The-Dream – Love King

The-Dream - Love King

“Actually, can we turn it off?”. Six words and one piece of punctuation to break the heart of anyone who insecurely tries to introduce people to new music, and the very thing said to me as I played The-Dream‘s Love King to a friend. “Oh…okay” was my response, well-below my usual high standard of ‘well of course you wouldn’t like it, you like (name of perfectly reasonable band picked on out of spite)’. I couldn’t hide the fact that her reaction was understandable. After sitting through a song about how a woman upset about their partner’s adultery is easily mollified by being bought an expensive bag, the next song about a woman who already had a boyfriend, ‘but I had to pursue her/he ain’t ever there, so she let me do her’, proved too much. It was, as mentioned, understandable.  … Continue Reading

Singles of the week – the battle of the divas

Kylie Minogue

It’s here. The battle of two of the biggest pop-divas in the world. The seasoned Australian princess versus the outrageous, never-far-from-nude upstart. Kylie and Lady GaGa release CD singles on the same day today, and what a battle we have on our hands. Except we don’t, because of bloody downloads ruining all the fun – they’re both already in the top ten, with the GaGa song entering its tenth week.

It seems that the days of hyped up chart battles are over, but worry not – the two singles will be pitted against each other in this very column in a competition as intense as, if far, far less lucrative than, any chart battle. There will also be reviews of other new singles, including The Futureheads and Revere, although these won’t involve any element of competition. … Continue Reading

Neon Indian, Visions of Trees and DAM Mantle, London, CAMP Basement

Neon Indian

May 20, 2010

Thursday night at CAMP basement in Old Street sees the coming together of Neon Indian, Visions of Trees, and Dam Mantle, all three implausibly attractive given the fact the music they make involves hours of sitting at a laptop. Neon Indian are the main draw, with their Psychic Chasms record doing well critically last year. A bringing together of strong electro-pop songs with lo-fi fuzziness and nostalgia, it showed a lot of promise and there is a good deal of anticipation to see how it will translate live.

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Apollo/This is for all Mankind – Brighton Pavillion Theatre

Brian Eno

May 1, 2010

Brian Eno’s 1983 soundtrack performed by Icebreaker and BJ Cole

Brian Eno‘s stint curating this year’s Brighton Festival begins presiding over an interpretation of his 1983 Apollo album, a collaboration with his brother Roger and Daniel Lanois, set to the film it originally soundtracked, This is for all Mankind by Al Reinert. Those familiar with the album will need no explanation as to why this is worth getting excited over: shifting and pulsing between the uncomplicated beauty that characterises Eno’s early ambient work and the isolating darkness of works such as ‘On Land’, the record represents a true masterpiece of the genre.   … Continue Reading

Pantha du Prince – Black Noise

Pantha Du Prince - Black Noise

You can nearly always hazard a guess as to what music an artist has been listening to when hearing their album, but rarely can you do it upon just seeing the title. To name this album ‘Black Noise’, we can safely assume that Hendrik Weber’s musical diet consists of Mika, classical chillout compilations and a radio station that only plays birdsong. It’s hard to imagine another way that the man known as Pantha du Prince could have looked at himself in the mirror and said, “Pantha, this isn’t warm, pleasant, ultimately rather dull noise that you’ve created. Oh no, this is black noise. And that is what you should name the album.” … Continue Reading

Classic album: David Bowie’s Lodger

Bowie's Lodger

By 1977, the collaboration between David Bowie and Brian Eno was running out of steam, which is fair enough when the last two years had each produced a genuine masterpiece of ambition and invention. Their final work together, Lodger, a more blurred musical vision than either of the previous two, is seen to represent the duo veering away from each others musical trajectories. After it, Bowie would lunge again at the mainstream, at first cautiously with Scary Monsters, and then without abandon with Let’s Dance. Eno, on the other hand, was busy hitching his wagon to David Byrne’s jerky star, making albums every bit as experimental and impressive as Low and Heroes.

Lodger is indeed noticeably distinct from the duo’s previous efforts. The first track hints at it – an epic ballad, ‘Fantastic Voyage’, is driven entirely by a piano and Bowie’s beautiful vocal, crooning a lyric which has a clear narrative of Cold War-era paranoia (it even contains a clear threat, that Bowie would ‘never sing anything nice again’ if bombs were dropped. The Cold War ended a mere ten years after this song – coincidence?). Its coherence and traditionalism would not have got anywhere near the preceding albums. Nor would the three chart-friendly singles, ‘DJ’, ‘Boys Keep Swinging’, and ‘Look Back in Anger’, all placed next to each other in the centre of the album for ease of picking. And following these, there are simply more songs  – no more long ambient tracks of harsh, isolated piano stabs. There are in fact no instrumentals on this album, and without Adrian Belew’s coruscating guitar continually turning songs on their head with layers of noise, it would be Bowie’s most accessible album for some years.

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