Kathryn Williams - Presents... The Pond

By Tom Bolton

Kathryn Williams is best known for carefully crafted song writing and a clear, beautiful singing voice.  Although floating around the edges of the folk scene, she is really more of a descendant of Joni Mitchell.  She is no political songwriter though, and her style kills with a smile, a soft edge marking out her best work and placing her a cut above a long list of others with a voice and a guitar but no distinguishing marks.  Her sound is close to that of the late lamented Kirstie MacColl, so it makes perfect sense that she has released an album with Neil MacColl, Kirstie’s brother.

Despite a Mercury Prize nomination in 2000, Williams operates just below the radar of the wider public, a state of affairs that seems suited to her low-key musical style.  It also gives her freedom to make the music she chooses, which has always involved both solo work and collaborations.  The Pond is an album and band, although something of a long distance one, involving experience session players Simon Edwards and Ginny Clee in North London, Williams in Newcastle, and an internet connection in between.

Remixed by Portishead’s Adrian Utley, the album is an intriguing proposition.  The Pond is described as “a democratic mud-pit”, which sounds like a much messier version of the usual sand-pit, full of protean creation and lurching, shapeless forms.  Despite some unexpected rap, it’s really not like that.  This is a very polished record, buffed to a sheen in a way that is very reminiscent of the 1990s. It’s also a supremely low tempo record, with an icy chill-out vibe that suggests someone’s found their Herbaliser records.  Inevitably, the success of the exercise depends to a great extent on how much you love trip-hop.  However, stand-out tracks transcend the horizontal groove, and purvey some welcome menace.

‘Carved’, the opener, has slinky, swampy guitar and the promising first lines “If all I am is blood and bone / where’s the good in us?”  It is definitely about doing wrong and, although it’s never precisely defined, Williams tells us “Morals taste like liquorice / dark and strong and sweet / chewed them up and spat them out / but they’re sticking to my teeth.”  This is a close cousin to PJ Harvey’s ‘Down By the River’, and it augers well.

In a similar vein, ‘Circle Round A Tree’, despite the press release’s claims that it has a ‘sunny, laid back disposition’ is equally sinister.   The nursery rhyme feel captures the strangeness of folk tunes such as ‘She Moves Through the Fair’, which recount mysterious and alarming events in a way that defies explanation sing cheerfully of things that seems anything but cheerful.  The song repeats patterns of love and hate recurring throughout time.  The spoken word finale, sounding like a rap delivered by Vashti Bunyan, is more of an acquired taste.

‘The River’ has a manic caper at its heart, the fastest tempo on the record, and a hypnotic tabla beat combined with rumbling guitars that are also very reminiscent of ‘Down By the River’.  ‘End of the Pier’ is a damp song too, which combines a sparse beat with a vocal from the ocean depths. The whole song sounds as thought it’s drowning, and lines such as “You know you’re somewhere different / when the water tastes different in your mouth” suggest just that.

‘Pass Us By’ has Adrian Utley’s influence all over it in the best possible way, making Williams’s gorgeous song sound like an offcut from Out of Season, Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man’s autumnal classic.   The simplicity of this track is its strength, giving space for Williams’ melody and Ginny Clee’s harmonies to breathe.

Aspects of The Pond do not work as well, and where tracks veer into dinner party territory they undermine the songwriting edge.  ‘The Art of Doing Nothing’ sounds too much like Morcheeba for its own good, which is as much to do with the production which employs a thick layer of ‘Oh oh oh’ backing vocals.  The same backing vocals create the same problems on the next track, ‘Memory Let Down’.  With the next track, The Pond seems to have entered a mid-album crisis.  ’Bebop’ is a misguided, half-speed partial cover of Gene Vincent’s ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’.  Kirsch, rapping “Pure delight when he be-bops with Lula”, veers far into embarrassing dad territory, and the whole undertaking is a bad idea.   Other songs seem too polite and lacking in energy to be memorable

The Pond is a mixed-up record.  While there’s no doubt Kathryn Williams has enormous talent and works with excellent musicians, this album lacks an element of distinctiveness.  Too many tracks that sound close to some of the singers she admires, and ultimately originality is in too short a supply.  There’s an embarrassment of sharp lyrics on The Pond though, and a highly accomplished sound that gives pleasure.  The question of where Kathryn Williams intends to take her talents next hangs in the air.

El-P - Cancer For Cure

By Ben Dufton

Former Company Flow man El-P’s third/fourth (my research is inconclusive – do people include El Producto’s jazz album High Water in his general back catalogue?) studio album Cancer For Cure comes five years after its predecessor, the much vaunted I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead.

In the intervening years, a few things have changed – for one, El-P put his label Def Jux “on hiatus”, removing the previous platform for such releases and necessitating the move to Fat Possum Records.  Some things, however, have not changed.

Cancer For Cure shows that El-P’s production chops are very much still intact and his world-view is no less dystopian.  The tracks on show here are just as claustrophobic and pervasive as those on I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead. For example, opener ‘Request Denied’ is near three minutes of 65daysofstatic-esque build up before El-P welcomes you back to his world, spitting his words out quick just in case someone is listening in.

Guest stars Danny Brown and Killer Mike – the latter fresh making his own El-P produced R.A.P. Music album – provide a new sound in the whirling miasma on ‘Oh Hail No’ and ‘Tougher Colder’ respectively, bringing you back to attention, as I occasionally found El-P’s raps getting lost in the noise, another layer in the sinister soundscape.

On ‘The Jig Is Up’ El-P proclaims; “I wouldn’t want to be a part of any club that would have me”.  It is possible that this attitude of isolation is what is making El-P stand creatively still – Cancer For Cure is really very good, it will likely get better over the years as did I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead; but that is kind of my point – I find it all too similar, like I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead Pt II.  No bad thing; and I suppose “Why change a winning formula?” applies, but I guess I expected El-P to change it up a little.

St Etienne - Words And Music By St Etienne

By Greg Salter

Saint Etienne understand pop music. They know that all the clichés about pop music are essentially true – that it soundtracks the most important, pivotal moments in your life, that hearing a particular song or melody can immediately take you back in time to those moments so that they never really leave you, and even become a part of who you are. In a way, Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs didn’t need to make an album like Words And Music By Saint Etienne for us to know this – the band began (even before Cracknell joined full-time) by fusing post-acid house dance elements with ‘60s and ‘70s pop and ‘80s synths and have, over 20 years, created albums that sound like patchwork, subversive, unrelentingly melodic histories of popular music.

For all their decades of dedication to the cause, the band have never sounded quite so in love with pop music as they do on Words And Music By Saint Etienne. This is a wistful, heady album dedicated to the way pop music inhabits our lives, or the way our lives in habit pop music – check the map of Croydon on the sleeve doctored with song titles for road names, landmarks and stations, and Cracknell’s assertion in album opener ‘Over The Border’ that she “used Top Of The Pops as my world atlas”. The songs move without a care through genres, from ‘60s chamber pieces to pulsing modern chart pop (care of Richard X and Tim Powell) and the effect is a bit like flicking through a collection of 7s built up over years and playing one after the other or, indeed, scrolling through the cover flow on an iPod.

For much of its run time, Words And Music By Saint Etienne effortlessly toes a line between this genre-hopping, a fair amount of nostalgia and hook after hook after hook. The largely spoken word opener ‘Over The Border’ would be twee if it didn’t cleverly pinpoint the tiny details of growing up obsessed with Top Of The Pops, music magazines and buying tapes from Woolies, an experience possible from the mid ‘70s to the very early ‘00s. Similarly, ‘Heading For The Fair’ and ‘Last Days Of Disco’ ache with memories coloured and perhaps distorted by pop songs, while also managing to be fairly extraordinary pop songs in their own right. Not all the album is rooted in the past however – ‘I’ve Got Your Music’ captures the sensation of putting on a pair of headphones and escaping (“I feel love in digital stereo”) and album standout ‘Tonight’ the anticipation and sheer joy of gig-going. These are moments that could happen at anytime, songs about the continual, ever-present power of pop music, and it’s testament to the band that these songs could easily soundtrack the kind of moments they’re written about for listeners in 2012.

It bears repeating – though Words And Music By Saint Etienne does deal in nostalgia (an obsession for both musicians and music writers, it seems), it puts those feelings into brilliantly constructed pop songs that feel partly indebted to the past and its emotions, but also resolutely now. Saint Etienne don’t need to disguise a lack of hooks with atmosphere or tape hiss like the majority of younger acts – on the album’s second half, ‘Popular’ is a crisp, leftfield pop gem, in the mould of the songs Xenomania used to chuck Girls Aloud’s way a couple of years ago. And then there’s ’25 Years’, which is probably the most melodic rumination on mortality you’ll hear in a while (unless Morrissey is planning on working with Calvin Harris on his next album) – it’s full of euphoria as well as melancholy, just like the best pop songs. And on top of that, it encapsulates the way Saint Etienne are thinking about music on this album – pop songs as memories and milestones, but also possibilities and hopes, whole futures.

MV + EE - Space Homestead

By Kenny McMurtrie

Oof! Rather like when you miss a downward step and have cause to make an involuntary noise upon reconnecting with terra firma, so un-met expectations can also force an audible reaction. Having very much enjoyed 2009’s Drone Trailer from these guys I was therefore left on the couch making something approaching said noise right from the off with this new release, Space Homestead (MV + EE‘s 32nd album since 2001 apparently).

Whilst the sound in general was what I’d expected, things just seem to lack the general warmth and sensitivity of the earlier releases. Track 1 is merely a short instrumental named after 1960s British horror actress Barbara Steele for some reason and from there on things just drift along in the normal trippy fashion with languid guitar parts, gentle drums and echoing, phased vocals. All nice enough and totally inoffensive but as a result unexciting and hard to sell to anyone not already into the likes of Beechwood Sparks, New Riders Of The Purple Sage, Bongwater or anything in between.

The nine songs in the package fail to push any emotional buttons (a near constant feature of Drone Trailer) although the extended guitar solo of track seven, ‘Too Far To See’, lifts that song head and shoulders above the rest by achieving the feat of managing to sound like some Grateful Dead outtake – clear as a bell descending into distortion as you picture the sun rising over Death Valley. All too short though at only four minutes. I’ve got my fingers crossed that album 33 finds them back much more on form.

Smoke Fairies - Blood Speaks

By Kenny McMurtrie

A solid and weightier release from the girls of Smoke Fairies this time and ‘Three Of Us’ is a fantastic track, with its swooning vocals and simple but effective guitar solos. Whilst the video for that song looks to have been filmed by the sea either in East Anglia or along the south coast, it is the flat, near featureless landscapes passed through by train in a few sequences within it that the album as a whole seems to identify with. A sense of being in between one thing ending and another beginning pervades the work viz the line “There’s a version of the future hanging close above my head, but I can’t get to it” in track number nine, ‘Version Of The Future’.

It’s not often either that you hear falling in love being mentioned as something of a negative (unless maybe you’re reading some Michel Houellebecq) but, in ‘Take Me Down When You Go’, “something dies” when you do so. Not that that’s to say the tone of the work overall is negative. An almost childish curiosity about the world and what wonders one’s journey through it will hold seems to be the overarching theme of the album. The folkier elements of the duo’s sound are still very evident throughout but added to those is a heft of a darker hue, albeit one on a par with that found in a Grimm fairy tale.

This release then represents a significant step forward in the development of the talents behind it and should by rights raise the pair’s standing in the awareness of the wider music buying public in the coming months.

One Little Plane - Into The Trees

By Richard Wink

Kathryn Bint has a voice that you can only fall in love with – fragile, beautiful, spellbinding, perfect for earnest Department Store advertisements and the first kiss scene from a film adaptation of the latest smash hit Young-Adult Fictional Novel. Into The Trees, the enchanting singer’s second album as One Little Plane, following on from 2008’s Until, is a real gooseflesh inducing moment capturer.

Produced surprisingly understatedly by Kieran Hebden, the album is a collection of calming songs with a few curveballs thrown in to avoid the listener falling into a pleasant mid-afternoon slumber. The first couple of songs are idyllic acoustic frolics into the land of placid and predictable. ‘Nothing Has Changed’ actually at one stage goes limp, and requires a welfare check.

And so it goes on. ‘Paper Planes’ at least ups the tempo, and I suppose that is a tick in the ‘pros’ column. But, aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghhh we’re back in dulltown on ‘It’s Alright’ and I don’t think I can take much more. I reach for the fork on my writing desk, still stained by the Bolognese sauce from the microwave meal I devoured two hours ago and the temptation to stick it into my one remaining good eye is overwhelming (the other one was lost in a clay pigeon shooting incident back in ‘07).

Six tracks in and there is something a little bit futuristic emerging from the minimalist electronica of ‘Bloom’, aside from this and the penultimate song ‘I Know’ which is an angry little blighter there really is a distinct lack of variety and scope, and considering the creative parties involved, you really would expect a lot more.

There is a sense of knowing smugness on Into The Trees which troubles me. Bint knows she has ‘the voice’, yet there doesn’t appear to be any hint of sincere emotion apparent. Perfection can be a weakness, particularly given that creating music is about expressing…. something… anything. Hebden’s production seems to reveal a reluctance to tamper too much with what isn’t broken, i.e. let’s keep this nice and folky, and not mess with the traditional formula; and Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood who provides bass guitar on the album, buzzworthy endorsement aside, his contribution matters little.

Bluntly speaking, I dislike this album. It bored me terribly, and for all the delights of Bint’s vocal performance there is about as much insight on display here as there is on your average post-match Football phone-in.

Here We Go Magic - A Different Ship

By Matt Churchill

An incongruously industrial introduction to A Different Ship leads into an intimate folk track, singing about how it’s ‘Hard To Be Close’, with a gentle vocal positioning itself near enough to your ears to make it seem, in fact, quite easy. Building from an upbeat acoustic guitar accompaniment, the backdrop to this track gradually layers up to a plush landscape, continuing to grow in stature right to the end of the song. This broad sound then snaps us into a claustrophobic shuffle with ‘Make Up Your Mind’. Whilst the gentle build up of the album opener does take you away from the simple opening, it does not prepare you for this that would fill an intelligent dancefloor. Probably the most immediate track on Here We Go Magic‘s new album, with hushed, clipped lyrics and an enticing lilt of a chorus, it only disappoints when it ends without an ending.

It is possible that this is due to the decision to switch mood again, as it falls to the very relaxed falsetto verses of ‘Alone But Moving’ before picking up that upbeat feeling again with ‘I Believe In Action’; the former appears to be espousing the joys of solo travel, suggesting “Alone but moving/ Only place to be” with the latter decrying both loneliness and noting that “Not moving does not mean you don’t move.” Whether intentional or not, the opposing slow to fast(er) dynamic of the tracklisting does seem to be reflected in a little lyrical turmoil here too.

Whilst A Different Ship has been arguing with itself a little, to good effect of course, there are harmonies to come on ‘Made To Be Old’, with a few other voices used almost as just another layer to the complex sound that lies behind the lyrics. For fear of sounding like we’re angling for a key change, this track does highlight a tendency to steer clear of really launching a song when the opportunity arises. The music may start to build, the vocals get a bit urgent, but it doesn’t quite take off in a joyous cacophony as you feel the songs may want to. Perhaps the band is merely ascending above the obvious pleasures in favour of more interesting ideas, of which there certainly are plenty.

Moving on from that attempt at a complaint, and after the dancey one earlier on, we get to the radio-friendliest track in ‘How Do I Know’. It has what appear to be the simplest lyrics (“How do I know/ If I love you”, for instance) and a generally joyous feel, constructed by that now characteristic constantly building sound, it adds “aah aaah”s, rhythmic “woo woo”s and hand claps on the home straight. It may be that it dismantles itself a little early and a little quickly at the end, or it may just be that you don’t want it to end.

End it must though, and the album does so with the title track, which mixes effects-laden ’80s pop with stalling choruses, out of the back of which all the spare ideas and sounds seem to tumble as it draws to a brooding close. A Different Ship may occasionally steer clear of the shallow fun of the crescendo, but it successfully navigates a route through exuberant and intelligent, allowing you to enjoy the tunes and admire the craft of Here We Go Magic.

Simian Mobile Disco - Unpatterns

By Kenny McMurtrie

Album number four from Simian Mobile Disco and the duo have taken their feet off the pedals and decided to freewheel on this one it seems. Nary a decent hook throughout its length. Instead they’ve leant heavily towards the third word in their name and come up with a set of mid-paced background music which wouldn’t induce you to even tap your feet. So it’ll probably go down a storm live in a tent in a field when you’re off your face. Sans drugs, however, it’s all rather boring.

I know I’ve played it a few times now (back to back and everything) as I remember pressing play but it’s left no impression of substance whatsoever. Which is a shame as all previous efforts show the pair can clearly do better. Music for the backdrop to a nice quiet night at home with your significant other could of course have been the whole jumping off point for this outing in which case they’ve achieved their aim admirably.

After a break of a few days I’ve now come back to this squib to try and pad it out a bit but having apparently reached the total of times I can stream the album I think that in itself puts a seal on proceedings. I can’t work up the enthusiasm to request an extension of the streaming period and despite having played it throughout the day on May Day Monday not a single song title has lodged in my mind. To plagiarise a fellow Musos’ columnist this is screaming out for a remix.

Richard Hawley - Standing At The Sky's Edge

By Joe Bates

Hype can work in mysterious ways. More of a system in which all acts can exist than a force that lifts up certain artists, even the shiniest ‘undiscovered gem’ is not immune to it. Not that long ago, it was Elbow who benefited from not being hyped or over-exposed. ‘Elbow are doing this sort of thing but ten times better’, was the reaction when a particular Coldplay or Snow Patrol song became bafflingly ubiquitous, ‘so why is no one buying their records?’ When enough people began to voice variations of this, suddenly Elbow got massive.

Nothing had changed. They certainly hadn’t changed their style – beyond a first album so gloomy it suggests all the subsequent ones are indebted to SSRIs, Elbow’s music has remained pretty familiar. But now they have a Mercury prize; they have appearances on Children in Need; their specific songs blatantly designed for thousands of people to sing along to at Glastonbury are being sung along to by thousands of people, often at Glastonbury. Just like average bands like the Arctic Monkeys can become massive due to hype, average bands like Elbow can become massive due to a supposed hype-deficiency.

It maybe a surprise to some that something similar hasn’t happened to Richard Hawley yet. He has written some great songs, his brilliant voice enriching his more mundane efforts and lifting up his best tracks higher. He’s far from undiscovered but his songs won’t have invaded many peoples space unless they’ve sought them out. The problem might have been Richard Hawley’s muse seemingly taking him further within himself – his last album, the often-beautiful Truelove’s Gutter, featured fewer concessions to arena audiences than any of his previous records, and even for fans might have been slightly lacking in hooks.

His latest, Standing at the Sky’s Edge, is somewhat of a change of tack. It’s big – the guitars are louder than ever, the choruses are more anthemic (the combination of these two factors makes the opening track sound a bit like Oasis), and Hawley himself is more of a presence vocally. It’d be great if this was the album which propels him beyond his faithful fanbase, but it’s probably not going to be. It’s a decent album, not a great one, and once you peel away the layers of electric guitar and the new volume, the songs are not vastly different to anything he’s done before, and definitely not self-consciously crowd-pleasing enough to win over many neutrals.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t much here to enjoy. Hawley is a brilliant guitar player and a loud, expressive album like this shows that for all the comparisons to sixties crooners, he has a love for searing and piercing noise which adds great texture to many of these tracks. It’s nice to see him sounding impassioned, too – as nice as ‘Open Up Your Door’ from the previous album is, it did represent Hawley at his most simple and somnambulist. The tracks here, including the brooding title track, give him much more to get his teeth into vocally and lyrically, and there is much less chance of this record completely washing over a listener. That being said, the fact that the middle section is the quietest and yet contains the nicest moments, including the perfect ‘Seek It’, means that the surrounding noise can be unwelcome, and gets you thinking of the weaknesses of the new sound that he has adopted for much of this album.

These weaknesses  are quite noticeable and, for someone whose charm is often found through channelling songwriters from long ago, mark the first time he has sounded truly dated. ‘She Brings The Light’ is late-era bloated Britpop, its psychedelia derived from predictable imagery and a sitar, and other tracks such as ‘Leave Your Body Behind You’ are similar. Predictability is an unfortunate issue throughout, with songs rarely going in places you don’t expect them; getting loud at the obvious points, choruses following from the verses in the expected ways, and nothing really surprising, even in the better songs.  The guitars sound good and his voice is always a welcome presemnce. But this album simply represents a new sound for Hawley, not a sound remotely new to anyone else.

That said, there’s enough good stuff here to constitute a decent record. It is underwhelming at times, and the new sound doesn’t always play to his strengths, but it is always heartening to hear an artist worth trying something new, even if it doesn’t work out. Richard Hawley isn’t about to join his friend Guy Garvey on the Pyramid Stage for anything other than a guest vocal just yet, and perhaps this is for the best. A flawed but enjoyable album, Standing at the Sky’s Edge shows Hawley is not resting on his laurels, and has enough promise to hint that his masterpiece, and an increase in profile, might still be ahead of him.

Beach House - Bloom

By Russell Warfield

2010’s Teen Dream was a colossal leap forward from what we’d previously heard from Beach House. Preserving the dream-like quality of their lauded nostalgia-laced ruminations, the duo refined their processes, tightened their structures and sharpened their melodies in comparison to the looser mood-piece feel of 2008’s (equally excellent in its own way) Devotion – a move which paid off to excellent effect. Hearing Teen Dream for the first time was enrapturing; a catalogue of quiet revelations – Legrand’s hooks hitting straight between the eyes with a previously unheard confidence, bolstered by a newfound clarity within the shimmering arrangements. Bloom, on the other hand, marks the first plateau in Beach House’s trajectory – not necessarily conceding a quasi-objective drop in quality, but undoubtedly signalling a stasis in their evolution; an album which sounds cut from exactly the same cloth as its predecessor.

There was strong indication of this with early preview ‘Myth’, a song which felt like slipping back into a warm bath, another dose of the velvety Teen Dream indulgence fans were aching for. Next we were treated to ‘Lazuli’ – an example of what a Beach House greatest hits compilation would sound like if distilled into a five minute package: a tinny beat and twinkling arpeggio giving rise (blooming, if you’ll forgive me) into a breathy cacophony of intertwined music-box vocal melodies. Luxurious and smoky as these morsels undoubtedly were, once the initial pleasure of having Beach House back had worn off, the unwelcome realisation hits: we’ve heard this before. Sticking with their well worn blueprint of mid-tempos and sweeping, languid melodies, tracks like ‘New Year’ and ‘On The Sea’ now sound featureless and drab – a foot in each boat between the aching melancholy of Devotion and the pop vitality of Teen Dream, achieving the heights of neither.

Ironically for a band with such a penchant for ostensible backward-gazing and repetition, Bloom’s insistence on occupying the same ground as Teen Dream marks the first disappointment of Beach House’s career. If you’re anything like me, you’ll have (quite rightly) played the last record to death by now, and a new album which plays like a collection of offcuts and flipsides to Teen Dream’s fresh ground doesn’t make for a satisfying follow up. Exactly where I wanted Beach House to go, I couldn’t tell you (although the conclusion of ‘Irene’ makes me wonder what might come of engaging more closely with the drone and dissonance elements at the peripheries of their sound). But what I can say with certainty is that they should have continued going somewhere. As is the nature of nostalgia, if you actually return to what you were yearning for, what you remember making you so happy the first time, another go around on the carousel is cripplingly unfulfilling – a sad reality which ultimately leaves Bloom sounding like a hollow repetition, a cold echo, a contender for Miss Favisham’s favourite album.