Drowned In Sound |  |
- Santigold to produce Devo and climb Kilamanjaro
- Adam Green - Minor Love
- Various - Follow the Outline
- Shield Your Eyes - Shield 'Em
- Iggy & The Stooges and more for Matt Groening ATP
- Listen: Stream of Vampire Weekend's Contra
- Animal Collated: The round-up of what the criticis thought to 2009
- Times New Viking: Coming this way in the Spring
| Santigold to produce Devo and climb Kilamanjaro Posted: 07 Jan 2010 04:41 AM PST  There's not a great deal of information about it, only that she dropped the news in an interview with Paste Magazine. Miss Gold told them:
Ha. Sweet. In other news, she also revealed she working on her new album, saying she's pretty damned excited about it, and so she might be. In other other news, you may have been aware that she was due to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with Jessica Biel and Lupe Fiasco. That is happening NOW, we believe she's started the climb. It's for the Summit On The Summit, to "fight the global clean water crisis". A few select tweets of what she said in the lead-up to it all:
You can follow her progress on Twitter, as well as on the official Summit On The Summit website. G'luck. |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 12:49 AM PST  Sad to say, the man's grown up from his earlier work. Sixes and Sevens suggested it, Minor Love confirms it. There's none of the potty humour of 'No Legs', or 'Who's Got The Crack?', or 'Jessica Simpson'. The only nods to the childish lyrics of yore is the chorus of 'Castles and Tassles' - "Castles and tassles / And flatulent assholes / I love you". Toilet references and sex jokes are almost entirely excised. Without the humour, this could so easily be lounge singer pop. This is, after all, the man who came up with the so bad it's genius of "I am a goat / In a moat / With a boat". Without that, what is left? What do you do if you've excised all the silliness? You go to Songwriters 101, and learn how to write proper songs, with addictive melodies and all that. 'Buddy Bradley' features the same vocal rhythm throughout, sung over the same guitar and bass riff – and yet, it works. The repetition is addictive, almost hypnotic. 'Boss Inside' tells a dark, depressing tale - "He wanted me to kill him / But I took his life instead" - over a plucked out acoustic guitar line. It's oh-so-mature, and it suits him. The lyrics are no longer puerile, focussing instead on bizarre narratives of slacker comic book characters, crying alone in diners, scumbags and schmucks. His smooth baritone is in fine mettle throughout. You can see him in a velvet suit, clicking his fingers as he lulls out 'Give Them A Token', or on a stool, crooning out 'Bathing Birds'. A lesser voice wouldn't have carried these songs. Nothing on here is innovative, or new, or cutting edge. This is forgotten pop music, the music everyone got distracted from by musicians with beards, or fiddly guitar parts, or synths. Green's New York heritage is channelled on 'What Makes Him Act So Bad', a song that could easily appear on a Velvet Underground record, its simple chugging guitar backing the vocal melodies perfectly. 'Don't Call Me Uncle' could be Love. The Sixties never died – they were just endlessly recreated. Not everything on here works. The fuzzy guitar riff on 'Lockout' was annoying the first time everyone heard it. There are no indications here that that will ever change. Trumpets arrive on the chorus, too late to fix anything. The garage rock of 'Oh Shucks' doesn't fit in well with the timbre of smooth tranquillity elsewhere. As is typical of an album that fits 14 tracks into 32 minutes, there are no epic orchestral movements, no post rock mountains and valleys, no dub workouts. Minor Love is a record of succinct pop ditties, with only three clocking in over 150 seconds long. It fits in well with the internet generation, their shortened attention spans questing forever for everything. It fits in well with the elder generation, used to these classical tropes of songwriting. Unlike Sixes And Sevens, Green's remembered to keep things interesting. He's a grown man at last. |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 12:49 AM PST  The artist is Aim – a.k.a. Andy Turner, ATIC's co-founder. It sets an early high standard for other acts on the roster, but it's a standard which is only equalled by the compilation's closer. Another of Aim's compositions, with vocals provided by ONC, 'Before…' could easily be mistaken for Jurassic 5. Its crisp beat, propelled by pounding brass and dreamy rhythms is a perfect example of intelligent hip-hop: reflective, honest, authentic and credible. This might be what makes ATIC unlike other labels – it's the bosses who, instead of getting bogged down in marketing strategies and recording deadlines, are setting the high creative watermark for the other acts to live up to. Co-founder Nicole 'Niko' Vergel de Dios also pops up on Follow The Outline. First, on Gripper's remix of Aim's 'Northwest', her dancey vocals are hauntingly twisted and distorted. Unfortunately, with completely static drums and bass, the track lacks direction, and feels hollow, empty. Niko redeems herself on 'Womb': a jazzy lament, with sackloads of style and grace, if not originality. All of this leads to the assumption that Aim and Niko's earlier collaboration was let down by Gripper's knob-twiddling – an implication that appears to be confirmed by the artist's own tracks. 'Zombie' starts out like a sinister 'Billie Jean', but the breakdowns are dull and the theme becomes repetitive; 'The Right To Know' is a messy slow-build of an intro with no song at the end of it, that somehow sounds completely unfinished, despite failing to raise any anticipation; 'Styrofoam Head' consists of the same spoken-word sample - "There have been changes in the sea" – repeated over and over and over, which annoyingly distracts from the minimal development of the music itself. The track is unsuccessfully salvaged by a few random single-bar patterns that sound as though they were strung together in Fruity Loops in about ten minutes. Gripper's 'El Ruedo' however, is an achievement. It is an achievement in sounding remarkably like it was written to promote a central European city-break destination. Over-complicated drum patterns attempt to compensate for an unforgivably plain bass part, which is only padded out by daft jazz flourishes The quality of the rest of the acts is equally diverse. Paperboy show the other side of ATIC's sound, beyond the urban bravado. 'Bigfoot' is an enchanting folk ballad, beefed up with swirling psyche sound effects, and smoothed out with twee-as-you-like understated vocals. The band also happens to include – you guessed it – Andy 'Aim' Turner on guitar. Crowhead's 'Tackle Lad', by comparison, sounds like the soundtrack to a gory Nineties 16-bit video game, with squelchy bass and unimaginatively fuzzy synth. Three tracks by Death Of The Neighbourhood complete this compilation. 'The Beautiful Things We Dirtied Up' catches you off guard with soaring strings pushed way down in the mix, caught under a trippy drumbeat and lovelorn vocal harmonies. The unreservedly Brit-hop 'Cokeholes' on the other hand, is distinctive for its fuzzed-up Casablancas-esque vocals and unusually electronic beats – all remixed unsurprisingly by Andy 'Aim' Turner. Of course, it's hard to imagine a compilation – particularly one from a label that is only four years old – that couldn't be described as 'hit and miss' and Follow The Outline certainly fits that description. Yet, while there is room for improvement on many of the tracks included here, there's just enough energy captured throughout for the label to establish itself as one to keep an eye on in 2010. |
| Posted: 07 Jan 2010 02:36 AM PST  I always associated them with the current glut of underground post-hardcore/indie rock bands that litter Britain's toilet circuit; bands whose records and songs are so well regarded yet fail to register with me. Upon listening to Shield Em for the first time I can't say I was pleasantly surprised. Rather, I was shocked. Turns out I'd been unfairly judging Shield Your Eyes by the standards of their peers, rather than their own merits. Shield Em is explosive, interesting, engaging. It's things that the afore-referenced bands rarely manage. From the get go Shield Em grabs your attention. Right out of the gate, everything explodes into a mess of jagged guitar riffs and off kilter drumming. Parts twist and turn, go off at tangents, head to unexpected places, stop, start, then stop again. The clattering drums and spiky guitar work, underpinned by a jazzy, walking the dog approach to bass playing sets Shield Your Eyes somewhere between Off Minor and Paper Cut Out. Their approach to song writing seems to be playing one part until bored of it. Hence some riffs will only appear for a few bars and then be thrown away, whilst others, notably the one on closing track 'Sandy', go on for around six minutes. The problem with this is that a lot of songs merge into one long every changing, ever evolving riff. It's not a bad thing if you're approaching the record as a listener, but it makes it tough to isolate songs as a reviewer. Let me put it this way – I've had the opening part of 'Oranges' stuck in my head for days, along with 'Ultra Soul', and I was always assumed they were one long song. It's only after checking the tracklisting that I discovered the truth. It's similar to the principal that Lightning Bolt employ in their music; the idea of making riffs the focus of your songs, of constantly making small changes and throwing in odd curve balls here and there in order to keep things flowing. Riff after riff after riff. What sets Shield Your Eyes apart from their peers is their ability to keep things interesting. Whilst a lot of bands at the minute operate within the same ballpark, Shield Em towers above competitors. It somehow manages to mix post-hardcore with math rock, jazz and a bit of blues to great affect. I salute Shield Your Eyes for challenging my prejudices and making me realise that not every band on Britain's underground toilet circuit is shit; just most of them. |
| Iggy & The Stooges and more for Matt Groening ATP Posted: 06 Jan 2010 12:36 PM PST  A whole EIGHT bands have been added to that bill tonight, with Iggy & The Stooges being the most prominent, here's who else has been added to the bill. CocoRosie Who join these esteemed artists, already on the bill: Panda Bear The weekend takes place at Butlins, Minehead from May 7-9, and you can get your tickets from See Tickets, for either £170 or £160, depending on what sort of option you choose. You should know the deal by now. |
| Listen: Stream of Vampire Weekend's Contra Posted: 06 Jan 2010 09:50 AM PST  ...orrrrrrrrr read our own review of it. If you like it enough to actually buy it, it's out January 11 on XL Recordings. |
| Animal Collated: The round-up of what the criticis thought to 2009 Posted: 06 Jan 2010 10:19 AM PST  To cut the bullcrap, the people (?) over at Tomorrow Never Knows have rather handily collated a pile of end of year lists from British publications and websites and made a list of the most popularrrrro. First place in a list gets 50 points, down to 50th place which gets 1 point. Capisce? The publications which have been included are: Drowned in Sound, Music OMH, Gigwise, Q, NME, The Quietus, The Guardian, Uncut and God Is In The TV. Oh, and Alt Sounds, them too.
On a worldwide scale, Metacritic have done much the same thing, although they go on the score the publication gave an album, as opposed to its position in any year-end list. Here's their/our Top 25 of 2009. Scores are rated out of 100. Couple of unheards in there, for sure. Brad who?
As well as ALL of that lovely stuff, HypeM are also running their 2009 Zeitgeist this week, which is currently up to number 21 at the moment. I'm not going to give that away, but click here to see who they've included so far. Warning: includes Mumford & Sons. |
| Times New Viking: Coming this way in the Spring Posted: 07 Jan 2010 03:45 AM PST  Here are the UK dates: March: 17 - Manchester, Sound Control That's The Dome in Tufnell Park, by the way, not The Millennium Dome, which is now known as the O2 Arena. It's a very nice venue, seriously. They then visit mainland Europe for a whole bunch of dates - which can be found here -before tailing the tour off with another few dates in the UK. April: May: Watch the video below for 'Born Again Revisited'. IT MAY HURT YOUR TENDER, TENDER EARDRUMS. |
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