Altar Eagle - Mechanical Gardens

Mechanical Gardens is the latest release from husband and wife Brad Rose and Eden Hemming’s Altar Eagle. It’s a soft lit romp between warm, fuzzy synthesisers and glassy techno bathed in the saturation of a super 8 camera. It could be the soundtrack to some hazy evening lost to the corner of an ATP chalet, or a dusty field filled with summer time, hangovers and the peaceful slow motion of an over heated, relaxed mind.

Considering his other projects (The North Sea, ajilvsga, Alligator Crystal Moth) Rose isn’t the first name you would naturally associate with soft focussed alt-pop but Mechanical Gardens is a triumph of rich, flowing electronic dream pop that offers ease of access into its nine crumbling, colour-bled tracks without resorting to gimmickry or forfeiting its calm, ethereal qualities to po-faced demands for melody.

Throughout the album, your ears are drawn to wandering through the mental record collection within your head, gliding across names of artists conjured, like quotations, from Mechanical Gardens. However, this isn’t a brand of deja vu or some hatchet hint at something not entirely original at the heart of the album. On the contrary, you feel as if the two halves of Altar Eagle have travelled through their own musical influences and arrived at something entirely their own on the other side.

From the very start, the shoegazing of Slowdive collides with M.I.A.’s sample snatches and aching synths as they pour through opener ‘Battlegrounds’ before delving into ‘Honey’. Further on we find the haunting mumbles of ‘Monsters’ housed in what feels like Bloc Party on one of their more successful electronic jaunts, reshuffled and reassembled with fuzzy, static soaked velcro. Altar Eagle even try splicing detroit techno with My Bloody Valentine’s Butcher/Shields vocal dynamics for later track ‘Spy Movie’. Closing the album, ‘Six Foot Arms’ holds something of the Animal Collective about it with its scatty background and pulsing, prodding synths that stab in and out of the fore. It’s hard not to fall into compiling a list whilst attempting to convey the vast spread of mental music triggers littered throughout.

At times, Mechanical Gardens feels like some witty set of remixes fired about by two battling DJs in the throws of the friendliest of rivalries. As an album its a hypnotic 45 minutes of shoegazing, ethereal dream pop with a beating techno heart that rips your mind to pieces with joy as you unfurl the layers of each track. Your brain will race with every connection it creates from the rich soup of influences on offer, but it can’t get in the way of such an enjoyable oddity of an album.

Ten Kens - For Posterity

Following a couple of personnel changes within their ranks the Toronto noiseniks Ten Kens locked themselves away from the world for a number of months to gestate this, For Posterity, their second album, and boy does it sound like it. Loud is definitely the word of the hour here whilst the sense of the frustration born of too much time in each others’ company is palpable throughout, so clearly they fed off the self-imposed studio confinement.

Whilst generally maintaining the clear breadth of influences that characterised their self-titled debut there is though less immediacy about the songs on this album and it’ll take a few listens to bed itself down in the discerning listener’s aural palate. Vocals are more often than not little more than swoops up and down the extent of singer Dan Workman’s range it seems and recognisable words are at a premium. Coupled with many lengthy instrumental passages that morph from proto-psych through to hardcore in the space of a single song and you’re in possession of one of the more challenging albums of the year to date. Third song, ‘Insignificant Other’, is a perfect example of this marrying of genres.

That track though signals the point at which the band’s vision begins to cohere and from then on, after the aforementioned few listens, it’s possible to see what they’re aiming for. By the time the halfway-point tune ‘Summer Camp’ is reached it’s reasonable to ask the question of whether the band are in fact the new Pixies, such is the riffage they produce and the range that Workman’s pipes can cover. ‘Grassmaster’ however is more the illegitimate offspring of This Is Hell coupling with Frightened Rabbit.

‘Style Wars’ takes rather too long to get to wherever it wants to be but things pick up again on ‘Hard Sell’ and from that point on it’s a straight run to the finish. The band have then come up with a distinctly better than average second album and that time spent in enforced proximity to each other has more than paid off.

Fan Death - Womb Of Dreams

We’ve all been there – wondered if Dave Grohl has died again this week and ended up three hours later stuck in a never-ending carousel of Wikipedia entries. Criticised for its lack of accuracy (although for reliability, the BBC has it only a gnat’s chuff off the Encyclopedia Britannica – but then, I found that factoid from Wikipedia itself), as “free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual, encyclopedia projects” go (again, lifted from Wikipedia’s entry on itself, which is already some fucked up feedback loop), when it comes to binging on pointless information, it’s a pretty cool resource to have.

Vampire Weekend-supporting Vancouver-via-Brooklyn outfit Fan Death, then, must have been cursing when that list of the fifty most interesting Wikipedia entries was passed around the internet last year. Suddenly their kooky name, not a threat to their over-familiar followers but taken from an urban myth blown up by media scaremongering in Korea (a spate of deaths attributed to leaving an electric fan on overnight, if you don’t know already) didn’t sound so obscure – losing them valuable cool points. No Erol Alkan remix is going to save them from the indignity of that.

Turns out that obscurity isn’t what Fan Death are gunning for. Loading up on more genres than a particularly large branch of Blockbuster Videos (which I guess isn’t saying much) – and taking the view that pop producers are actually the only ones taking risks these days – they seem to have their sights fixed on the charts. This is a pretty slick slice of cosmopolitan disco, but for all the glossy sheen there’s that lingering suspicion that you can’t polish a turd, and if, under the layers of glitter, that’s what this is.

The creeping clutter of strings that greets listeners with Womb Of Dreams’ opener ‘Constellations’ is a star-gazing suggestion that this is going to be epic. It leads into early single ‘Veronica’s Veil’, which is perhaps closer to where the heart of this piece lies. Full of mirrorball pomp, it does it’s best to dress this up as the likely heir to Hercules and Love Affair – if it didn’t come across as a calculated attempt to tap into the Florence and the Machine market.

Indeed, singer Dandilion Wind Opaine (who, with the video to earlier release ‘Cannibal’ to her name, has some right to claim responsibility for the band’s image) has seemingly been groomed with toppling the current indie darling cum pop queen in mind, which is fine as long as you’re comfortable with the feeling that you’re being targeted as a market sector rather than as a person. Her patter is supposed to come across as a sultry purr but grates these ears. By ‘The Best Night of my Life’, the whole affair feels like a set-up date where the other party is revealing Fatal Attraction-levels of interest and you’re trying to size up the nearest exit.

A shame because when they get it right, Fan Death’s brand of exotic Kasbah funk hints at an ability to incinerate dancefloors. But from the get-go, and particularly in the lead track, this feels obviously orchestrated – maybe overly so.

PVT - Church With No Magic

While being robbed of their vowels by similarly-named Yank band Pivot would present something of an issue on Countdown, it seems to have proved a blessing in disguise for Aussie electro three-piece PVT. Not only does their new handle sound more like a physics equation, sitting comfortably with their bleepy maths rock output, they’ve used it as an opportunity to start over. And from the title onwards, this is an exercise in spiritual rebirth.

Beyond the name, the most obvious new development is that they have literally found their voice on Church With No Magic. Rather than applying vocal noises as just another layer of instrumentation, the songs are increasingly shaped around frontman Richard Pike’s actual singing, and his talent is such that you wonder why he didn’t pipe up earlier.

Married with the vocals is a resurgent interest in the mechanics of songwriting. While the majority of the album leans more towards atmospherics, off-kilter beats and electronic throbs, there are elements of the traditional craft. Take ‘Window’, which marks the mid-way point of this enterprise – it’s a bona fide single, with a mantra-like chorus and everything. (It even has its own video, which – as the live shots show – this may be electronic music, but you can’t dance to it).

Given the slight reincarnation, there’s obvious parallels with Joy Division and New Order – in fact, their sound is often caught somewhere in between. More accurately, you could look at them as a reverse Radiohead, moving towards epic early U2-scale traditional songwriting but dragging the wonky electronica of their label Warp with them. Be thinking cascading gothic future-retro – like Interpol plugged into a sinister calculator.

Not that opener ‘Community’, thick with its pulsing Doctor Who-like reverb and Gregorian chanting, suggests a new approach. If anything, it serves as a statement of where this band has just come from rather than where the album is going. Leave that to ‘Light Up Bright Fires’, where trademark Boards of Canada blips boil into something you might recognise as a “song”.

‘Window’ is certainly a stand-out moment, and a much-needed release given the density of the rest of the album – like the dark matter out in space, it’s the gravitational pull of the stuff that seems to exist beyond our sensory perception that keeps this album together, but a breather is nice.

‘Timeless’ is the take-no-prisoners everything-but-the-kitchen-sink epic ending (that isn’t quite, since it’s the penultimate track), building up around a dirty bassline borrowed from Leftfield, only to grind like a heavily-buffered YouTube clip of itself. This leaves ‘Only The Wind Can Hear You’ to round things off, bringing to the foreground the borrowed Vangelis sound that’s hardwired into this band’s DNA. Tellingly, a large portion of this album hinges on the same model Roland employed for the Blade Runner soundtrack (only doctored with a piece of tape to read “Poland”).

A great leap for the band, this is one of those occasions when a step towards what you could consider mainstream appeal actually works. You can only assume that the Church With No Magic of the title refers to how effective various religious orders might be if they ditched all the dogma and mumbo-jumbo and the differences that result in persecution and war and got down to the core reason for their existence in the first place – bringing people together.

Dylan Leblanc - Paupers Field

What Paupers Field does so beautifully is show that true anguish is weary and unhurried; heartbreaking in its resignation. Born-in-the-90s Dylan Leblanc, and indeed the album itself, are preceded by an impressively dramatic bio: dropping out of school to hang out with musicians, the murder of his grandfather, and his own drinking and depression all vie for pole position in his list of influences.  As he sings on the opening track, “Are you feeling alright? Are you feeling low?”, you can’t help wonder who he’s talking to – us or himself.

Such archetypical Deep South musical credentials means that, in a less secure pair of hands, this album is in grave danger off sliding into cliché and self-indulgence. Colourful family history? Check. Evidence of own personal anguish and potential slide into addiction? Check. Swooning steel guitar and delicately picked melodies? Check.  Protégé of established and great country star? Check out Emmylou Harris on guest vocal duties. But Leblanc pays tribute to the idea that something can be so much greater than the sum of its parts, and translates his life experiences and feelings into something both musically brilliant and emotionally moving.

One of the album’s highlights is perhaps the least typically ‘country’ track, ‘5th Avenue Bar’, where Leblanc pushes against heavy cellos to articulate his despair at having nothing left of a relationship but a picture in a locket – a deliciously nostalgic idea from someone of a generation for whom photo memories are more common in pixelated form. Like many creative types of his age, he’s obsessed with ideas of the past, both real and imagined. This album is full of ghosts, sometimes literally; on ‘The Death of Outlaw Billy John’, he tells the tale of the moments up to an execution and the weeping of the relatives of this condemned man, with empathy and aplomb that you can’t help but feel something for this man, even though he was guilty of ‘fourteen banks and thirteen cold blooded murders.’

The instrumentation on this album is undeniably beautiful, but if it weren’t for Leblanc’s vocals,  this album would loiter in ‘very good’ instead of, as it does, striding determinedly into ‘outstanding.’  His voice, smoky and forlorn, sounds like it’s been around far longer than his 20 years, and as he croons and howls his way through these twelve tracks, trailing vowels and misery, there isn’t a single moment of insincerity or posturing. Dylan Leblanc, and his Louisiana brand of tragedy are as real as they come. Both absorbed in and reflecting on his own misery, instead of alienating the listener he draws us in and leaves us hanging on every modest word.

Magic Kids - Memphis

I don’t know whether it’s jealousy mixed with sheer admiration but I’m always quite wary of good music made by kids and at the same time incredibly envious of their youthful optimism and wide eyed innocence, as yet uncorrupted by the fickle music world. A great example of one of those bands is Magic Kids, a young band from Memphis who are attracting huge online attention for their sunny update of the ’60s California pop/Beach Boys sound despite only having had a few songs hit the blogosphere over the past year or so. That’s all it takes these days though and it has secured them a signing with True Panther Sounds and a debut album, Memphis.

Where Magic Kids differ slightly from their contemporaries such as Smith Westerns (with whom they released a split 7” with earlier this year) is their ability to capture the same energy and transfer it into a more complex song structure. The sound not so much borrows from the classic US pop template of the ‘60s as continues and updates it (think Beach Boys and Spector) which is unusual for bands of Magic Kids age, who generally prefer three chord fuzzing to high harmonies, sleigh bells and strings parts.

The accomplished song craft on show is accompanied by saccharine lyrics that, although far from being derivative and obvious, do centre around first girlfriends, summer flings and teenage crushes – prime subject matter for classic pop and done in the naive and clean cut manner of those early Beatles songs and, although it turns lot of people off, seems appropriate for the Magic Kids happy-go-lucky sound. The bands manifesto is to “spread happiness to the world” which they attempt with promising results on this record. Although the lack of aggression or even a hint of distortion anywhere is usually construed as safe, boring music, I think their case is an exception.

Lead single ‘Hey Boy’ is the best example of just how prominently the Beach Boys sound features on this record. The lead vocal echoes a young Brian Wilson, but I daresay if it sounded like McCartney then the whole mood of the album would seem Beatle-esque as the music is so set in that era. The only time there’s any straying from the plan is on ‘Little Red Radio’ and even then only toward the very end of the song. The instrumentation and structure of all the songs borrow from the Pet Sounds style – guitars are often substituted for strings, brass and luscious backing which gives the record a depth and a sense of timelessness, as demonstrated heavily on album highlight ‘Hideout’.

Perhaps the best thing about Magic Kids is how they manage to use the ‘60s sound so well in their music without it sounding silly. The 1960s is the most dredged decade for style ideas across the musical spectrum but the results usually either come up short or piled too high with references to be taken seriously – luckily Magic Kids have struck the perfect balance. Don’t expect even the slightest nudge of the envelope on this record though, it’s just 100% pop brilliance worthy of all the praise it gets.

Women - Public Strain

Most bands create albums from the small to the large, using songs as component parts to build their long players, often without knowing how these constructs will turn out. Some bands, however, see the bigger picture from the outset. They know what they want to build and they know how each component must be shaped in a particular way to fit their blueprint. Women fall into this latter group and Public Strain, as silly as it sounds, is an album for album lovers.

Taken individually, each song offers only glimpses of what Public Strain is all about. There are a couple of highlights which may show off the album’s qualities better than other tracks but Women haven’t crafted this as an album to dip into briefly now and again – its intent is to wholly envelop you, seeping into your pores gradually like having a long soak in the bath. Each song flows into and compliments the previous one, and throughout the entirety of the album’s run time there is neither a single miss-step nor one second of filler.

The flow between the opening couple of tracks, ‘Can’t You See’ and ‘Heat Distraction’ is the strongest example of this. The former is a noisy, distorted quagmire of detuned orchestral instrumentation, flat vocals and just the merest hint of melody at the point where the orchestra opens up in the mid section. The latter however begins with simplistic spikes of guitar, which are made more melodious only because of the murk which precedes them. It’s almost incomprehensible how such a simple, ramshackle piece of music can sound so vital and interesting – you may not hear it on your first listen but your ears will be in rapture on subsequent plays.

‘Narrow with the Hall’ is the closest Public Strain comes to offering a memorable, hummable tune. This is not an album that exults in hooks and melodic refrains but this track is as close to a very old school, two and a half minute pop gem as anything else Women offer here. This isn’t to say that there are no other breaks from the shade and drone. ‘Penal Colony’ offers something more contemplative with its delicately strummed guitar and dreamy, echoey vocals and ‘Locust Valley’ has a cleaner, lighter sound, even throwing a brilliantly under-used semi-chorus simply made up of reluctant ‘ooooohs’.

The two previously mentioned highlights are ‘China Steps’ and closing track ‘Eyesore’. ‘China Steps’ builds slowly with a foreboding bass line that is scissored open by mechanical guitar squeals. The bass and guitar thrillingly snipe back and forwards at each other like an embittered married couple, before settling their differences and rolling towards a beautifully spaced out closing. ‘Eyesore’ feels exactly how an album closer should. It encapsulates and perhaps expands on everything that has come before, sounding more classically formed whilst still taking in the haunting drones, hinted melodies and spiky guitars of the rest of the album.

Public Strain is a gloriously complete album. It’s unique, utterly absorbing and holds a mysterious, unquantifiable characteristic which transfixes the listener like the swinging pocket watch of a hypnotist.

Everything Everything - Man Alive

Here is a conversational exchange (done via The Email) between our Albums Editor Greg Salter and our Overlord-of-sorts Natalie Shaw, about the sparkly-fresh new album Man Alive by hot young things Everything Everything. It’s because we couldn’t contain our excitement in the space of a conventional one-person-to-a-reader format, so needed to gather heads and take a metaphorical trip to the sweet shop and back home via magic carpet.

Natalie: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the thing that sets Everything Everything apart from the crowd is the fizziness of their songs. They’re a truly great band, and they’ve got this stride to them – they’re not afraid of how untouchable they are. It’s like they’re shouting “bollocks to making music that sounds unusual, and we’re certainly not going to patronise you – we know you’re all clever enough to love us as much as we love our music”; they’re not even acknowledging that their contrasts, ambitions and flinches are unusual. I feel guilty for even mentioning that what they’re doing is so abnormally excellent but it’s got to be said – there’s nothing vaguely common or garden going on here…

Greg: There’re about three albums worth of ideas condensed down to 12 songs on Man Alive, which is innovative in itself at the moment seeing as a lot of bands are happy to settle on one good idea and plug away at it across a whole record, particularly on a debut. An abundance of ideas does not necessarily make a great record though – what’s great is that, most of the time, the band manage to fuse them together in ways that shouldn’t work, or at least shouldn’t have been attempted. Though it’s been around for what feels like years, ‘Photoshop Handsome’ is a case in point – pure sonic bravery that they’ve carried over to the record as a whole.

Natalie: It’s that it’s so familiar in spite of being so foreign, isn’t it. You can trace those spitfire rhymes back to hip-hop – I could go on but it doesn’t matter who they love and what bits of x or y person’s craft they’ve lifted into this fizz. It’s beyond human how many ideas are there, and that they’re by no means buried underneath the lead vocal, the hook – it’s all right there, unabashed and unafraid. Man Alive sounds so big, brash and brightly coloured, and their name’s the aptest thing ever. I bow to them.

Greg: I’ve listened to Man Alive an embarassing number of times, and I still don’t know what half of these songs are about. ‘My Kz, Ur BF’ is like watching a Coronation Street omnibus on fast forward, with its explosions and romantic entanglements flying by at breakneck speed. At other times, it’s like listening to a hip-hop record – you won’t catch all the great lines first, second, third time around, but they’re waiting for you.

Natalie: They’re squealing to be understood. Squealing “MEEEE, skip back five seconds and listen to meeee!”, jostling against each other. They’re making the effort, and some. But if the whole thing were at such breakneck speed, it’d be grating…

Greg: Too right – on its own ‘Two For Nero’ feels like a failed experiment, but it’s perfect between ‘Photoshop Handsome’ and ‘Suffragette Suffragette’. ‘Tin (The Manhole)’ serves a similar purpose later on – it’s easily their prettiest moment and it’s quietly become one of my favourite songs on the second side.

Natalie: It’s like the seeing-them-live dilemma; after two visits, I now know that it’s impossible for them to sound like they’re running at the same pace as their songs. Genuinely impossible. It’s too much. But to let that be a dampener isn’t akin to admiting defeat, oh no – it simply provides a counterpoint. It depends on your threshold for treasured bands meeting studio-quality live (because that’s what Average Joe ponders upon entering the doors of an O2 Academy, Barfly etc) as to whether that tempers just how incredible a band they are. For me, there is absolutely no way that it does. Though that said, I feel that ‘Qwerty Finger’ lets the side down – I find its verses too plodding, the builds comparatively undramatic (hey, this is relative) and the choruses that percentage point too hysterical. The same could be said of its qualities, all told…

Greg: I think it could prove to be a deal breaker for the many people coming to this album still waiting to be convinced. I’d tell them to hang in there though, as that track precedes a quite astonishing four-song run. I can see some lazy reviews making superficial comparisons with Queen and/or prog rock, and it’s here that you might be tempted to admit that they have a point – they do the frantic pace and abrupt changes better on other songs. It’s not without its charms though – Jonathan’s yelps and the tumbling guitars and synths suggest they aren’t taking themselves completely seriously..

Natalie: And let’s go back to the lyrics to indulge Jonathan Everything in a bit more revelry. Fig. 1, ‘Photoshop Handsome’: “I have skin like a waxen peel/ and a face that I can never feel”. And heck, the track’s title alone… this is proper contemporary genius, innit.

Greg: Or “My teeth dazzle like an igloo wall/ I inhabit, I inhabit y’all”. Or every other line to be honest.

Natalie: But what the heck does it all mean? Imagine someone chatting you up with these lines? It’d probably work on me. Imagine someone looking at you “like “woah!”" (as on ‘My Kz, Ur BF’). They take the whole quick-syllable thing from Destiny’s Child et al to a new level. And the extraordinary falsetto is like Beyonce in Dreamgirls-mode or even Prince fronting The Futureheads, according to me after a few too many G&Ts – quite apt, even though I cringed at myself at the time.

Greg: I like that description. This record does remind me a bit of being excited by the debuts by Maxïmo Park and The Futureheads in 2004 – Man Alive has a similarly frantic eagerness about it. More recently there was Wild Beasts’ first record, which bears similarities in that Everything Everything are so unique that their sound is yet to fully develop – don’t bet against a Two Dancers-standard follow up. They look to a broader set of influences though, for sure – Destiny’s Child, definitely. Missy Elliot too, OutKast. You could even make a case for nods towards artists as far removed as The Pet Shop Boys and Brian Eno.

Natalie: The desperation in it all and the feeling that they’re on borrowed time in the listener’s ears, it’s absolutely a parallel. There’s such an amazing contrast between Everything Everything’s influences and those being referenced by “the hype bands” (ack) – they make Yuck’s Archers of Loaf impressions seem uneducated and lazy, and some-time tour pals Darwin Deez (at a push, a Mr. Motivator fanboy) and Hurts (Elemental-era Tears For Fears? Getting desperate now…) look less and less oxygen-worthy. It’s the effort thing again, and the breadth of knowledge at play.

And Man Alive is such great fodder for the crap writer. The one that listens to 30 seconds of a song, and immediately files their 300 words – Everything Everything are masters of the music-hack mousetrap.  On a listen to a snippet, they’ll find veritable festivals of similes spewing from their synapses, begging to be snapped up. “Like a non Pop Idol Liberty X if they’d had a course in songwriting from an LSD-high The Young Knives”. You get the picture.

But I must briefly halt for Man Alive does have its faults, which arise from how Everything Everything come crashing and stumbling on at such velocity that the production sometimes finds itself playing catch-up. And there’s some filler too, which is frustrating – and leads to the thought process that it may’ve worked better as an EP. But then would it’ve sounded too saturated?

Greg: I think the moments of filler help pace the album – I think they’re still developing new dimensions and angles to their sound. The speed with which they’ve come on is frightening – I saw them live on three occasions between early 2009 and early 2010 and they’d jumped forward each time.

Natalie: We’re absolutely agreed on their progress – I saw them at Stag & Dagger in 2009 and they didn’t blow me away. But maybe that’s because without having the recorded songs to compare the performances with, it was just too much? I have a slight fear that this is what happened in the studio; the producer didn’t quite know what to do with them. I just want the best for this band, as if I have a personal interest; all criticisms here are of course to be borne in mind of just how stonking this debut is. It’s an uber-stonking record.

Take the astounding ‘Schoolin”, for example. It’s more lithe than any of the other arrangements on Man Alive. The build ups are SLICK, and those sucked-up harmonies pinpointing the main line in the chorus and the introduction of the funky guitars are unimaginably brilliant. The space-age keyboard whizzing, the whirling feelings and the lyrics: “I’ve got myself a fire hydrant with more tyrant and watery blast than all of my past”. They are amazing. It is just brilliant.

Greg: True. If anyone’s still wondering what Man Alive sounds like, they should listen to ‘Schoolin” – it’s the most complete summation of Everything Everything’s sound and hints at the twist and turns they take on the rest of the album.

Natalie: And ‘Final Form’, which is a huge pop song just like the rest. I’m going to be That Lazy Journalist here, and say it’s like the moment ‘Danger Of The Water’ entered my ears on The Futureheads’ debut – it adds a whole new level, maaan. There are no similarities in in any other way, it’s just a parallel cherry on top.

Greg: I think ‘Final Form’ is my favourite. It’s subtler than the others and easy to miss on a first side where the songs, well… aren’t subtle. I think it’s the woozy synths on the chorus that make it – the drums are blinding too. Jonathan’s range is more obvious on other songs, definitely, but he sounds positively soulful here. It suggests that Everything Everything could build in completely new directions without losing any of their eccentricities.

See this: “Princess Diana abbatoir sea anenome fox fire hydrant A4 paper taking over the guillotine the taj mahal o zone layer faraday cage sitting on fences pedigree chum engines burning polythene bags keyboard bloody hands clapping everything everything”. Yep.

WILL YOU ALL GO AND BUY IT NOW, PLEASE?

The Whiskey Priest - Wave And Cloud

The Whiskey Priest is in fact Seth Austin, a singer songwriter with an impressive beard and a country outlook who makes his music in Austin, the San Francisco of Texas. As well as the beard, he has a fine moniker, culled from Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory (although the ‘e’ he adds to ‘whiskey’ brings in curious Irish overtones). His first album, begun in a church attic on a four-track, arrives weighed down by a high risk press release from record label, Rainboot.  It declares, “It’s probably fairly unusual that a record label can, with any real level of honesty at least, suggest that they’re about to release a truly ‘classic’ album – one that could actually affect its audience to the point where it deserves the tag ‘life-changing’ – but we have that record.” Support for your artists is laudable, but probably only Blood on the Tracks, Here Come the Warm Jets and Kimono My House could live up to a billing like that. Rainboot sets Wave and Cloud up to be sinus-clearingly, mind-warpingly good.  And although it’s not so bad, it falls some way short of the standards unhelpfully set by excitable marketing types.

First track, ‘Seafarer’s Lament’, has ambitious and life-changing written all over it.  Seth gives us 9 minutes 25 seconds of slow burn, his soulful voice building a long crescendo throughout the entire song.  It’s a remarkably confident way to open your first album, and The Whiskey Priest sound is readily identifiable from the first notes – gentle bass scraping in the distance, acoustic strumming in the foreground. The song takes the form of a storm at sea rumbling on the horizon, coming ever closer. The vocals tell an unhappy love story, which begins calmly: “I dreamed you were a ship of grey sailing the seas my loving way.” However, it’s difficult to pick out the lyrics in their entirety, and not just in this song, as they disappear beneath The Priest’s breathy delivery. This is not always such a loss as, although atmospheric from a distance, when examined too closely they have a tendency towards portentiousness. The second half of the track mostly involves a repeated chorus of “Oh the head ocean is prophesy, the ocean will not end suffering, the ocean will not let me be.” He means every word of it.

At this point, just one track in, The Whiskey Priest seems to have good tunes and expert instrumentation but is already overwhelmed by humourlessness and second-rate lyrics. Indeed, other tracks suffer from the same problems as ‘Seafarer’s Lament’. The title of the more upbeat ‘If a Train Was a Doctor Was a Song’ gives a pretty clear idea of what to expect, and unsurprisingly the lyrics don’t work at all. The first line, “If I was a train I would carry you along”, comes across as a pretty underwhelming offer, more than likely to get a reply along the lines of “But you’re not, I’m taking the car.” ‘Uncalled’ is better, intriguingly ambiguous with an understated melody and lyrics about Jesus and pulling back curtains, although The Priest rather spoils it by running out if ideas and resorting to ‘ah-umm’-ing halfway through.

‘Winter Window’ has a chilly woodwind melody, and a mood reminiscent of Vashti Bunyan’s ‘Winter is Blue’. The song is about being trapped in a relationship, and the guitar, flute and bells summon up just the right love-hate atmosphere. The vocals however, are anything but chilly. The Priest’s voice is cracked and racked, emoting with the tone dial firmly set to ‘heart-rending’. It’s a fine voice, but it doesn’t seem suited to the more delicate and oblique songs, which are potentially the best. Here, it messes up the mood, and quarrels with the backing band.

The album peaks with a set of three songs in the middle. ‘No Man is an Island (But Me)’ possesses a sense of humour, which releases the Priest to sing with abandon. This works much better than when he’s bottling it all up, and trying too hard to make us all feel his pain. And it’s also short, which means it’s genuinely funny and doesn’t overwork its slight but enjoyable concept. The next track, ‘Winter Secret Army Blood’, has an arresting percussion sound, with rim shots that sound as though they’re being drummed out on a school desk and a menacing, distorted melodeon that accompanies The Priest singing “I could kiss you like a curse.” It’s a convincingly heartfelt song, relaxed rather than contrived, and it boasts a good tune.  And ‘Wave and Cloud’ has a sampled vocal that loops and clicks throughout, repeating “I see her love” in harmony with crooned lyrics in the background sitting under a finger-picked, guitar figure, trebly and sad.

Elsewhere, the mood remains steadfastly unaltered and the lyrics underwhelm.  ‘The Way of the Future’ is a particular offender, spouting soft rock nonsense. ‘Real Good’ has an unpromising title, and repeats it at every opportunity, a readymade soundtrack for adverts we have yet to endure. ‘Careless’ is repetitive and under-developed. Closing track, ‘Love Me Like a Holy War’, has a ridiculous title and turns out to be about two girls from Texas, both of whom want a piece of The Priest. He’s definitely not taking advantage. In fact, the dilemma seems to be causing him a lot of grief and he wants “to know what the pain is for.”  Then after ‘hey-hey’-ing ‘la-la’-ing his way through a further 2 minutes 30 seconds of song, he’s gone, doubtless leaving behind a trail of changed lives behind him. This record is both pleasant and annoying, uninspired and touched with flashes of promise.  We’ll have to wait a little longer for the stone cold classic.

Klaxons - Surfing The Void

If you can remember as far back as the summer of 2006, you might recall that Klaxons, for a few months at least, seemed like the biggest band in the country. Hyped beyond their wildest dreams and supposedly poised to deliver us into a “new rave” era (which was really just guitar bands with one guitar replaced by a synth) the band re-released the singles that got them big along with a load of filler and rushed it out as their debut album Myths Of The Near Future. It won the 2007 Mercury prize and then they disappeared.

With them went all their hype and momentum and they gradually began to occupy the section of the brain reserved for embarrassing teenage memories, then they became something you talk about with a cringe, “Oh god! Do you remember when we used to dance to this?” and finally became a joke. Well, they’ve at last emerged from their exile with their follow up. It’s been a long wait but has it been too long? Have they Stone Roses-ed it? Can they ever be forgiven for new rave and glow paint?

Well, what’s for sure is that the musical landscape in the UK has changed a fair deal since Klaxons were last involved in it. Those few post-Libertines years of Brit-Pop resurgence have disappeared, as have all their peers, and as it stands there are no small bands in the charts, kids don’t listen to guitar music anymore, and American bands and scenes have taken over the indie world again and are infinitely more exiting than our homegrown acts. So where do Klaxons fit in now? Bearing in mind that they’re doing nothing new this time, they’re destined to fit snugly into mediocrity with this record, and they might even see a few familiar faces.

Lead single ‘Echoes’ confirmed my fears, sounding much the same as their earlier material but with a grandiose tone in the instrumentation and the vocals of the driving chorus. The problem is, with so many good albums coming out this year, this just isn’t cutting it. With the exception of the initial shock of hearing ‘Flashover’ and thinking “Oh cool, this is a bit of a new sound”, nothing here really does anything close to interesting. It’s not that the songs are particularly weak, just bland and unexciting. There aren’t any standout moments at all and I’ve had no desire to listen to any of it again – a bad sign. Some of the tunes such as ‘Cyberspeed‘ and ‘Extra Astronomical‘ begin sounding quite promising but don’t deliver.

It’s not even that the wait has been too long and the new rave thing has passed as the sound has kind of matured a bit since the first album. Unfortunately, this album would have been disappointing even if it had been released a year after their first. I wouldn’t bother taking The Suburbs off repeat if I were you.