Category: Album of the Month

Ah, the old authenticity debate. We just can’t get away from it. I wonder if that’s how we evaluate modern music. I guess it makes sense. It’s not like there are endless accessible new forms and most artists sit within a well-defined genre, whether they think they do or not.

Saadiq is an unapologetic revivalist and his latest, glorious, upbeat album is a love letter to Motown, late 60 and early 70s soul and even garage rock and psych. Why it works for me when other revivalists fail is just one of those subjective things you can’t put your finger on. But here I am trying to do so, so let’s give it a go!

I think it comes down to a few things. Firstly, he throws his heart and soul into it. This is a committed, shit-hot performance from a guy in control of his vehicle. Secondly, it’s such a rich collection of songs. He’s a songwriter who knows how to press all the buttons and drawing on a rich knowledge of soul music’s past. And finally, he’s a bloody amazing musician (check out any live performance on youtube, the guy is an astonishing guitar player). And that all comes across. There are so many lovely touches on the album – the lovely use of mellotron (that very 60s thin analogue organ sound, reminiscent of late Beatles). Crisp, clear production. I don’t know what’s not to like?

There is also an investment you make in an artist. I’ve followed him since Tony! Toni! Tone! days. I regard Lucy Pearl’s album as possibly the finest R&B album of the 90s. I think his early solo album Still Ray is an incredible, invent piece of work. So I guess me and Raphael go way back.

And that’s it really, isn’t it? Reminds me of Jack Black in a way. No one says, why’s that guy doing garage blues rock – he just is and he’s doing a better job than anyone else.

So why do I think he grabs me more than say, Jake Bugg? Well, all of the above – but really, the number one thing is the songs. They’re a lot, lot better than Bugg’s in my humble opinion. And that’s what you keep coming back for, right?

So I thought I was done with Vampire Weekend. I bought and enjoyed the first two albums, but as with many albums I’ve bought in the last decade, they didn’t feel like they sustained my interest and eventually I stopped listening. I was ready to file ‘Oxford Comma’ and ‘A Punk’ under tunes from a certain era, and then move on. And when I first heard new single ‘Diane Young’, it confirmed my waning allegiance. It sounded irritatingly hyperactive, like a throwback to their first album. One trick ponies that got found out, I thought to myself.

And then the reviews started coming in. Huge leap forward, they said. New maturity, they said. Surprisingly introspective, they said. And I listened to the minute long previews on iTunes, and within 5 minutes I’d bought it.

The reviews are right. This is an album that states that Vampire Weekend are not just preppy boys playing Graceland-style pop. It starts off with with the downbeat Obvious Bicycle (still need to work on those titles now and again, boys), with its repeated imploring to ‘listen’, as if the band are insisting we reconsider them. And then we go on really quite an odd journey, that feels both like a crisis of identity set to pop music (Ya Hey, surely one of the album’s highlights, appears to be a bleak exploration of  faith and Jewishness), mixed with beautiful tunes (Step’s brilliant Bach steal, the gorgeous Hannah Hunt – probably my favourite song – and the album’s small, melancholic closer, Young Lion) and in amongst them, some reliable bops from the old school Vampire Weekend – such as Unbelievers and the single, Diane Young. The latter suddenly makes so much more sense in the context of the album as a necessary shot of fizzy sugar in amongst all that wistful existential angst.

And its funny that the band started off with Paul’s Simon’s Graceland as a template, because it’s Simon’s songwriting that most comes to mind – both his late work with Garfunkel and his early (brilliant) solo albums. That’s quite a comparison, but I think the songwriting on this album is that good.

So yes, a great leap forward and a sign that these boys are hear to stay. I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am.

What to say about this album? Or the man behind it? His story is at times harrowing, sad, joyous, in fact the very fact he’s made a new album and put it out given what he’s gone through in the last year is an achievement in itself. A former frontman, beset by a lack of faith in his own skills and voice, time spent int he musical wilderness was saved by American outfit Midlake when they persuaded him to record an album with them. The result of that was the fantastic Queen Of Denmark, which layered piano and velvet, dual-tracked vocals, disguising the extremities of emotion in almost MOR style balladry. But underneath the surface of the standard musical structure lurks darkness at every turn. And The Queen Of Denmark was about his happiness spent with a partner, then Pale Green Ghosts is the bleakness of post-break up, taken up a notch with the announcement, onstage, that he was HIV+. Others would have retreated into solitude, but Grant simply confronted this head on, and the result is an album that’s accessible immeadiately, then gradually snares you, as the emotional impact the words hits home.

Made with Biggi Viera of Gus Gus, there’s an electronic slant on it, but it’s much more than just some synths added to Grant’s syrupy voice. For me, I’ve actually become obsessed with the album. I tend to listen to new albums three or four times over to get to know them in the first week, but occasionally I end up with a mild addiction, and in this case I’ve listened to it over 30 times in the first two weeks. I find myself waking up in the night and the morning with songs stuck in my head (the fist in a velvet glove GMF, or the ehtereal title track) and it’s pretty much taken me over this month.

There’s a brilliant interview with him in the Guardian that’s worth reading too:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/mar/03/john-grant-interview-singer-songw…

Laid bare, Pale Green Ghosts is one of the albums of the year.

Brother David – Deptford Goth – Life After Defo

Similary sprung on me this month, by a friend and while at first impression it just sounds a little like identikit male-voice, lots of reverb, dubby Croydon stuff, it’s a real grower. It’s not so much the vocals or the fx, but the melodies, and they’ve really stuck with me. two of my favourite albums this year so far. There’s a good interview with him in the Guardian as well. Enjoy!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/mar/15/deptford-goth-life-after-defo

Of all the hard-luck stories in rock – and there are many – you’d have to go a long way to beat Big Star. Perhaps only Badfinger (look em up on Wikipedia – a properly tragic tale) have a more depressing backstory. Big Star are one of those quintessential rock fables: a band with ridiculous talent who made 3 astonishing albums, who made no impact at all and fell to pieces – and who are now lauded by all and sundry as one of the great rock bands. Indeed, if you ever do a search under ‘Power Pop” (that is, rock music influenced by Brit invasion bands that are strong on melody and jangle, but are definitely crunchy rock pop rather than pop), Big Star will invariably be mentioned as one of the finest exponents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_pop

And yet none of you own a record by them or have heard of them. Cruel old world, eh?

Big Star were formed in the early 70s in Memphis by Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, once of the teen-pop Box Tops, whose song The Letter you’ll remember:

Never have a band sounded less like they were from Memphis or from the early 70s. Bell and Chilton were both obsessed with The Kinks and The Who and I think Chilton even sings with a bit of an English accent! They certainly don’t sound like they were from the US South. And therein lies their tragedy. Their first album, the brilliantly titled Record #1, garnered amazing reviews, but Big Star were signed to Stax, a soul label who had no idea how to deal with them and seemingly underinterested in marketing them. The first album bombed. Bell’s drug use got out of hand. He and the band fell out and by the time their second album, Radio City, came around, he’d left – though the record bears some of his playing and songwriting. The second album fared as badly and the band only managed one more record, the bleak, harrowing Third/Sister Lovers, before disbanding. Soon afterwards, Bell died in a car crash.

Over the years, successive generations of musicians have discovered and their reputation has grown – R.E.M. were hugely influenced, as were The Lemonheads, Teenage Fanclub, Wilco and so on. They’re the basis, really, of melodic American college rock, except that makes them sound so-so when they’re so much better than that. I first came across them via 4AD’s supergroup This Mortal Coil, whose albums feature several covers of what I later realised were Big Star songs. You’ll also recognise September Gurls from The Bangles, who scored a hit with a cover. In the 90s, Chilton reformed the band with some success – he at least, got to see what the band’s reputation had become. Sadly, he died in 2010.

As with Bowie, there was a temptation to give you the most obvious album, which in Big Star’s case is their first album. It’s probably the most accessible, though their music is hardly difficult. But I think Radio City tells us the most about the band: despite Bell’s absence, it’s a band at the top of their powers making a bunch of quite incredible songs that burrow under your skin the more you listen to them. But you can also hear the strain on Chilton and a sorrow and tension in his songwriting and in his voice. Despite the chiming guitars, exquisite melodies and crunchy rock, it’s somehow quite a melancholy record. I also think it’s a beautiful piece of production. So much space between the instruments. Somehow both stripped back and yet really full. The guitar sound alone I could wax lyrical about endlessly. For me, it’s where chiming 60s pop meets 70s rock. It’s been often copied but never equalled.

Big Star have become a very, very important band to me. They’re one of the few bands whose work I can’t live without. When people first ask me who I’m into, I mention the three Bs: Beatles, Bowie, Big Star. I hope you feel the same.

Slightly late brothers, but the December album is Josh Rouse – Nashville. It came out in 2005, and I got alerted to it by my girlfriend at the time. It was something I’d have never really gone for without guidance, but don’t be fooled by the title, despite the odd steel guitar, it’s not a country album. It’s just a pitch-perfect slice of songwriting that tugs at the heartstrings. It grows with each listen, and it’s written distinctly with vinyl in mind, even when I had the CD it was listed as ‘side A/B’.

It had some emotional resonance with me, as it straddled the breakup of the relationship that brought it to me at the time, but that’s years in the past, and its effect hasn’t lessened, even though the association to that time’s now in the distant past. It’s also something I’d go – knowing the Brothers’ cd collections (and how hard it was to select something outside them) – as far as to say may just not fit for you, but if it does, it’ll be worth it. That’s the risk with new music. 99% of the albums I like, one of us has, so this is something different (it was between this and a Ben Folds Five album, but I chose this as it was more rewarding in the long term for me).

It sounds pretty timeless. It could’ve been made in 1975, or 1995, and it’s rare to find a modern album like that that hasn’t aged at all. I saw him perform it live in 2005, and it was just as powerful.

So, listen, digest, critique, and lay it all back on me. Only a cold soul could fail to be moved by Sad Eyes. An absolutely heartbreaking record.

Here’s one of the album’s lighter moments, My Love Has Gone.