Author: GuyHornsby

Music, writing, and living.
Posted in New Tunes

Tracey Thorn – Record

Posted on by GuyHornsby

A classic case of ‘if only this had been out 8 weeks ago’ because I’ve been waiting for it for ages, and it’s not disappointed. I’ve long been a Tracey fan, even though for EBTG I was only a cursory listener, and only really came back to them after reading both Tracey and Ben Watt’s brilliant memoirs in recent years.

With all the #metoo movement’s focus, this album is very much 2018. Produced by Ewan Pearson – so the production is absolutely perfect – so the tracks are electronically-tinged, it’s a modern paean to feminism and being a woman. But it’s the melodies and songwriting that have got me. This is the epic highlight – Sister – 8 plus minutes of balearic, modern pop music. I couldn’t recommend it more. This track also gets some belting remixes from Andrew Weatherall, what more could you want?

 

Posted in Album of the Month

JANUARY – N.E.R.D. – No One Ever Really Dies

Posted on by GuyHornsby

 

Ok, so some disclosure here first off: I was always a fan of N.E.R.D. back in the day, but honestly, never a die-hard. I loved In Search Of… and Fly Or Die but it feels like a long, long time ago that I listened to much beyond the hits. And I think it’s fair to say it was a different time. Back in 2001 and 2004 (when those came out) they seemed pretty much like something totally new: they were hip-hop, but they had guitars, they were cool, good looking, ridiculously talented, and of course, alongside this, they were The Neptunes. For all the brash, boisterous records they released as N.E.R.D., they were also one of the production outfits of the decade. Their Clones album had everyone on it, all produced with their slick, gossamer-like studio skills, and brought some of the best hip-hop of those years. Kelis, Snoop, N.O.R.E., Nelly, Busta, Ludacris… they sprinkled their gold dust on everyone. And so, well, I gravitated away from N.E.R.D. to the Neptunes.

So, fast-forward to 2017, and it’s been 7 years since their last long-player and the world’s changed. Have N.E.R.D.? I’ve certainly changed, and this was an album of the month that I’ve come to pretty much totally cold.  Given Pharell’s polymathic skills, its’ a question that will it work or will it prove an ill-fated comeback. This is enough to give me the cold sweats, especially where it’s a genre I’m less than enamoured with than the rest of you gents. So, is No One Ever Really Dies (yes, that’s what the initials mean) really a step forward? Looking at the (inevitable) guests it certainly feels very 2017: Kendrick, Gucci Mane, Rhianna, Future, and Ed Sheeran. Yes. Him. Then there’s Andre 3000, an interesting nod to the past.

I’m three listens in, and I have to say, my first reaction is that I FEEL OLD. I know I am old, but really, for a man that’s pretty mired in the old school sound of samples, turntablism, and classic hip-hop, this feels so alien. It’s not like I don’t like new stuff – Kendrick is brilliant, Frank Ocean likewise, and there’s new records that still shake me (A Tribe Called Quest’s new record is one of my favourite albums of the last ten years, already) – but the new production style that sits somewhere less grinding than trap, but still with percussive, nervous tics and few melodies that open Lemon is way out of my comfort zone. In fact, the first listen almost makes me feel like I’ve tried to watch the news in a foreign language. Or use Snapchat.

But…. but…. it’s not all dad jokes and cliches. As I revisit, things start to gel. Lemon is a ballsy opening track, with Rhianna’s words and voice suiting its bombast well. Andre 3000’s golden skills on Rollinem 7s makes you wish he’d actually make a new album of his own. The brash melodies of Deep Down Body Thurst are bright and bouncy. It starts to emerge out of the mist, and I feel less like the new dad I am, trying to listen to Radio 1. Kendrick makes reading the phone book interesting, so he’s always listenable on Kites, and on Don’t Don’t Do It (though do they have to really overdo it on everything, rather than just make a perfectly-pitched record?). The overriding feeling so far is that there’s an album waiting to get out, if I just give it more time. It’s a much more coherent beast than some of their patchwork earlier albums, and much better for it.  But it’s also an obvious truth that the modern style of hip-hop they’re swiping just isn’t my bag, so either I’ll end up liking it in spite of that, or going off it because of it. Pharrell didn’t need to make this album, and he certainly didn’t need the money, so while only time will tell, it’s good to have them back.

Posted in Album of the Month

JULY – Joe Goddard – Electric Lines

Posted on by GuyHornsby

 

So, I don’t think I need any disclosure here: this feels a little obvious as a ‘Guy Album Of The Month’.  Yes, I love Hot Chip (and LCD, and Joe and Al and Felix and Owen and Alexis and New Build and 2 Bears and…) as much as any other band that’s been around in the last two decades, but this doesn’t make it a throwaway choice. In fact, it’s one of the most listenable albums of the year so far for me, but it’s also much more than ‘oh, that bloke from Hot Chip’s made a solo album of dancefloor bangers’. It’s actually pleasingly more subtle than that, and it’s an LP that you should give a chance, because in many ways, it talks about what music means to me and tries to grab bits of all those *moments* that you have, whether it’s in a club, on the way to work, at a festival, at a gig. It may be ‘dancey’, but it’s not just a dance album. Stick with it and hopefully you’ll end up as rewarded as I do.

Joe’s a proper, unashamed, music geek. He loves disco and Salsoul (more of that later), but also dancehall and dub (just look at The 2 Bears influences). He loves techno and rave, and he loves pop music. But until now, his songs have often been twinned with others – Alexis Taylor in Hot Chip, Raf Rundell in The 2 Bears, as well as his Greco-Roman collective (label and releases-wise) – but while the solo stuff he’s done goes back to 2009, and there’s been some memorable stuff, this feels like a long time coming, and a bit of a new chapter for Goddard. He’s spoken about having a load of new kit, and wanting to make a record that  gets the most out of it, and to push himself in a way that perhaps he doesn’t get when operating within the strictures of a band. But even with the newer sounds he’s created, what his music always sounds is joyous, vibrant, and throbbingly alive. And it takes someone with a cold heart to feel there’s nothing in Electric Lines for them.

So, what’s it like? There’s a myriad of influences, but instead of wrapping them in knowing subtlety, they’re out there front and centre, whether it’s the famous Celeda sample in tribute-heavy and vibes-laden Music Is The Answer, or the Salsoul sample – Brainstorm’s We’re On Our Way Home – in the paen to late-night wobbly post-club treks Home (with its brilliant Pete Fowler cartoons), Joe’s celebrating the music that is important to him, framed in his own template. The album flits around, from Ordinary Madness’ restrained modern soul openings, to shimmering, wide-angle pain of Human Heart, via balls-out 6am sweatbox Lasers, but there is a traceable line, and changes in tempo and feel that works across the length. You don’t make half a dozen albums without knowing how to structure an LP. Above all though, sonically and stylistically, the album shouts ‘HAVE FUN’, and it’s hard not to just let it wash over you and bounce down the road. It’s definitely made for summer and shades.

And with Al’s away with LCD, and Alexis releases piano-based albums, it’s a deserved chance for Joe to get some more limelight. No, it’s not a huge departure from other work he’s done, but why need it be? Alexis joins on the title track to sublime and familiar effect, and there’s some shades of Hot Chip around a few turns, particularly the cascading synth lines of Truth Is Light. But it’s very much Joe’s own project, and an album that shows that solo work doesn’t have to be any more complicated than putting together a load of music that shows who you are, and if that’s about good times, then where’s the evil in that? Despite being the wrong side of 35, he’s not a man that appears to be growing respectable with age (his comments about simply tearing out into Shangri-La and hanging on for the next 4 days made me chuckle), and if you saw his Glastonbury set on the Sunday, it’s a pretty impressive knowing what he probably got up to before that point!

Sometimes albums that are instantly accessible fade quickly, and feel disposable, but this isn’t one. Also, it’s hard to say what you’ll connect with in music. Even something you think you’ll like, it just doesn’t happen. But I’ve listened to it a couple of dozen times, and all I’ve done is feel it speaks to me and those moments you have when you’re out (we’ve all been in that fuzzy cab ride home). And you feel the connection was there from the start. I can’t make you like it, but I can make you listen, and just hope you do.

Posted in Album of the Month

FEBRUARY: Sampha – Process

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I first heard Sampha’s “who IS this?!” talents on this very blog, back in 2014, on “Wonder Where We Land?”. It wasn’t an album I really thought was my thing, and even on fifth listen, let alone first, it felt too odd, too patchwork, to take hold. But it did, and it was the incredible “Gon Stay” that pulled me in. But that, despite coming back to the album over the next two years, was all I encountered of the South Londoner until now. Having encountered “Process”, I feel a little foolish for this now.

But if it’s a debut album that’s taken a while to land, then it’s every bit the reward for being teased out. And while it’s a cliche, it’s more than just about the music here, as mesmerising as it is. These days we crave ‘story’, but the tale behind a work for an artist that’s worked with the likes of Drake, Solange, Frank Ocean and Kanye is one worth touching on, because it frames the album like an unseen assistant, a shadow over the lyrics and music that can’t be ignored. The Morden resident was a nascent musician as a child, but his adult life has been pockmarked by tragedy, his existence moving from single parent – his father Joe died of lung cancer in 1998 – to orphaned son, as his mother passed away from the same disease in 2015 in between his second EP and the album’s release.

It’s easy to talk of emotion and candour in music, such is the ubiquity of artists on social media, baring their souls (in 140 characters at a time) but Process feels exactly as that single word befits: a young man coming to terms with his place in the world as he comes to terms with love, life and loss in modern, isolating city life. His own health scares also sit behind the words of the record, and time and again the emotions are front and centre, with that incredible voice not slotting into others’ productions, but acting as another instrument in itself, and sounding the most powerful and piercing that it has yet. “Blood On Me” is a beautiful record, its staccato beats echoing modern hip-hop, but the piano’s chords carry punch, and the words speak of a man spinning close to the edge of control.

In fact, the feeling is one of boundary-free music, with Sampha’s soul pouring out unrestrained, even as the clever time signatures of “Kora Sings” or the simple arrangements of “Take Me Inside” cascade into multi-tracked synth and vox like a burst of of colour, despite the darkness of many of the lyrics. The pace may often be slow, but the energy and heft is always there, and even at first listen it’s a beguiling proposition. And for all the tales of suffering and anguish, the truth is that beneath all of it is a hugely talented musician.

The reviews are stellar, because the album has all the makings of a modern classic. A man whose career has been stop-start, halted by tragic episodes that may be the making of him. From all the heartache often comes the best music, and this is a stunning piece of work from a new British artist we should cherish.

Posted in New Tunes

Powerdance – String Groove

Posted on by GuyHornsby

This is dead good. In fact all their stuff is. Check out Power Dance too. But then you’d expect that when it’s Luke Solomon, Nick Mauer (of Greenskeepers fame) and a certain Al Doyle amongst others.

Like Disco: like Powerdance.

Posted in Album of the Month

September: Michael Kiwanuka – Love & Hate

Posted on by GuyHornsby

It’s hard to believe that Michael Kiwanuka was being touted as a next big thing a whole four years ago, by BBC Introducing, hot off the back of a fantastic debut single “Home Again”. I loved that at the time but it’s fair to say I’d forgotten about him in the intervening years.

And so while we fretted about the lack of a physical Frank Ocean album, back he popped again. Not randomly: I’d seen him light up Later… earlier in the year with Black Man In A White World, above. It encapsulated why I loved that single back then and – finally – seemed like we may see more of a next big thing, before he became a “whatever happened to…”?

So what do you get with Kiwanuka? It’s not flashy or hip or cool, but that’s the attraction. Sounding like he’s got one foot in Marvin Gaye’s house and one in a smoky basement club in London, it’s modern soul at it’s best. No syrupy production, and while there’s strings, Love & Hate isn’t pastiche, it’s at it’s best an album that’s accessible from the start, with lyrics and a voice that feel heartfelt and powerful.

There’s a lot to love: from Father’s Child with it’s raw, stripped back opening, opening into a chorus of backing vocals and crisp drums. Or Black Man… a track that feels very prescient in today’s world. I’m also a sucker for a long opening track (see Station To Station or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road), and Cold Little Heart is a thing of beauty.

There’s nothing showy, but really in a world of artifice, PR, overproduction, compression, auto tune, this feels much more authentic than any of that without ever trying too hard. And lord knows we need some of that. it’s helpful that Kiwanuka is a genuinely lovely person. I just wish I’d seen him at Glastonbury now.

I’m starting to fall for this record after only a couple of listens, and that’s not something I say often. I hope you feel the same.

Posted in Album of the Month

PJ Harvey – The Hope Six Demolition Project

Posted on by GuyHornsby

 

You wait for a bus and then a few come along at once. In agreeing to have PJ Harvey’s new album as May’s album of the month – I have long found her a singular and unflinching artist that’s made music that doesn’t seem to nod to any other artists – and then Radiohead release A Moon Shaped Pool forty-eight hours later. Music’s gain is confusion for this blog. For, as much as I love PJ, and have enjoyed The Hope Six Demolition Project‘s own character, it can’t but help have taken a back seat since I heard Burn The Witch.

But this is about the album of the month, and it’s still more than worth all our attention and review. Harvey burst onto the scene with The PJ Harvey Trio’s Dry in 1992, an angry, unafraid and powerful artist that put her own life and experience at the centre of her music. Despite her never giving much care to the mainstream’s accolades or attention, she flirted with it in the mid-00s, even garnering BRIT, Grammy and Mercury nominations (the former two, she never won), but is the only artist to have won the latter twice, with Stories From the City, Stories From The Sea, and then her previous LP, Let England Shake.

So, what does an am artist that’s been making music for 30 years have still to say? While Let England Shake drew parallels between previous world wars and the messy modern conflicts we have been dragged into, The Hope Six Demolition Project deals with a much larger focus, in reality it still addressed themes and topics that are as virulent and important as any she’s taken on over the years: poverty, deprivation, loss, race, class, and humanity. It crosses the pond to look at America (as she’s done before) and is a nakedly political record, perhaps addressing the issues in a way that a US artist couldn’t. And being Polly Harvey, it was no ordinary recording, with sessions taking place live in Somerset House as the public watched.

What is the album like? You get many of Harvey’s strongest suits – raw rock, piercing vocals and lyrics, confrontational themes and the ever presence of John Parish’s gruffness – and an unflinching gaze onto America’s most troubling issues. This has resulted in somewhat of a backlash over the pond, with residents of the Washington DC area referenced in the album and commentators both criticising her subject and her opinion. But provocation is what Harvey does, and across the eleven tracks you get an album and a message that’s clear. In The Community Of Hope’s critical words and The Ministry Of Defence’s jangling guitars and chorused vocals, fans will feel at home. It’s not just a single pace or style, with Chain Of Keys’ rumbling snares and heavy sax, while River Anacostia’s haunting wail overpowers everything else. There’s definite echoes of Stories from the City… on show, so it’ll be interesting to see if it can follow up that and its predecessor’s success and resonance. Single The Wheel (above) is the most accessible and catching record, but like many of PJ’s albums, it needs addressing as a sonic whole. That’s where the power lies.

As she gets older, perhaps the one criticism of Harvey’s canon is that as she addresses weighty and important issues in her music is that she gradually retreats herself from the centre of it. Perhaps she’s earned that right. Are these views her own? Is it simply a theme of the album? We will likely never know, but it doesn’t dim the power of her music, and most likely never will. We bandy ‘national treasure’ around too much, but while she’d never agree with it herself, I’m sure PJ Harvey deserves it more than many.

Posted in Music chat, Uncategorized

Prince Rogers Nelson

Posted on by GuyHornsby

prince-rogers-nelson-obituary-02

What a sad, sad day. And another sudden death from an icon that crossed boundaries, race, sex, genres, and the globe. It’s easy now to look at him and think how crazy he looked and sounded, but you have to remember this was in a time when no one looked that way or sounded that way.

He played every instrument on his albums, certainly early on. A shy, introverted man that concocted an extroverted stage persona that took him to places that maybe even he didn’t know he’d reach. And what places. The fact that a guy could take r’n’b and make it funky, take a guitar and fuse rock with them both, and all at a time when someone of his race and background just didn’t succeed off their own back. He rewrote the rules, and for a time, there was no one on the planet that was as cool, as successful, as autonomous, as funky, and as star-studded as he was. He made films (fully formed in his mind before the cameras rolled), he produced five albums of unreleased work for everything that saw the light of day, he wrote for others (Chaka Khan, The Bangles, Cyndi Lauper, Alicia Keys, Stevie Nicks, MC Hammer for starters) and his legacy is 30 years of people wanting to sound like him, want to be him, and no one ever came close. And now no one ever will.

These days everything seems a facsimile of something else, but he didn’t sound like anyone, and no one sounded like him. He turned rock starts onto r’n’b and r’n’b artists onto funk, to soul, to anything he laid his hands to. His music knew no boundaries. And his style and his overt sexuality scared the shit out of middle America, and it captivated everyone else. I remember seeing his album covers when I was a kid, and it was as if he’d landed from another planet. Sometimes it felt like he had. He made kids from all backgrounds realise that they could make something of themselves, and he gave his time and money to causes that mattered, with little fanfare and publicity, and he had no qualms making those statements when it had the most exposure (search for his speech at the Grammys when he chose to support Black Lives Matter).

His output may have waned in quality in recent times, but when you have Prince, Controversy, Sign ‘O’ The Times, 1999, Lovesexy, Graffitti Bridge, Purple Rain, and many more to fall back on, you have a little leeway. He played right to the end, touring relentlessly over his entire career, with 21 famous nights at the O2 (then straight to the Indigo2 to do another show afterwards), then so many secret gigs in the last few years, even having a party at his legendary Paisley Park home last weekend. He famously said that he would make a song every day for the rest of his life. One can only imagine the size of the unreleased vaults, and the quality, but then for a man that was so private and had such control over his legacy, perhaps his epitaph will be just that: no Tupac-style re-releases. It would have him smiling down one last time, but with a back catalogue like that who needs bootlegs and secret albums?

Perhaps, like Bowie, he was ill. Stories flickered around the internet lately, but of course, no one really knew. Perhaps that tsunami of live shows of late was his raging against the dying of the light. We may never know. Even his piano tour was sold out, with no one, of course, realising it was his last. You rarely get to go out on your own terms, but it would be very Prince to be able to dictate even that. He changed his name, his style, he gave his music away in a newspaper and it was never anything less than simply what he wanted to do.

I’m no diehard fan. But nor do I claim to be. My twin brother Dave got me into him in our teens. I remember him playing Sign ‘O’ The Times relentlessly when we were at school, and while I listened and took it in, he was a full-on worshipper. But then you can’t help, as a child of the 80s, to have just been part of Prince’s world. He was everywhere: on MTV, in the cinema, on the radio, this huge, larger than life force of nature, making these amazing videos, that were barely concealing (or not at all much of the time) their sexuality. As a teenager in the late 80s, it felt like we were in on the secret as he sung Cream, Gett Off, Kiss, and so many more. He seemed everywhere, talking directly to his fans in the most colourful ways.

Much later in life, as I started playing records here and there, Prince pretty much popped up at the most fun and memorable times: I’ve dropped him at many of my best friends’ weddings (Controversy is the clear winner here), I’ve danced to many classics at Bugged Out to bring in each new year, and playing on the radio for the last two years he pops up regularly. You can’t refuse dancing to his Funkness. You never could. His music was powerful and above all it made you feel good. That’s a legacy as bright as any.

Hearing he’s gone, following so soon after Bowie, feels all of a sudden like we’ve got a big gap for genius left in the world now. It’s cliched and trite to say there will never be anyone else like him. So much feels like recycling these days in popular culture, but no one could ever sound like Prince did. This is the man that once stepped onstage with James Brown and Michael Jackson, played guitar then took his jacket off and danced, and everyone else just looked like second best. With everything so accessible now, the mystique that stayed with him all his life feels quaint and unusual, like a throwback to a more innocent time, but he was anything but innocent.

He’s probably busy covering Changes with Bowie right now, with God still sitting with his mouth open reading the back of the Lovesexy gatefold. It would be just what he’d wanted and just what we’d expect. It’s pretty hard to find someone that doesn’t like a single Prince record, because he crossed every boundary there was to cross. And that’s probably the most fitting epitaph of all.

Rest In Peace, Purple one.

Posted in New Tunes, Uncategorized

Shit Robot – End Of The Trail (DFA)

Posted on by GuyHornsby

 

New Shit Robot album incoming after 3 years, and it’s been worth the wait. I’m a big big fan, and after We Got A Love, which was bouncy, but a bit overproduced and ‘big’, this is a sharp turn 90 degrees. It’s apparently produced entirely on hardware and not massively reworked, but lots of live takes. It’s a much more ‘studio’ album, but sounds like proper dance music, and yet it’s still packed full of emotion.

This is the opening single, with frequent collaborator Alexis Taylor and it’s all pads and wistful lyrics. I love it. And the video isn’t bad either.