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Want to know more about what you are getting yourself into before you take the plunge? Or perhaps you like to work up the appetite; strengthening the tease before you make an inevitable purchase. Here we take the albums that grab us each week and we shake them about a bit to see what falls out; to see what they’re really made of. Be sure to listen as you read: just hit the play button.
Perfect Symmetry
by Keane
13 Oct 2008
Universal
In August 2006, Tom Chaplin was admitted to the Priory, infamous Salvation Army to the really poorly, drug and booze damaged stars of the showbiz world. Reportedly dining-out on cocaine with a ferocity that Tony Montana might deem a little greedy, the ruddy-faced singer was about as likely a rehab casualty as Esther Rantzen. However, this was no laughing matter, although reports he’d formed a supergroup ‘inside’ with Justin Hawkins and Pete Doherty called Sobertramp surely were. But what has the Keane singer learned from his journey to the heart of darkness, 7digital wonders, as ‘Perfect Symmetry’ drops in a dizzy blaze of colour and pop pomp, fired by production from Madonna’s current studio pussycat Stuart Price?
Well, there can be no denying the group have been given a bubbly second life by this near terminal experience. In the build-up to release, songwriter Tim Rice-Oxley has been throwing names like Pet Shop Boys, Salt N’ Pepa and Mel & Kim at journalists, as Keane look to conjure the “spirit and unashamed energy of great 1980s pop”, while Chaplin has spoken of the desire to take the band out of their “comfort zone”. “They'll still be sh*t”, came Noel Gallagher’s considered response but he was clearly too busy fondling his broken ribs to join the 50,000 plus fans who downloaded flamboyant, killer comeback single ‘Spiralling’, which this week won 2008’s Best Track at the Q Awards.
It’s representative of an album that retains Keane’s way with flush, anthemic, chart-eating tunes, invested with a fuller, 3-D electro-rock sound. Or perhaps that should be sound and vision? Because much here was recorded in Berlin’s Hansa Studios, made famous by David Bowie and U2 and both key influences. 'Spiralling’ lifts an ‘Always Crashing In The Same Car’ collapsing drum fill, while ‘Better Than This’ is pure ‘Ashes To Ashes’. ‘You Haven’t Told Me Anything’ and ‘You Don’t See Me’ are synth-led cousins of The Killers’ more retro moments, while the album’s sprawling title track is closer to Queen and considered by Keane their ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. So a comeback worth celebrating. But when Chaplin admits “I dreamed I was drowning in the River Thames” amid the euphoria of ‘The Lovers Are Losing’, we can only pray it’s orange squash all-round tonight.
See the tracklist and download here.
Eugene McGuinness
by Eugene McGuinness
12 Oct 2008
Domino
A rock’n’roll school has always seemed such a foolish idea. Surely that’s what pubs were invented for? This much was suggested by Alex Turner when he accepted the 2008 Best British Group gong at The Brits, drunkenly sneering in the direction of Adele, Kate Nash, Leona Lewis, The Kooks and Amy Winehouse, who was being led away by paramedics at the time. They all learnt their ‘trade’ at the Croydon pop institution, an institute of some success when compared to its Northern equivalent, Sir Paul McCartney’s LIPA in Liverpool. Which is where the story of Eugene McGuinness begins.
For all the above commercial clout, however, McGuinness is a talent apart, as you might expect from a man who chose to pose on the cover of his debut album in full fencing outfit. His is a peculiar, charmingly out of time sound that is not part of the LDN, anti-folk, Brits School or any other scene. This full band follow-up to 2007’s ‘The Early Learnings Of…’ mini-album sees the Leytonstone by Irish extraction troubadour mint his commendably unique DIY pop, the sort of broken but jaunty romantic vision that saw him seeking ‘A Girl Whom My Eyes Shine For But My Shoes Run From’ last time around.
With the big top theatrics of ‘Moscow State Circus’, the grainy vaudeville of ‘Those Old Black And White Movies’ and ‘Disneyfied’s drunken tear-up, you sense McGuinness sees the character in works by heroes such as Bob Dylan and Rufus Wainwright. He is also kissing kin to more contemporary acts like Richard Swift or Wild Beasts, albeit if produced by Cole Porter. There’s even a suggestion of Pete Doherty’s urchin knockabout and ‘Albion’ nostalgia for “Gin in teacups and leaves on the lawn” in ‘Knock Down Ginger’, which offers one of few nods to 21st century culture with the line “the tabloids call you Christ”. With fencing gear like this, Eugene will surely not go the same way as the broken Libertine.
See the tracklist and download here.
The Signature LP
by Sway
05 Oct 2008
Dcypha Alliance (All City Music)
Back in 2000, Eminem cracked the world in half with the cinematic, edge-of-the-cliff storytelling of ‘Stan’, emphatically setting a new high-bar in hip hop. Almost a decade on and the British strain remains the embarrassing uncle, generally delivering floppy ham where the beef should be, not dope, just plain dopey. Marshall Mathers’ gripping tale of a psycho fan is the same principle Sway deploys here on ‘Jason Waste’, comically rubbing-out the speeding car, pelting rain and impending doom for references to his dismal manhood, Feltham Young Offenders Institute, premature ejaculation and his grandma. It is these very things that make ‘The Signature’ a success.
Clearly Sway now feels he is ready to spar with rap’s rulers, three years on from debut ‘This Is My Demo’. Opener ‘Fit For A King’ comes out like Jay-Z’s ‘What More Can I Say’, the gladiatorial ‘We Will Rock You’ battle cry throwing a kitchen sink into the orchestra pit. “People from all over the world have gathered to witness the return of the King” an announcer booms, before introducing the meekly named Derek Safo, aka Sway. The braggadocio then hits overdrive on ‘Say It Twice’, as the Haringey massive bow to their master: “I’m the boss, I’m the king, I’m on top, I run this ‘ting”, he raps, in a grandstanding break-out presumably intent on trumping Hova, Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West et al.
Tellingly it’s when Sway, like Roots Manuva and his pints of bitter, stays grounded that ‘The Signature’ flies. A self-deprecating wit, ‘F Ur Ex’ is more Dizzee Rascal than 50 Cent, while ‘Upload’ explores download culture, referencing our very own 7digital (fame at last!). Equally, he refuses to swallow the rap ideal that lionises criminality, a conscious attitude that reaches for the afterlife (‘Pray 4 Kaya’ and ‘Letters To Heaven’) and damns knife culture (‘Special Place’). ‘Saturday Night Hustle’ features Lemar but the most significant guest here is Akon (‘Silver & Gold’), Sway’s new boss after adding him to the Kon Live roster. Here’s hoping he keeps the Cristal to himself, because it’s Britain not bling that is Derek Safo’s true signature.
See the tracklist and download here.
Un Dia
by Juana Molina
05 Oct 2008
Domino
The cut-throat corridors of pop’n’roll are littered with the diseased carcasses of actors turned wannabe music stars. Few of those attempting the rather greedy cross-over, however, come from a background quite as exotic as Juana Molina. Forced to flee Argentina in 1976 following a military coup, her family lived in exile in Paris for six years before she retuned home and began a very successful career as a comedy television actress. Take that Stefan Dennis! Judging by ‘Un Dia’, Molina’s fifth album, such a cosmopolitan upbringing has surely helped shape her border-snapping music.
Famed for her commendably rootless splice of South American folk and digi-pop, Molina’s perspective is resolutely global, finding favour with fans of MIA, Bjork and Konono No 1. However, ‘Un Dia’ is perhaps more avant-garde than all three, inviting the listener to get lost in the shifting, hypnotic, psychedelic soundscapes, as samples, loops and multiple instruments are gently built around polymorphous grooves to create some truly complex but consuming sonic architecture.
Molina’s Spanish language voice is a further instrument, cut-up to create an almost wordless worldview frequently reminiscent of Cornelius’ future-pop and bold enough to justify recent support slots with Feist and Jose Gonzalez. Indeed, tracks such as ‘Los Hongos De Marosa’ and ‘El Vistado’ are founded on repetitive acoustic guitar figures redolent of the latter. Elsewhere, the likes of ‘Lo Dejamos’ stretch into ambient music territories, rather like Aphex Twin or Philip Glass, before being overrun by the sort of wired musicality you might expect from Four Tet. With far-out form like this, 7digital can only conclude that a guest appearance on “Neighbours” is unlikely.
See the tracklist and download here.
I Started With Nothin And I Still Got Most Of It Left
by Seasick Steve
29 Sep 2008
WM UK
Times have been tough for Steve Wold, aka Seasick Steve, the one-man, dungaree-sporting blues phenomenon. And we’re not just talking about in the six decades plus it took him to get here. There are few rock stars who wait until they’re pensioners to burst/stagger onto the scene, wheezing into the glare of flashbulbs. One, in fact. Since releasing 2006 debut album, ‘Dog House Music’, at the age of 65, sales may have risen but the budget hasn’t, judging by the busted homemade guitar Steve pulled out at this summer’s festivals, which was down from a knackered three-strings to a crippled two.
No wonder he’s got the blues, as the desolate but archly titled ‘I Started Out With Nothing And I Still Got Most Of It Left’ suggests. Happily we’re not in danger of being taken downtown by the Music Police for crimes against authenticity here and this is no ‘Oh Brother Where Art Thou’ rehash either. "The kids who come to my shows don't know nothin' about Charley Patton or Son House. They just know it rocks”, he explains, a statement 7digital saw with our own eyes back in July, as he tore-up Latitude, necking whiskey with red wine chasers.
Dr John, JJ Cale and Howlin’ Wolf are obvious touchstones but Steve proves to be as happening now as if he was jamming with John Lee Hooker in Mississippi 50 years ago. Long-term collaborator KT Tunstall is absent, but the splintered slide guitar junk of ‘St Louis Slim’ could easily have featured Jack White, while Nick Cave and Grinderman guest on ‘Just Like A King’. Elsewhere, we have songs about heavy drinking (‘Thunderbird’), dead dogs (‘One True’) and riding trains (‘Prospect Lane’), all of which suggest Seasick Steve’s years of hobo pain will always be our gain.
See the tracklist and download here.
Dear Science
by TV On The Radio
21 Sep 2008
4AD
There are some people out there who actually watch radio on the TV. Sadly, the complete lack of visual stimulus makes such an experience rather boring and certainly not as supersonic as NYC musical collective TV On The Radio. Last time they were on our radar, with 2006’s ‘Return To Cookie Mountain’, one critic compared bulldozing lead track ‘Wolf Like Me’ to “being strapped to the wings of an X-Wing Fighter”. Well if that’s the case, ‘Dear Science’ picks-up the story as we land on the Death Star for Darth Vader’s annual fancy dress party, with the host torn between going as himself or Prince.
Because there is a fine line at play here between the funky falsettos, Paisley Park, Stax and Sly & The Family Stone-referencing ‘Crying’ and ‘Red Dress’ and the band’s more urgent, volatile dark side. Opener ‘Halfway Home’ is fired by a pummelling drum tattoo, machine handclaps and a nagging guitar drone, while the rabid LCD Soundsystem punk-disco of ‘Dancing Choose’ savages global media, singer Tunde Adebimpe spitting: “He’s a what, he’s a what, he’s a newspaperman!” Happily, for much of ‘Dear Science’, super-producer Dave Sitek merges both to finally realise TVONR’s potential as true pioneers in the space-rock galaxy.
Sitek’s position as sound-sculptor du jour has recently spanned works by Scarlett Johansson and Foals, but closer to home Brooklyn natives Yeasayer, MGMT and Vampire Weekend have looked to steal his considerable thunder. It’s unlikely any could achieve the Michael Jackson/David Bowie bravura funk-pop splice of “Golden Age” or the elegiac “Family Tree”, where his arrangement skills outstrip such whippersnappers into the rarefied realms of The Flaming Lips and Spiritualized. As closing track “Lover’s Day” marches into apocalypse, the massed horns, whistles and choral fireworks fitting of an Arcade Fire/Sigur Ros supergroup, TV On The Radio look to have created the world’s first album in High Definition.
See the tracklist and download here.
Nights Out
by Metronomy
08 Sep 2008
Rough Trade
Malnourished by what dance music has to say in 2008? Yawning at the thought of another wimpy effort from Hot Chip? Mildly petrified of Justice’s tough Gallic stance, leather jackets and Christ-adoring cross? If the answer to these questions is a raucous “Yes!!!”, then say hello to Joe Mount, aka Metronomy. Midway through ‘Nights Out’, his hotly-tipped second album, the band’s driving force makes it clear he too is done with the current scene, singing of “all those evenings spent disappointed on dancefloors”. So what makes Mount the boy most likely to?
Well his production skills have already been deployed by Gorillaz, Franz Ferdinand, Kate Nash and Roots Manuva. But it is with the bold and adventurous ‘Nights Out’ that he will be judged, as we’re given the keys to the city at nightfall and thrown into the back of his flash car. Mount says the album is “a soundtrack to a bad weekend” and he certainly covers a lot of ground here, racing though genres - house, funk, electro, disco - to create a strand of popcorn synth-pop all his own. On the way, Metronomy reference a vast spectrum of music icons, from Prince, Devo, Kraftwerk, Soft Cell and Delia Derbyshire, to 21st century contemporaries like Klaxons, Calvin Harris and Crystal Castles.
Admittedly, it’s a peculiar evening that begins with the sound of a wheezing horn fanfare but by the wonky acoustic comedown of ‘Night Outro’, this bedroom boffin’s DIY symphonies to chasing girls and getting plastered prove to be as enthralling as they are exhausting. Of the highlights, ‘My Heart Rate Rapid’ sounds like a deranged ice cream van on self-destruct, resulting in the careering speed-synth pile-up of ‘On The Motorway’, while the knowing, cool and detached single 'Heartbreaker' makes it clear Mount has one eye on the Top 40. ‘Nights Out’ is the dizzy, slapstick and breakneck ride of your life. Now, belt up!
See the tracklist and download here.
Me and Armini
by Emiliana Torrini
08 Sep 2008
Rough Trade
There is a good reason why music critics are always frothing about epic arctic tundra, eye-popping vistas and fulminating geysers when it comes to Iceland. It’s because the place is amazing, like setting foot on the Moon with fitting -150°C climate to match. Such a fantastical, otherworldy landscape is surely paramount in the acclaimed, far out work of Bjork, Sigur Ros and Emiliana Torrini, herself a minted superstar in Reykjavik and beyond. Last album, the eerie, stark but charmed ‘Fisherman’s Woman’, was very much of her roots, displacing debut ‘Love In The Time Of Science’’s awkward trip-hop for creaking acoustica.
Cosmopolitan follow-up ‘Me And Armini’, however, seems more like a mirror to Brighton, her adoptive home, and the busy creative sparks that fly in the face of love dying then flowering again. Torrini has made no secret of the fact her third album was recorded during a period of some trauma, but fortunately, as Embrace once remarked in perhaps their only moment of clarity, the good will out. Because this is a collection far beyond its predecessors in musical scope and confirmation that left-field pop femme leaders such as Feist, St Vincent and Lykke Li have a new ally.
Torrini and songwriting partner Dan Carey struck gold by penning Kylie’s ‘Slow’ but there are few comparables to her or Bjork (except vocally) here. You are unlikely to witness Emiliana stomping up and down onstage screaming ‘Free Tibet!!!’, when she could be exploring the Caribbean skank of the title track or the Goldfrapp produced by Air space-folk of ‘Birds’. At every turn, this is a bold, confident work, from the breathless, sweet zip of ‘Big Jumps’, stripped-back blues energy of ‘Jungle Drum’ and ‘Gun’’s sinister black void, the Icelandic pixie seemingly eaten whole by PJ Harvey. Torrini is hot enough to melt ice-bergs, naturally.
See the tracklist and download here.
Slime and Reason
by Roots Manuva
31 Aug 2008
Big Dada
Three years ago, Rodney Smith dropped ‘Awfully Deep’ and threatened to walk away from the UK hip-hop game for good. The heavy, self-explanatory thick head of Roots Manuva’s third album came cloaked in reports of dope-addled fear and minor madness but ‘Slime And Reason’ offers new hope for a genre seemingly only able to thrive and sell with the debatable help of Calvin Harris or expensive watches. Thankfully Smith has no truck with either or the artlessly bereft and bankrupted soul of its American equivalent.
Because this is as British as the pints of bitter he referenced on killer breakthrough ‘Witness’ or the cricket whites and village green tranquillity of opening track and second single “Again And Again”, which finds Manuva promising “Again and again we come to improve ya”. Musically, with the assistance of fellow Sheffield studio brain Toddla T and Joe Mount, aka Metronomy, Smith has loosened the production reins a little and the results shine. The playful, organic DIY machine music bubbles into a vibrant brew of soul, reggae, funk - redolent of former collaborators Gorillaz - re-establishing Roots Manuva as the definitive voice of UK hip-hop.
Inevitably, the thin but detailed, wholly accessible sonics, fired by reverberating synths, rebounding beats and a succession of strange samples, found sounds and daft hooks, cannot disguise Smith’s inimitable gruff flow and haunted anxiety at the world’s ills. The archetypal, skanking calypso stroll of “Again And Again” has him lamenting “I’ve seen the future and the culture is corroded”, while a tormented “The Show Must Go On” resounds to the doomed line “Give my love to the children and tell them why I have gone”. His pain is our gain because ‘Slime And Reason’ is Roots Manuva’s best album to date and there’s not a Rolex in sight.
See the tracklist and download here.
The Stoop
by Little Jackie
01 Sep 2008
Virgin Records America
“There’s only one me in the galaxy, I am an endangered species”, announces Imani Coppola on ‘The World Should Revolve Around Me’, perhaps the key song among ‘The Stoop’’s winning eleven tracks. It’s a swaggering boast from an artist just one year short of 30, now on her ninth studio release. The Long Island native has, remarkably, been in the game for over ten years, breaking on the pop scene in 1997 as a teen, only to find her “completely arrogant” attitude rather incompatible with a thriving thirst for fame.
Well, it seems clear her time is now, in an era when strutting girls with a fizzing music box of tricks and an empowered attitude to match are, more than any other 21st century incarnation, running the show. For Lily Allen, then, read Little Jackie, and dispatch the drab, cloudy LDN hangover for Manhattan skyscrapers and the colourful lollypop street noise of the Big Apple in 2008. Coppola takes the fashionista world of Allen, Amy Winehouse and producer du jour Mark Ronson, rewiring it so that every minute is a sun-glazed Saturday morning, the sidewalk bouncing with the bulbous sound of ‘The Stoop’.
There is much to enjoy here beyond the brash confidence, in the fresh but hyper booze and fags litany of life of ‘28 Butts’ and the NYC rallying call of ‘Crying For The Queen’, as Little Jackie sneers at Winehouse with a cutting diss of “It’s time for you to get clean and stop creating a scene”. Like the buttered-up soul of Gnarls Barkley, who Jackie has opened for, the sparkling sonics, all sliding string flourishes, colourful keys and parping Stax horns, are as undeniable as the self-proclaimed coronation of ‘Black Barbie’. Besotted, hypnotised Kens should join the queue here.
See the tracklist and download here.
