I like an album which wants to play hide and seek with you. Radiohead used to do it a lot and Elbow’s first album is a great example of it; melody, sound, texture all hidden or unexpected. It’s a bit like a series of lovely ambushes on your ears. It lets you come back to the album again and again, there’s unpicking to be done after all!
GLEAM are an interesting duo in their way, swinging from broad pop-rock choruses which wouldn’t be out of place on a U2 or ToTo album (please contain your vomit, chipmunk-like, in your cheeks for the moment) to Jarvis Cocker mumble-verses, angular Talking Heads-esque breaks, and Zeppelin-like drum-drum-tumbles. (Yes, you can swallow that chunky vomit back down now, save it for another time).
This week Wallscenery Demos offer up their third album for our greedy ear-gullets to swallow whole or choke on at least. The album opens with promising guitar fuzz, the kind of muted guitar fuzz-waves-in-aglass-box noises you absolutely fucking loved from Here Come The Warm Jets. The guitars lace and play with each other, one cheekily unzipping the other in the hope of something meaty.
Sadly it’s a little flaccid. The vocals kick in and you feel your heart sink a little. No it isn’t bad per se - it’s just hidden. Much like cottaging the vocals try and get away with it without exposing themselves to the world.
Shy and retiring wallflower make this mistake, self produced musicians make this mistake - they know the words so they can hear it; for us however it’s mostly lost.
This is made all the worse by the snatches you catch with your deep-diving ear-nets; hollow echoes of Bright Eyes B-Sides and Love is Hell era Ryan Adams fragility (not as good mind, but there are wiffs of it there.)
The album continue to piss warm jets all over itself when petulant samples of “The Big Lebowski” are thrown in for the album’s fourth track. This track serves only to burn whatever good will you have for the artist.
It’s hard to drag up venom for an album standing in front of you soaked in it’s own effluence - especially when you feel somewhere that it is not ineptitude, but shyness that has made it this way.
But what do I know? VISIT HERE TO HEAR AND SEE FOR YOURSELF WITH YOUR OWN EYE STALKS & EAR GULLETS.
National pride. Some think it’s out of fashion, some think it’s been made illegal by insane jobsworths (turns out the people who believe this are insane jobsworths), and others make music to celebrate it.
Enter stage left: Fifty/Fifty. British? Yep. Young? Yep. Angry as a badger with a hangover? Certainly. Proud of their country? As much as anyone could want them to be.
Political Affairs is a drama played out through a series of every English sounds; jangly hook-heavy guitars, deep-dubstep inspired bass, relentless but unobtrusive drums and a very average man shouting like singing as best he can.
What does he shout about? Well, he shouts about how he’d like Kate Middleton to give him a blowjob on the eve of the Royal Wedding - producing gems like: “You could be my angry pirate Queen / While you’re looking at William I’ll remember how you were winking at me.”
It’s run-over almost-rhymes which make the delivery so perfect, like the song’s lyrics implode and topple like waves breaking and crashing. And it seems to have turned me all whimsical, the cunts.
Other tracks imagine Blair and Clinton taking turns with Hillary, John Major’s early and unpleasant meetings with Michael Howard (best not talk about that really) and what I’ll only describe as a “Thatcher Solo.”
An album that does what it says on the tin, some will find the subject matter unpleasant, other (cool people) will understand the lacing of civic pride, rise to the occasion and sing the national anthem while thinking of the queen sitting on the throne, naked surrounded by loyal corgi’s. Fifty/Fifty, Political Affairs: You’ve got half a chance to enjoy it.
Anna Pollatou mixes the 21 year old’s love of both torch songs, and “found noises” made by industrial deforestation machinery into what is a surprisingly powerful album. Containing only one song over 83 minutes Anna grabs you by the scruff of the neck and forces you to fellate the filthy pistons of her mechanical rhythms while she recalls lost loves and loves which may have never been.
Most of the songs are directed at someone mysteriously known only as “BIG MUSKIE” - the world largest “digger” (for lack of a better word). It soon becomes clear that Anna’s Mechanophilic tendencies are more than a little literal and that her unrequited love for “BIG MUSKIE” is best played out at distance.
This is a startling sound - by the end of what could conceivably be called the first act if you’re ears aren’t bleeding from the relentless bludgeoning noise of monstrous machines grinding away at dirt you’re not listening properly. There are great and soft beauties to be found
From inside the huge grinding rhythms there are elements of the best mechanical jazz flitting around her shrill trilling voice - this is the heaviest easy listening you’ll never hear (or never hear again after your first time).
You Don’t Want to Know’s first album Act as if it were impossible to fail blends the hateful bastard son’s of Oasis’ swagger with modern self-abusing (in the catholic sense) wankery of modern Emo-Core music. The trio, based in the up-and-coming provincial town of Burton-upon-Trent unleash a threatening groin-buldge of mascara-soaked masculinity. Trevor Turin, the band’s stalwart front man, ejaculates into your ears with lines like “Martin Clunes has nothing on me / Oh! please touch me gently” like gooey word-jizms - word-jizms which intend to inpregante your brain with their charming combination of brash insincerity and guitar lines which literally take your dog out for a walk and secretly train it to gnaw your heels off in your sleep.
It isn’t all this good though. By the middle of the album you can feel that they’ve already sold out - and the introduction of strings in the albums closer “No, really, I just want your Go Go Beads” - is the final nail in the coffin.
Act as if it were impossible to fail? Sadly acting like it doesn’t mean you didn’t lads.
