Liam Finn – Champagne In Seashells

Liam Finn – Champagne In Seashells (Transgressive)

For an example of the varied guises and stylistic diversity that Melbourne-born wunderkind Liam Finn is now capable of, one need only listen to the closing track on this excellent mini-album. Captain Cat Is Crying begins as a severe and spooked sound collage complete with a brassily-intoned narration (remnants surely from some sick old children’s programming), gradually weaning from that source with gentle vocal samples, rhythms investigated and abandoned until the base ingredients of wonderful epic slope into view. Almost imperceptibly, Finn conjures pop majesty from the merest of beginnings in a truly brilliant finish.

That’s not to decry the five songs that precede it, however, for they are imbued with wit, with honest sentiments and keening, weary pop, fuzzed to high heaven but somehow polished. The whirling organ bedding of Honest Face serves as a perfect balance to the squeaking guitar lines and stomping chorus, but it is the sound effects of waves crashing that tie the record together, remind us of the title and crystallise it as a complete work more than just a collection of songs. If these principles were applied to Finn’s next full-length release, we’d be in for a real treat.

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This is out on the 21st September, and the review is in this month’s Artrocker. Which you should buy. Also, just so you know, there’s deliberately no references to Neil Finn in the review. I made the connection, but wanted to do a review that didn’t refer to it. He gets it all day I bet. More here.

Sleeping States – In The Gardens Of The North

Sleeping States – In The Gardens Of The North (Bella Union)

Markland Starkie has taken his time with this Bella Union debut, and it’s been absolutely worth the wait. Rarely are listeners likely to hear a writer who gives such balance to the realms of pop and folk music and the trappings therein. It is at once atmospheric and direct. Rings Of Saturn creeps without menace but with luxuriating intensity. Starkie is not so much driven by his bookishness as he is by the musical ascents he cleverly creates. Showers In The Summer, for example, shimmers thanks to masterfully beaten toms and careful cymbal, his voice buoyant amongst it all along.

There is something of the spiritual about some of Starkie’s flightier works. Josh Pearson is evoked on the sweetly-cooed Breathing Space, a beautifully judged piece that implies deep consideration of its musical gestures – clearly, the nuance of performance is a trait heavily valued on In The Gardens Of The North. This makes it, above all, a naturalistic, instinctive record with wonder and seriousness equal players in its success.

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This came out on Monday. PM DID REVIEW IT IN TIME, THOUGH, FOR GOD’S SAKE STOP WORRYING. Proof? Buy Artrocker this month. Music (lovely, super music) here.

Dave Cloud & The Gospel Of Power – Fever

Dave Cloud & The Gospel Of Power – Fever (Fire)

With intimations this fiery, unfocused and sickly, it’s easy to find ample entertainment in Dave Cloud’s reasonably barmy incantations. Questions about this veteran Nashville Arthur Brown-alike might include the following for the uninitiated: Is he singing in tongues? Why does he have two voices? Does he have some sort of mental problem? The answers are unimportant when lines like “Did I say calypso? Well, shut my lips-o!” are peppered throughout this micro-masterpiece of tension and dirt.

Aside from the artful quirkiness on display throughout, it’s chilling to hear exactly how an elderly David Berman would sound on Try Just A Little – it’s uncanny. The freewheeling spoken-word final track, ‘In The Distance’ is brilliantly atmospheric, sounding almost like an after-thought, but with gravitas aplenty in the spooked tale of a courtship betwixt bugler and belle, providing a fine ending to this short (a shade over twenty minutes) but electrifying collection.

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This comes out via the inestimable Fire records on August 24th. Visit.

Japandroids Videos

Getting dangerously interested in Japandroids now. Head here for a total shed-load of interviews and performances. The interviews feature a blond man.

Here’s a funtime video that isn’t at that link:

Amazing. Myspace. Review. Review.

Hecuba – Paradise

Hecuba – Paradise (Manimal Vinyl)

Hecuba are, if nothing else, utter experts at conjuring a menace that seeps. The boy/girl duo of a filmmaker and an actress are more than competent at maintaining that menace and mutating it gently into serious unease – the buzzing free-form ending of ‘Even So’ is a scintillating climax. Intense darkness surrounds the early stages of the record, with the borderline horror film nursery rhyme of ‘Miles Away’ standing out as paranoia incarnate.

More than just pantomime villains, Hecuba reveal the subtleties of this debut very slowly, but very markedly. Gradually increasing the bombastic synths and widening the contrast between a light spooking and terrifying squelching horns very slowly makes itself apparent, and the listener is faultlessly drawn in. Relentlessly, ‘Paradise’ prangs from Laurie Anderson motorik monotone to joyful keyboard explosion and into the lowest registers of what sounds like a piano being breathed into life by Godzilla. In short: a mood masterclass with enough dramatic pop fun to stop it being relentlessly bleak.

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This is out on 31st August via Manimal. That’ll be nice. You can also read this review in the latest issue of Artrocker. Which you should get.

Telekinesis – Telekinesis!

Telekinesis – Telekinesis! (Morr Music)

The best summer records are more than just simple, jolly songs played on acoustics with a little bit of fuzz – you have to capture all elements of the season. The sitting down, the water, the sweat of activity, maybe some romance if you haven’t already cracked a bottle. This is why Teenage Fanclub can be said to produce some summery material, but have not recorded a summer album. The Lemonheads’ ‘It’s A Shame About Ray’, on the other hand, nails it with a blend of exuberance and Evan Dando’s slackerisms. Telekinesis have at the summer album and pretty much nail it too.

The opening sketch ‘Rust’ is the perfect entrée, wistful, homespun and excellently lo-fi, and the following set seeks to gently tweak and rummage its way through your Jun-Sep (if we’re lucky). Main man Michael Benjamin Learner is clearly someone to whom lightness has little adjoining shade, preferring instead the jamboree-pop favoured on all those classic records from nineteen-seventy-whatever. Which means that this is not a record dripping with invention, but it is one that understands the multifarious nature of summer, its stickiness and its sweetness, its sensations and its silliness.

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This is out BLOODY TODAY. I don’t care if it’s raining, get it and enjoy the summer. Have a listen. This review is in this month’s Artrocker, which you should buy and stuff. I don’t mean buy and then stuff it, I was being flippant.

The Heavy – The House That Dirt Built

The Heavy – The House That Dirt Built (Counter)

With a Ronseal title like The House That Dirt Built, the listener would expect some serious scuzz, some dusty, taut rock ‘n’ roll, an erring on the side of well-greased punk. We get that, with bells on, we get that. But we also get a confusing amount of genre-hopping. So confusing and, in fact, wilful is that hopping that it goes some way to undermining the potential impact of the album in general. If you’re not sure that your navigator’s got the map the right way up, can you expect a pleasant voyage?

So. When The Heavy tackle their natural targets, it’s a bracing and involving listen, like being shaken awake. The album itself kicks off a house-of-horror-ish excerpt from some old film or other, all portentous, campy warnings not to tread any further… then, with reasonable aplomb, the band launch Oh No! Not You Again!, the lead single. It’s a refined, soulful punk-blues meld of vocals shrieked into a bean tin and guitars jostling for supremacy with squelching sax – a sonic triumph and a little exhilaration to be going on with. Elsewhere, similar set-ups provide similar results – the overlong No Time in particular a high-concept smash-along.

But the blues mutates on this album. It slows down and funks up on How You Like Me Now?, it waltzes on Sixteen, and it totally softens into 50s pastiche on Love Like That. By no means is it a bad thing to stretch your legs on an album, but The Heavy try too much to appear multi-headed. Excelling in some areas while falling down in others gives the impression that our guides through the record are not at all comfortable. Tellingly, they are at their most comfortable when they do very little. That single, Oh No! Not You Again! is by a very long way the strongest song here, and they would have done better to omit the more far-reaching elements. The closing track, named Stuck, is a perfect metaphor for the album and displays The Heavy’s need to contextualise, to minimise. It’s fine to be ambitious, it honestly and truly and nobly is, but the results have to prove worthy of the time spent producing them.

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This is out via Counter (excellent job, folks, your parcels are fast beoming my favourites) in early August or something, I left the press release at home… more here.

OSKAR – LP:2

OSKAR – LP:2 (Incarnation Recordings)

The loopy (literally) back-story to this recording is hilarious fun, and involves a load of previously near-mute Spanish mentalists in an asylum getting excited about music, which is obviously amazing. But have OSKAR (no need to shout) managed to distil the whimsy, the unexpected purity and infantile joy of such a scenario? In some ways they achieve the whimsy, but more often than not it’s coupled with a delicious, nightmarish sense of impending danger, as if at any moment the genteel lady sitting in the corner might suddenly leap out of her seat and try to bite your knees. The more they do this, the more you suspect that OSKAR will one day succeed and sever a leg.

A massive range of genres are touched upon, and not in a fleeting or insubstantial way. Twanging indie-folk on Printer Tzara is polarised by dadaist incantations on the delightful Reichenbach Falls, while the grind and chug of metallic guitar on Some Song contextualise the epic peaks of Hi-Beam Blue. Indeed, as the unashamedly post-rocking tendencies of that song wind down into blissful ‘cello scrapes and build up once again to a blinding and confusing even keel, the listener is reminded that OSKAR’s technique and skill of altering soundscapes to enhance effect is exemplary.

Luckily for them (and perhaps indicative of their skill), OSKAR’s LP:2 remains bewitching throughout, whether they’re skipping idly or running with intent. The closing track, Sanatorio, returns the whole album to the theme of human madness. Recordings of insane laughter that, so the press release leads us to believe, are taken from that Spanish asylum pepper the melancholy with that all-important suspicion that this is music aching to tip over into entertaining ridiculousness, but is too clever to let that be the only tension on display. It is never uninteresting.

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This came out on June 22nd. FAT LOT OF GOOD TELLING YOU THAT. More here.

Japandroids – Post-Nothing

Japandroids – Post-Nothing (Polyvinyl)

The sleeve of Post Nothing looks more than a little like the sleeve of Television’s Marquee Moon. Co-incidence or not, it’s interesting. What Japandroids share with Television is their extreme economy – both sound desperate to make the most impressive sound possible with the little physical attributes they have, resulting in some tremendous tricks that colour and shape their songs. Where they differ, though, is on dramatics. Television blustered their economy into a semblance of immense tension and release, while Japandroids gleefully make music as positive, scattergun and running-too-fast as its possible to make with just guitar and drums. They are hugging a little bit on the cover, too. 

Chord patterns and riffs are reminiscent of chugging Thurston Moore on Heart Sweats and of Deep Purple being rinsed by Kinski on Crazy/Forever, but their sense of abandon is totally their own. Truly, there is little more heartening than the chorusing wails that pepper Post-Nothing. So what, though, right? As if no-one ever screams. So something less tangible about this pair has to affirm our belief that they love to shout together, and a closer listen suggests that it’s nothing more complicated than the fact that they have to struggle to be heard amidst the aforementioned slushing mix of guitar and drum. Even if you could hear them whispering, you know they wouldn’t be.

Young Hearts Spark Fire is bumbling, bouncy and perhaps the closest thing to radio-friendly on the whole album. It speaks (or, as established, shouts) of forgotten potential, but is conversely obsessed with letting all existentialism die – “I don’t wanna worry about dying, I just wanna worry about the sunshine girls,” is a line that, if serious, is an effective raison d’être for Post-Nothing and a smashing pull-quote for this most triumphant of revolutions. When at the four-and-a-half minute-mark, the instruments stop to let extended screams take the foreground, a potent juxtaposition of two brands of chaos. Throughout, Brian King and David Prowse are just itching for that moment to come around, the moment when they can let their voices be as loud as their amplifiers.

The teenager-y fixations of some of the lyrics serve more than anything to unite this pair further in their quest for expressions most pure. When they yelp of not finding love, it makes the love in their songs flow even clearer and closer to the surface. But when that’s not doing it, the sheer conviction of the playing and the love of extreme volume combined with the duo’s unbeatable youthful bounding tips the whole proposition into great territory. On the Japandroids MySpace is a video of the band rehearsing at the end of which Brian King comments on the song they’ve just finished playing. “Less than five fuck-ups? That’s good enough to play live.” This, undoubtedly, should let the listener know where the energy in this band is directed. Noise, positivity, clarity, unity.

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The UK release for this is August 3rd. Listen to a few songs from it here. You can also read this review at The Quietus, here.

Juice Aleem – Jerusalaam Come

Juice Aleem – Jerusalaam Come (Big Dada)

If there’s one furious expression that works every time in hip-hop, particularly in British hip-hop, it’s the continual decrying of futile, facile popular culture. In some ways, the obviousness of these targets – the overpaid, the artistically insincere – can detract from the impact of the lyrics, but nothing quite hits home like raw, incensed talent verbally shitting on inferiors. A childish, impish and self-defeating exercise it may be, but boy, that’s entertainment. So when Juice Aleem rips mercilessly into the likes of Jamie Oliver and premier league footballers on the deadly funny Higher Higher, it’s hard not to be moved, such is his vehemence and righteous disgruntlement.

Juice Aleem, with his gusto and fuego, is a shocker, a true verbal wit and one whose grasp of balance and weight in his sentences is expert. A fixation with the unjust and with righting wrongs provides the majority of inspiration here, but it is never tempered by ill-informed ranting. When, on the opening First Lesson, he attacks those less nimble of tongue than he, it is not so much as a protestation as a telling-off. Something about this man screams authority, dexterity and clarity. Even the roundabout beats and chugging bass motifs are rendered moot by the precise ramblings of this masterful learning curve of a track.

Amongst all the righteousness and upstanding biblical reference, Aleem still finds time for that old staple of the hip-hop canon, the sex anthem. U4Mi unsurprisingly takes a distinctly more refined look at the bedroom conundrum – this is no Wildflower – and is therefore something of a curio. It does not have the satisfying grunt of male dominance so often prevalent in this typical song form, but it does push the value of sexual respect and attempts to find beauty in the whole concept. Above all else, Aleem seeks to sideline expectation, battering existing memes and surprising as much as possible. Even if it means softening a traditionally beefy issue.

Most impressive of all, though, is the rich description given to the protagonist in The Killer’s Tears. A solemn and wholeheartedly depressing re-telling of a story that would fit on an early Wu Tang release, the violence is illuminated by the beautiful evocations, rather than having blind violence providing cheap shocks. With deeper analysis comes deeper appreciation, and lines like “silently he moved, though his sword was heard to roar,” are weighty enough to ensnare even the most casual of listeners. Crucially, the lyrics work off the record as well as on – this is a story worth hearing even if one can’t stomach the beats. Time and time again, Aleem proves that his hard work and his controlled (but relentless) anger make for the most enjoyable of musical treats.

Throughout Jerusalaam Come, Juice Aleem proves that Big Dada’s current stable of hip-hop artists is among the strongest in the world, British or otherwise. Alongside stalwarts like Anti-Pop and newbies like Speech Debelle, the future of intelligent hip-hop seems in safe hands for now. For the restless, bashing rhinoceros in that stable, look no further than Juice Aleem.

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This is out on Big Dada on August 3rd. More here.