And don't get me wrong, I know and love all of them. But  to hear something from that time that absolutely turns that (anti)cannonical safety on its head, taps you into a whole bunch of British people making music whose main resource wasn't a cannon of alternative-music made by experimental psychonauts but rather old-testament prophecying and civil-war-borne production-line doom about the end-times  - inevitably this music touches you more now than all that reshuffling and reiteration of the usual pack of underdogs. Can't ever get enough of these Saxon Sound System tapes, although wish even more had survived, to further flesh out my growing apprehension that in Tippa Irie, Peter King, Asher Senator, Maxi Priest, Daddy Rusty, Smiley Culture and Papa Levi, Saxon basically assembled thee greatest crews of lyricists and DJs that have ever existed in the UK (no accident that so many of those names ended up signed to majors). Crucially the 'importance' of these fuzzy, distorted, sometimes barely-musical, decayed transmissions, which is massive, doesn't obscure the sheer pleasure they give, how compelling they remain as listening experiences. And just how much Saxon Sound owned things, everywhere they went, dominated, crushed all opposition. We should've shouted about them more. We should never forget to listen. 

Saxon started in 76 in Lewisham as purely a party set-up, soon progressing to supplying sound systems at local venues, functions and weddings in and around Lewisham, spending the rest of the 70s building their rep as the number one sound system in the UK. Clear to anyone who heard them that their MCs, dubplates and DJs were a cut above. Perhaps clear that anyone who heard DJ Peter King (who always had such a stunning ability to switch his voice, going from lightspeed chat to slow drawling cockney within the space of a syllable) at the DJ Jamboree dance in Lewisham in 82 were witness to the birth of a totally new style, the reverberations of which still seismically rumble through UK rap, grime and d'n'b.  Crucially a style that in a sense cut the umbilicus between UK dancehall and Jamaican dancehall. 'Fast Chat', as the style came to be known certainly had its antecedents in the artists that Levi, Smiley, Aher, Tippa and King were raised on, the U-Roy, Brigadier Jerry and Nicodemus yard-tapes they were listening to. But in the hands of Saxon the style got stretched out, extended, elaborated upon, given up to English as Londoners speak it and crafted by consciousnesses that were pure black British, straight from the streets and shops and homes and intellects that struggled in Lewisham and elsewhere to come to terms with their own 1st & 2nd Generation immigrant identities, their parabolic relationship with international black consciousness and the tightrope tween slackness and roots they walked every time they stepped to a mic, with charm, grace, humour, poetry and an almost-frantic inability to stop themselves. Only white guy to come close at the time is Mark E. Smith and that's not an altogether daffy comparison, there's a similar sense of eccentricity and irresistable life to the best of Saxon's output. Because if your day-to-day life tells you you're at the margins, that you've got to remain silent, try and sneak by for fear of violence, for fear of bigotry, then when you get that mic in your hand there's a very real danger no-one will be able to stop you talking. The 'Fast Chat' style enabled the artists on Saxon to say the unique things they had to say in a totally unique way, to push themselves and their experiences out as compellingly breathless art. It was as complete a simultaneous homage and immolation of a 'homeland' culture as Two-Tone was, and should be listened to at least as regularly. 'Rapid rappin' was another name for the style Saxon pioneered and it fits, at a time when the UK was just waking up to hip-hop Saxon were delivering British rhymes, lyrics that could only have been birthed in the minds of British people, delivered with supreme finesse at dizzying speeds, freestyled over thumping bass-heavy beats to a point where sometimes all you can hear is a 2-speed kick-drum pulse and somebody's deepest'n'darkest, funniest 'n'lightest thoughts coming at you like a nuclear train - perhaps the only British artists to get close to the kind of thing Treacherous 3 and Run DMC were pulling over in NYC at the time, even though how conscious of hip-hop Saxon were who knows. King explained the birth of the fast-chat style in an 85 issue of Echoes: 

“A lot of English MCs was chatting like yardies, they weren’t trying to be original. I heard a lot of MCs copying and pirating, not entire lyrics – just the style. It all became rather the same … I did the fast style in 1982. People was already coming to Saxon but they used to love the fast style … People from other sounds used to say the “fast style” was bad. They come to me and say “drop it in now”, in the dance so that they could hear it. Everybody was doing a style off a it – just said, well, cool runnings, at least they know who originated it.” 

Listening to the tapes, you hear Levi, Asher & Tippa in particular stretching the possibilities of breath, of thought, of throat. Nothing compares to it - nothing contemporary at least but it does recall later work by SUAD,  London Posse (both of whom were regular attendees at Saxon parties), or the most frenetic mindblowing grime to come much later- there's also a warmth, a humour, a turn of phrase simultaneously so English and yet so revolutionary you frequently have to note down where you're gonna rewind to, just to check you were right to believe your ears. Just as Jamaica had discovered its own ska sound in 62 beyond mere plagiarization of American r'n'b sources, so you can hear in tapes from 82 onwards Saxon discovering their own sound, a new way of both grounding themselves but also propelling themselves into totally new territories lyrically and musically. 

   Of course, Saxon's innovations lyrically offer stark counterpoint to what was going on in Jamaican dancehall at the time. A waning of political emphasis, a growth of slackness and a proto-hip-hop kind of assertive individualism opened up that space for Saxon to reaffirm the lost Rastafari consciousness of roots reggae, apply that dialectic to dissecting the ravages suffered by young black Britons in Thatcher's first two terms. It's not as simple as a rejection of Jamaica's changing lyrical emphasis though - there's still plenty of slackness in these tapes, these guys were too big fans of Yellowman to totally excise that stuff and you wouldn't want them to. And as Saxon started playing and winning clashes back in Jamaica that speedy-style fed back into Jamaican dancehall itself, reinvigorated a style that had only fleetingly been hinted at before. Listening to Shinehead or Supacat from later on in the 80s it's clear that Jamaica fed back Saxon's impetus and explorations - that Jamaican crews returning home after battles with Saxon had been infected a little by just how odd, just how convincing Saxon were. It's Saxon's fluidity, their ability to melt together their roots, their present, and glimpses of the future in their music that makes these tapes so compelling. You can hear the crew's diasporic disconnection get fused, get fixed and lived with and that's an incredibly liberating, joyous thing to hear. Never just bleak, though sometimes bleak, never just happy, though often happy, Saxon summed up the defiance, despair and triumph of their times like no-one else, stylistically AND in terms of the topics and things they chatted about. Helps that in comparison to Jamaican tapes from the time tapes of clashes involving Unity, or Fatman Riddim, or Coxsone or Saxon in England are just more lively, funnier, with way more crowd interaction & way more bedlam. These tapes document a desire to party hard, because the Monday that beckons will be hell, because the mean time between dances is a mean time indeed. 

    It's inevitable, looking back, that Lewisham would be the birthplace of Saxon, the place they so often returned to. After all, it was Lewisham where Jah Shaka's record shop opened up, Lewisham where Jah first started his dub soundsystem Shaka Sound, Lewisham that contained the Moon Shot Youth Club, the Moon Shot Youth Club raided and vandalised by police in 75, adding to tensions that would grow and explode into the Battle Of Lewisham in 77, Lewisham that was witness to the horrors of the New Cross Fire, Lewisham where the NF and other fascist groups focussed their terror and thuggery, making every walk out for young black kids an exercise in running the gauntlet of hatred and violence. You can hear that tension teasingly hinted at in Saxon tapes, even if the main impetus is liberation and joy - the soundsystem, the clash, the dance as safe-haven, as transcendental refuge, a place where black unity and autonomy was celebrated,  a space where pleasure and politics could co-exist. Dr. William 'Lez' Henry, who started out as a soundbwoy with Jah Shaka was in no doubt about exactly why Lewisham would prove a fulcrum for British dancehall in  this fascinating interview from 2013: 

"They were alternative public arenas and alternative public spaces. That’s exactly what it was. DJs in the UK were articulating about absolutely everything; from love to hate to life and death.You know they say that hindsight is a fine thing because when I was immersed in the culture and DJing as Lezlee Lyrix, although I appreciated certain things, you don’t really understand just how profound the nature of what you’re doing is until you reflect on it. And when I was doing my doctorate work, I concluded –and I’m not asking people to conclude with me, it bothers me not if they do or don’t – that what was being articulated in reggae sound systems in the UK from probably 1981 to 1987 is probably the most pro-black, African-centered voice to ever come out of the UK. We governed that space. We were judge, jury and executioner of what happened. It was almost like an autonomous space in that sense, and a self-regulating one. Personally, I don’t think people really appreciated that. Especially, in the contest of the Black-British sound system and DJ culture . . .  people would be articulating what you could do to get yourself out of your situation. What you can do about a particular situation. That’s why on the sound systems, the DJs would talk about everything from being stopped and searched by the police to how to deal with love problems. The focus wasn’t just on race or racism. That was just one aspect of our live or our “livity” as Rastafari would say. People need to understand that these were transcendental spaces and not just spaces of resistance"

   Still topping the youth unemployment league table (JSA claimants currently outnumbering available jobs 14 to 1) Lewisham is still suffering in sight of the city, finding itself the victim of both all-new brutalising cuts to youth services by the Coalition and all-too-familiar police-tactics of racist stop & search both before and since the riots of 2011. How much would Lewisham benefit from a transcendental space again, and from a set of artists who could  summate and surpass these times as effectively and elegantly as Saxon Sound did? Needed now more than ever. Here's a few clashes I've stitched together. An 80s you're being kept from in most nostalgia from that decade. Get that wild feeling and then go find who's doing this now and report back to me. Cheers boss.

Saxon Studio International Vs. Ghetto Tone (Papa Levi vs Lez Lyrics) 1983 by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

Saxon Studio International v Young Lion Hi Fi, High Wycombe UK 20.10.84 by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

Saxon Studio International Vs Coxsone, People's Club, 1982 by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

EASTERN SPRING THE MIX

March 27, 2014, 5:42 am

≫ Next: A NEW NINETIES U.S EDITION PART 5: THREE SLUGGERS FROM LOUISVILLE

≪ Previous: A WILD FEELING: SAXON SOUND SYSTEM TAPES

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EASTERN SPRING: THE MIX by Neil Kulkarni on Mixcloud

(all txt from 'Eastern Spring' by Neil Kulkarni, published 2012 by Zero Books)

1.Lata Mangeshkar - Ghanu Waje Ghun Ghuna(from the album ‘Amratachu Ghanu’, song by Hridnyath Mangeshkar)

“Happy daze - I hear the Seekers and the Sex Pistols and Val Doonican and it all sounds the same. I also hear this song and I realise that music can make me cry and choke. This song is about moonlight, shelter, looking in the mirror and not seeing yourself looking back. It's by Maharashtrians of a similar vintage to my parents, Hridaynath Mangeshkar and his sister Lata, a familial combination that created gold whenever it collaborated... but at age five I knew none of this. I just knew it felt funny, that this song woke and walked into new chambers of my still-growing heart, instrumentation I couldn't quite picture that pulled the brine from your eyes in pure melodic yearning and sent you on through your day levitating a few inches above the ground. A poem that's over 1000 years old. Hits you like it were writ tomorrow."

2.Lata Mangeshkar - Are Are Dnyana Jhalasi Pavan(devotional Abhang to the Saint Dnyaneshwar, arranged by Hridnyath Mangeshkar)

“That dislocation increases with age, even if the future generations of people who are going to call themselves proud to be British will be similarly composed of phantom solidity, but in numbers will find STRENGTH from that non-alignment with the monolithic, the strength us nervous pioneers had to keep locked up, sipped from in those moments alone after the freshest latest despair. When we didn’t have the advantage of numbers, our music made us strong, gave us voices upon voices, calling us back, pushing us on.”

3. V.G Jog & Ustad Bismillah Khan – Dhun Karhawa (from the album ‘Sublime Notes’)

“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.”

4.Lata Mangeshkar – Ya Chimanyanno (composed by Shrinivas Khale, words by Ga Di Madgulkar)

“Lata Mangeshkar, like all Marathi singers, sang songs about Shivaji because he was a hero to Marathis.”

5.Lata Mangeshkar – Avachita Paramilu(from the album ‘Avachita Paramilu’, musical director Hridnyath Mangeshkar)

“Melodies I couldn’t explain, rhythms without time conjured by the all-powerful multi-tracked voice above the drone. Another Hrydnath/Lata gem, another 1000 year old libretto by the Saint Naneshwar who translated the Gita into street-level Marathi from Sanskrit and that has the good sense to know that God is a perfume, and his stink is everywhere.Screens off if you can bear to be reminded of pure sound, and the pure vision that can come from it. Format matters.”

6.Sudhir Phadke  - Jag He Bandishala (literally ‘Imprisonment As Metaphor For Life’ from the 1960 movie Sakharam, a Chaplinesque tragedy of blindness, gangsters and revenge. Lyrics by G.D.Madgulkar and music by Sudhir Phadke)

(Lyrics Translation) “This World is a dungeon/ Nobody here is virtuous / Everyone is a wanderer off the path/ Everyone loves his cell / Friends and consorts in the cell/ Be it handcuffs or heavy gyves - everyone sticks to them/ Everyone clings to his place ! Nobody's vision goes beyond the walls/ Worms in a fig, in the fig they exist/ Nobody knows what's the term/ From where he comes nobody knows/ Everyone fears his deliverance/ Every one is happy with confinement”

7.Pandit Bhimsen Joshi – Raag Puriya Pt 4 of 4 (from the album ‘"Raag Puriya Dhanashree: Vilambit Bandish - "Ab To Ritu Maan" In Ek Taal (12 Beats) / Drut Bandish - "Paayaliya Jhankar" In Teen Taal (16 Beats)")

“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.”


8.Asha Bhosle - Ya Dolyanchi Don Pakhare (from the film Paath Laag, 1964, Music & Songs by Datta Davjekar)

“Haunted by who you are, by the idea of being someone. I don’t lend vinyl anymore but there’s a song at the heart of this. It’s a song sung by a dead woman, a ghost to her husband, warning him that wherever he goes and whoever he’s with she will be in his heart. It’s soundtracked by vamping keys, insanely heavy reverb, spooked and wracked sound fx and was made in about 1964, (just before Marathi song started being bulldozed out of Indian cinema, just before my mum and dad decide to blow Mumbai for the other side of the world) for the film Paath Laag and is called Ya Dolyanchi Don Pakhare.”

9.Asha Bhosle - Vikat Ghetala Shyam (from the film Jagachya Pathivar, 1960)

Lyrics translation: “Didn't spend a farthing, neither did I spend a penny/ I acquired my Shyam (Krishna)/ Some may think Its a theft, some may think I borrowed him / But as many as thebreaths in my whole life I've counted His Name/ Child Shepard from Yamuna river, naughty child of Sant Poets/ He has names as many as owners he has/His habitats are as many as hearts are there in the world/ But still nobody knows Him/ He still remains a poor nameless orphan”

10.Suman Kalyanpur – Jhite Sagara Dharni Milte (from the film Devbappa, 1953)

“The pictures are out-of-synch and so is anyone who escapes the world they were born to, to step and stumble out into another. Out of synch as is anyone who's walked on these black beaches barefoot and finds themselves grown up and trudging through a substance called snow that they'd only read about before.”

11.Lata Mangeshkar - Karangali Modali (from the film Padchhaya, 1965 music by Datta Davjekar)

“Born out-of-synch. Because 'Indian' culture as perceived by the English is either hidden or horrific by then, bar the odd gem precisely those pale imitations and painful malapropisms of contemporary western pop that the west loves so much, the camp failure of all these Bengalis-in-platforms trying to look like they belong on the dance floor where it's unlikely they'd make it past toilet-attendant. I don't need that neediness cos with the Indian music I hold close in my juvenile 16-year-old fogeyness there's no attempt to ingratiate, only the instant ability to fly, to be yourself where that self is free, where your eyes hurt because you've been waiting for god too long.”

12.Lata Mangeshkar – Om Namo Ji (‘Invocation Of Saint Dyanyeshwar’ from the 1971 album ‘Dnyaneshwar Mauli’)

“Crucially, Indian music at its best reminds me that I had music before I had words or categories for it: at its best, it suggests to me that it’s time I shut the fuck up about music and spend a few years just listening. Care less about having the final word than exploring those moments for which there aren’t words, let those folk who mistake music for the accumulation of taste have their lists and lineages and things You Must Hear Before You Die. Get busy finding out what and HOW I must hear before I can start living again.”

13.Asha Bhosle – Gyansham Sundara (from the film Amar Bhupali, 1952, music composed by Vasant Desai and lyrics penned by Shahir Honaji Bala)

“I suggest it to you because I love you. Because you’re my friend. Because we’re living proof that it never was about finding out who you are. Just about making sure who you aren’t, who you’re not gonna stand alongside, who you’re going to share your impure bastard-past and fucked-up future with. Sorry to have kept you so long. Let our eyes meet on the nearest star through the silhouetted branches. At the start of a new day of eastern spring. The summer soon come.

Vultus oriens, Ecce Homo Sacer, Rodus Dactlyus Aurora I don’t have long so listen now, before your house wakes and time starts stealing your future again an ancient song for a new dawn. Hear the sun? Hear the noise it makes?

Feel it in your heart.”

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