Josefina Sanner - Sirens
Nora Jones was always one with a voice to sell a cup of coffee. A bit of light jazz, add a the accoustic echo of a rainy sunday afternoon and suddenly it’s all perculators blazing. Figuratively speaking.
Easychord - Not In My Family Tree
Someone out there is clearly pining for a Tangerine Dream cover album. Otherwise I can’t see a reason for easychord to exist.
The Petter Seander - Til Death Do Us Apart
If you were going to write an album cynically with the intention of having your songs played on BBC Radio 1 16 months ago there would be few better blueprints than The Petter Seander’s “Til Death Do Us Apart”.
Slightly buzzy guitars and straight-up beats pervade throughout. Lyrically uninspiring, but hitting the right buttons to be played during lunch-time on Radio 1.
GLEAM - Lady Psyché And Her Heart Mechanix
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).
Big Eye Family Players - Family Favourites
Instrumental pop music falls roughly into two groups: one side represented by grand and epic post rock sound-mangle wankery and the other a focused soundtrack-esque narrative strain.
Big Eye Family Players are the second kind of cunts.
Like the Go Team without that feeling of a narrative arc they fling their pleasant enough Americana-tinged classical/jazz-trundling into your ear-brackets. It’s not bad, but it is mundane. Each song feels like a small emotional crescendo in a film, just after the reveal the hero or heroine walks somewhere in the rain, after the break-up they stare out the window and look bloody miserable - each song raising itself up and coming to a kind of needlessly undercut climax.
And then it happens again.
Naturally this gets a little tiresome as seemingly unconnected vignettes flip from one to the other.
The stated aim of the group is to allow the head-man a chance to explore “the soundtrack” amongst other things. Why then does this feel so devoid of narrative? It’s not like they haven’t “got me” with a few of the more sentimental moments dripped forth - had an arc been applied to this, had I been able to listen to the whole album with a sense of movement and place then I think this would be a very different review.
Silver Tongues - Black Kite
Silver Tongues’ debut really felt like they wouldn’t disappoint; a stomping intro with some claps, a little funeral organ in “Highways” and interesting but familiar texture to the thing - a bit like David Sylvian/Japan - except sung a little off; showing not inadmirable weakness. Then I realise it’s not really Japan being channelled here, it’s Matchbox fucking 20.
Barry - Yawin’ In The Dawnin’
Some would accuse this site of being one filled with endless pessimism; the glass is always half empty for us. With this in mind there has never been a more fitting EP to land in our inbox than “Yawnin’ in the Dawnin’” by Barry, a folk-rock four-piece. They feel like a capable band cracking out tunes, but they need their glasses topped up - with more whores whiskey and probably lime.
Genco - Confused Einstein
Genco’s debut is little more than whisper on the U-bahn between tipsy would-be-lovers. Deathly sparse but unrestrained you feel that the effort gone into making this album, the pure energy would be barely enough to boil an nearly empty kettle and make a cup of weak tea - even in a pyramid shaped bag which allows effortless circulation of the ground tea-leaves - without milk.
And yet it is hard not to be won over by the half-heard half-hearted mutterings which serve as lyrics dropped between the cracks of fat but quiet bleep-tone melodies.
The actual content of the album is hard to pin down, but in recent interviews Genco’s lead layabout suggested “The album is really about how our pacifism and apathy is the only way to overcome the right-wing, pseudo-fascist, proto-grass-roots movements we’re seeing spring up all over Europe. It’s like: “Chill out guys; the modern consumerist bourgeois lifestyle comes with super cakes and a great wine list. Join in!”.”
While their battle cry isn’t exactly enough to get the blood boiling, they have made the perfect album to listen to while eating cakes.
Wallscenery Demos - Half Asleep. Half awake
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.
Fifty/Fifty - Political Affairs
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.
