Drake – Take Care

Drake - Take Care

By Joe Bates

Aubrey ‘Drake‘ Graham occupies a very singular space in the music business, straddling the rap and alternative world through both the music he releases and the company he keeps. Comfortably one of the biggest names in the rap world, comfortable on the blockbuster tracks that this position entails, his own music indicates a broader approach than many of his contemporaries. The combination of his lyricism, which highlights insecurities, misgivings and doubts in a way that no other mainstream rapper would admit to considering, and his ‘sound’, which is associated with the low-key synth washes of main producer Noah ’40′ Shehib, makes him very distinctive indeed. His background, a Canadian with acting experience on a very successful TV show, is often used against him, but it is basically his main strength. He is a semi-outsider which might make him subject to crass criticism in the  spectacularly narrow-minded rap world, but the license it gives him for greater music expression and for exploring new ground more than makes up for it. … Continue Reading

Kurt Vile – So Outta Reach EP

Kurt Vile - So Outta Reach EP

By Joe Bates

Kurt Vile‘s Smoke Ring For My Halo, released earlier this year, is one of the year’s more complete releases. A very gentle listen, it hinged on Vile’s skill and instinct with the guitar, managing to achieve intimacy and directness with quite complex arrangements. His lyrical instincts were not as trusty – too often on that record, his rambling, personal style resulted in some astronomically awkward lines – but even with these moments, the record was still a success. In So Outta Reach, we have an EP featuring five songs from the same sessions, as well as a cover of the Bruce Springsteen track ‘Downtown Train’. … Continue Reading

Neon Indian – Era Extrana

Neon Indian - Era Extrana

By Joe Bates

In a week where M83 release an album that would have even in the 1980s been described as ‘a bit much’, it’s clear that decades revivalism is still going very strong. What started as quirky attempts to approximate the sound snowballed into certain bands wanting to hone in solely on a nostalgia that many music fans have for those years, whether or not they were old enough to actually remember anything, musical or otherwise, from the time. A whole genre has developed around it, and one of the principal ‘chillwave’ artists is Neon Indian, the main project of Alan Palomo, whose album Era Extrana was released last month. … Continue Reading

Slow Club – Paradise

Slow Club - Paradise

By Joe Bates

If you’ve got a friend of the aspiring-singer-songwriter variety, and you’re any kind of friend, it’s likely you’ve attended your fair share of open mic events to offer support. For nights that revolve around sensitive souls with acoustic guitars, they can be brutal; the more nuanced a song, the louder the audience chatter, so the more interesting artists are always at risk of being swept aside. Earnestness tends to be the weapon that most of the singers wield to cut through the indifference, but when this doesn’t work, you need an extra selling point to turn the heads of those impatiently waiting for their friend to play. … Continue Reading

Zomby – Dedication

The ever-shifting and ever-morphing world of ‘dubstep’ and everything that word is meant to represent, is at this point the stuff of potential PHD theses. For now, we can leave that to someone who has the requisite grant money and spare time and just talk about Zomby‘s particular place within it. One of the bigger names of early dubstep, his major contribution was the excellent rave-tribute album Where were U in 92?, which combined the euphoria of the second summer of love with the stomch-troubling bass drops of dubstep. After that, the One Foot Ahead of the Other EP came in 2009, but in relative terms, he’s been fairly quiet, particularly for someone who apparently writes ’70 or 100 tunes’ a week, each in 15 to 20 minutes. Now in 2011, with the world of dubstep seemingly in a very different place than when he left it, he’s back with his second full-length, Dedication. … Continue Reading

Clams Casino – Rainforest EP

New Jersey’s Mike Volpe, aka Clams Casino, has had a rapid, heartening rise into public consciousness. Something near to a genuine word-of-mouth sensation, he made incredible music for rappers like Lil B and Soulja Boy, who alternately destroyed his beats in both the positive and negative senses of the term. After releasing a very, very good free mixtape of some of his beats via Twitter, people began to notice that they were richly evocative pieces of music in their own right – often working better as instrumentals in fact. Tri Angle Records picked up on this and have signed up to release this short, 5 track EP of new material. … Continue Reading

Primavera Sound Festival Review – Part 3

26-28 May, 2011

The final part of our round-up of Primavera. Parts 1 and 2 can be found here and here respectively

Saturday
Due to bad planning on my part, myself and my travelling partner have to check out early in the morning on the Saturday after 5 hours sleep. We at this point know our flight is at 10.20 the following morning, and with airport transfers and such, it will be 30 hours before we will be able to be comfortably horizontal. So we start the day with some nice sitting down at the beautiful Auditori venue for John Cale performing Paris 1919. It’s a wonderful experience, and the orchestra and Cale boom out the songs, which transfer naturally from the introspective tone on that record to a setting such as this one. An encore which lasts almost as long and focusses on old and new material is wildly inconsistent, and too much for a lot of people to take. At one point, during what sounds like a new lounge trip-hop song, people stream to the exits as if Cale had just dedicated it to Franco. It’s difficult to take in some of this material with the level of tiredness I’m feeling, but he’s earned the right to do it after playing songs like ‘Paris 1919′ and ‘Andalucia’.

… Continue Reading

Primavera Sound Festival Review – Part 2

26-28 May, 2011

Part 2 of our 3 part review. You can read Part 1 here. Don’t miss the final part tomorrow.

Friday

The best intentions go awry at Primavera, and you end up missing bands you want to see because it’s too damn early to stop sitting down and drinking cheap drinks outside the festival. Fiery Furnaces fall by the wayside because of this ruthless reality, and it’s James Blake instead at 8.30pm which kicks things off for me. He manages to surprise constantly during his set, and is like Gold Panda in that he has found a very legitimate way to perform his sample-based music live. Even the Burial-esque ‘Klavierwerke’ is performed entirely live, with Blake singing out the repeated sample whilst reproducing the sub-bass on his keyboard. His album might have been more potential than the finished product, but he is very impressive here.

… Continue Reading

Primavera Sound Festival Review – Part 1

26-28 May, 2011

Part 1 of our bumper 3 part round up of Primavera 2011. You can read Part 2 here tomorrow.

With a typically amazing lineup, Barcelona´s Primavera Sound festival took place last weekend. A mix of nearly all the best bands doing the rounds, it often redefines the meaning of “painful clash” – Pulp versus Kode9 playing a set of Burial material, Low coming up against Belle and Sebastian, the fear in your mind over what major sacrifices would have to be made if the Champions League final ran into extra time and you had to make a choice between football and PJ Harvey. Luckily no matter what you see, you can be pretty sure it´ll be at least interesting, and it all takes place in a nice climate on the seafront, so you’re less concerned if a guitar freakout goes on a bit longer than it necessarily needs to if or you miss a band you previously thought helped define your life because your legs ache a bit. … Continue Reading

Katy B – On A Mission

Whereas most schools, rightly or wrongly, stream pupils into classes based on their test scores and academic ability, the Brit School in South London surely must do it in a way to make sure the grip on every facet of the charts is as tight as it can be. ‘Jessie J, get to your ‘How to hide extremely grating music with ridiculous clothes/Lady Gaga lesson, now!’ ‘Adele, Leona Lewis, those millions of records aren’t going to sell themselves – concentrate on your big ballad work’. And with the onset of the Jamie Woons’ and Katy Bs’ of the world, we can assume that a certain class are being asked to concentrate on the urban/dubstep sound and see what they can do with it. Maybe in sixth-form they took a field-trip to FWD and were given ketamine to put in their pre-packed lunches. Either way, they represent a new type of Brit-school graduate, with a cooler, more urban sound, one that collaborates with producers like Burial, Skream, and Benga. They probably only ever met up with the others in the classes that everyone had to attend, like General Studies and Cockney Accent Practice. … Continue Reading