A suitable riposte

Fuck off.

Not the Mercury Prize

The Mercury Prize List, as it should be. Probably.

So this year’s contenders for the Mercury Prize have been announced, and its the usual bizarre mix of elitism, populism and tokenism, with a few glaring emissions. Had I chose the nominees (who does, exactly?), it would read something like this:

Los Campesinos! – Hold on Now Youngster…
The coyest, most knowing record of the year, the Cardiff-based seven-piece created a debut which instantly draws you in with its unashamedly pop heart, and keeps you interested with its literate brain. It owes as much to the hardcore of Black Flag and Minor Threat as it does to the cardigan-rock of Pavement and Beat Happening, so don’t let its saccharine appearance fool you into thinking Los Camp can’t rock with the best of them.

Burial – Untrue
Also on the Mercury list, the elusive dub DJ is the nominee causing tabloid hacks the most confusion this year (see also Antony Hegarty and any jazz nominee ever), but this deep, brooding effort fully deserves to be brought to a wider audience.

Note to the bloke in the Sun: if Burial turns out to be Fatboy Slim, then I look like a young Nelson Mandela.

Portishead – Third
Bristol’s finest (sorry Tricky mate) finally returned after a seven year hiatus with the dullest title of the year, but a record that was far from dull. As edgy and deep as ever, with tracks ranging from ethereal beauty to those with beats that could cripple a man.

M.I.A. – Kala
The melting-pot sound of modern Britain flicking two fingers at ‘the Good Ol’ Days’: from African tribal rhythms to kitsch Bollywood covers, via Aboriginal wood sections, choirs and quite probably a kitchen sink, if there was any justice Kala would waltz to victory in the Mecury Prize. Alas, it wasn’t even nominated.

Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight
More sweary than me when I’ve had too much Southern Comfort and I’m confronted with an idea anywhere to the right of Trotsky, Scotland’s finest purveyors of Jock national stereotypes created a bittersweet, drink-sodden ramble through the murky, dingy streets of the Borders.

The Shortwave Set – Replica Sun Machine
Produced by Dangermouse, and partly arranged by John Cale and Van Dyke Parks, it was never going to be anything short of excellent, was it? Not that there wasn’t already enough in-house talent to create something special, either: The Shortwave Set’s alt-rock teemed with gentle-electronica is consistently tremendous.

School of Language – Sea from Shore
The constant overlooking of Field Music’s delightful retro-pop led to their probable split, and so David Brewis released Sea from Shore under this moniker: taking the toying pop sensibilities of his former (maybe) band and running wild with them under a multi-instrumental veneer.

Frank Turner – Love, Irove & Song
As much as I love Conor Oberst, the Bright Eyes’ frontman’s often overwrought worthiness is in my eyes exactly what prevents him becoming the ‘new Dylan’, or the ‘new new new Dylan’, as we’ve already truckloads of troubadours bestowed with grandiose comparisons to the reluctant ‘voice of a generation.’ Dylan though, had a sense of humour, and a lack of belief in his own hype or importance. The laconic, sardonic Turner also has his tongue often firmly in cheek, a jaded voice for the lost Left and the lost loves.

Hot Chip - Made in the Dark
Showing they can be as tender as they can geeky and dancy, Hot Chip’s third LP took them into stadium territory, with the aptly titled club-hit Ready for the Floor and the festival singalong title track, and a vastly improved live show to boot.

The Futureheads – This is Not the World
After the sadly underrated News and Tributes, the Sunderland quartet ripped it up and started again, leaving their record label to self-release this roaring work of near-perfect pop-punk.

Johnny Greenwood – There Will Be Blood (Soundtrack)
The Token Classical Entry, the score to Paul Thomas Anderson’s is an evocative, unsettling work that proves Greenwood’s multi-instrumental, trans-genre brilliance.

Radiohead – In Rainbows
Yes, this is bottom of the list because I forgot all about it until writing about Mr. Greenwood. Sometimes you can’t see the wood for the trees: their seventh opus caused ructions in the industry and brought the phrase “doing a Radiohead” into the vocabulary of clichéd journalists everywhere. It was, however, all trailblazing aside, a bloody fantastic album, as glitchy and neurotically brilliant as anything else they’ve committed to record.

I still like the Mercury Prize though, if only for how it perennially confuses the fuck out of the Sun.

Tilly and the Wall - O

Tilly and the Wall’s twee-as-fuck indie credentials couldn’t be much stronger. Bezzies with Conor Oberst, tourmates with Rilo Kiley and Of Montreal, and signed to uber-cool label Moshi Moshi. And they’ve got a tapdancer instead of a drummer, appear on Sesame Street and sing songs about rainbows. Or at least they did.

Third album O sees the Omaha band branching out from their summery indie-pop comfort zone, producing a glossier, fuller sounding record which misses a little less than it hits.

Opener Tall Tall Glass is reminiscent of the Tilly of yore, all saccharine vocals and acoustic hooks, a love-song to our favourite genre. We’ve all been there: “When there wasn’t anywhere for me to go, oh, I stumbled into deep love with you, rock and roll.” Anyone who’s ever found solace in alternative music, be it In Untero or In the Airplane Over the Sea, or indeed Tilly’s previous albums, will understand this sweet, light ode, the sentiment of which seems to pre-empt the sudden change of direction that follows on track two.

Pot Kettle Black is Tilly as loud as we’ve ever heard them: they’ve actually plugged in their guitars, and the rhythm section goes all out, giving the track a stomping driving force you simply can’t get with tap shoes. The infectious, dual vocal chorus is reminiscent of Le Tigre at their party-rock best.

Its tap to the fore on Cacophony though, but the song doesn’t deliver the noisy kitchen-sink antics that the title suggests, as it becomes a bit much of a muchness, the introduction of sax falling flat. The whole of I Found You falls flat as well, although again there’s more electric guitar than long-term Tilly fans will be used to.

Jumbler gets things back on track, a subtle bassline working perfectly with glockenspiel, tap dancing and call-and-response vocals. Chandelier Lake is the sort of typically lush sound we’ve come to expect out from American alt-pop on canonised labels like Moshi and Saddle Creek, if a little too forgettable.

Falling Without Knowing has an unusually speedy-yet-ethereal quality, another departure for the band, and an absolute treat. Blood Flowers has a glam feel to it, and tells you not “go fucking around in the garden”: older fans will remember Tilly quashing their butter-wouldn’t-melt image via the popular method of swearing (a method I’m very fucking fond of).

Tilly’s older albums typically closed on epic, folky efforts. This time out we instead get a Blondie-meets-Girls Aloud number with a handy “fuck you” ending and an “I don’t give a fuck, if I’m cool or not” mantra. Sweary, indeed, although you have to think that this newer, angrier Tilly and the Wall may be one that is squarely aiming to break out of the doldrums of college radio and support slots and become, well, cool.

O is an interesting departure for them; certainly more rock than their earlier work, with a swagger that suggests they could at some point cast off their cardigans in favour of leather jackets and truly “stumble into deep love” with rock and roll.

The Hold Steady - Stay Positive

The Hold Steady came to (slightly) wider prominence in 2006 with the release of the rip-roaring Boys and Girls in America, an album heavily influenced by the themes and the beat of Jack Kerouac’s seminal coming-of-age novel, On the Road. In many ways, it was also a coming-of-age record for the Brooklyn five-piece, a hazy, rowdy trip across the States seeing them truly finding their feet after the promise of their previous two releases. However, for many, Kerouac and his Beat Generation cohorts never truly fulfilled the potential of their early work, and after dispensing with the literary references, we hope the Hold Steady don’t follow suit (avoiding the drug abuse would also be handy).

The album begins as loudly as the previous, Constructive Summer tearing from the proverbial 0-60 in about a second, another instant Hold Steady classic, as gnarled and edgy as you’d expect: you can just imagine it soundtracking a bar fight on HBO. Sequestered in Memphis begins as a more melodic affair, and ends as a singalong, the song seeing the band back on the road (and subpoenaed in Texas) and shagging ‘n’ that, although this turns out a mistake, as “in bar light, she looked alright, in daylight, she looked desperate.”

False alibis are the subject of One for the Cutters, which asks “If one townie falls in the forest, does anyone notice?” I’m unsure of the American definition of ‘townie’, but if its anything like mine, then my guess is ‘no.’

Navy Sheets begins promisingly, but its noisy guitars and background synthesising don’t do enough to mask a generally lacklustre track, the lowpoint of the album. The tender Lord, I’m Discouraged is a slight departure from their usual output, even if the message to God is once more about a lost love. “Excuses and half-truths and fortified wine” says more about the foibles of the Church than the song’s subject, however. Its on this track that frontman Craig Finn’s vocal lessons appear at their most fruitful, his famously gruff voice displaying a softer edge, which is underlined on Both Crosses, a song reminiscent of Nick Cave both in style and in its dark content.

Yeah, Sapphire is a pleasant enough FM rock song, and the title track is the record’s poppiest moment, a jaunty paean of respect to the Youth of Today, telling us to stay positive about the future. Magazines begins in similarly happy style, but this makes way for a lament about a friend’s relationship failing under the weight of alcohol, ‘magazines, and daddy issues.’ The piano-led Joke About Jamaica unsurprisingly begins in a bar: if they’re not careful, the Hold Steady may get a bit of a reputation…

Slapped Actress rounds things off on a high, a typically raucous effort about attempting to keep a relationship secret, ending with an epic choral flourish.

Stay Positive doesn’t quite match the highs of Boys and Girls in America, but whilst they may have left behind Kerouac, the Hold Steady remain one of the most adept bands at chronicling the true American Dream, a murkier affair than many would have you believe.

Stay Positive can be streamed at: www.myspace.com/theholdsteady

Physical release July 14.

Girl Talk - Feed the Animals

Hip-hop is dead.

The Superstar DJ is dead.

Or at least, you’d think so.

DJs thankfully appear not be releasing albums any more, the superclubs are degenerated to tools to sell half-arsed compilations, and Ibeefa is just too bloody expensive for your average Weekend Millionaire.

And looking at the genre as a whole, hip-hop is a stagnant mess of egos, tired beats, and prison sentences, occasionally lifted above the level of dross by few-and-far between albums from the likes of the Def Jux stable, or are-they-hip-hop-or-not releases from the likes of M.I.A. That M.I.A. often isn’t accepted truly into the rap canon could be an indication of her renowned eclecticism, or of a genre digging its heels and refusing to evolve.

“Is it really hip-hop?” is also a question that could be aimed at of Girl Talk’s fourth outing Feed the Animals, the Pittsburgh DJ again throwing together an album consisting mainly of hundreds of samples, with the odd bit of original orchestration (there is yet to be a definite number on exactly how many samples are included, but its well into the hundreds. An incomplete list can be found on Wikipedia, and after only one listen you’ll have spotted something yet to be included).

What blurs the line over the pigeon-holing though is Feed the Animals’ eclectic variety of samples. Underneath various rapped verses from otherwise tedious artists, we’re smacked in the face with myriad other rips.

If these samples do defy the album’s hip-hop credentials, then we’re not sure exactly at which point it loses ghetto credibility.

Is it the inclusion of M.I.A.? We’re not sure where to categorise her, admittedly, but its more likely to be the skinny-white-boy indie rock of the likes of Radiohead, Blur and Yo La Tengo that moves the album out of the Hummers and onto suburban coffee-tables.

Even more likely still, it’s the amount of music generally reserved for pre-pubescent girls and middle-aged Tesco shoppers (who should really know better): Avril Lavigne, Kelly Clarkson, Pink et al.

Yet more likely to dissatisfy hip-hop purists is the amount of sheer cheese, though. Dexy’s Midnight Runners, for fuck’s sake!

What’s amazing though, is that on the whole, this works, and it works excellently. There’s so much to take from this LP. Gain indie points from spotting the Unicorns and Of Montreal, or sit in amazement as a Kraftwerk and Velvet Underground backdrop makes Low by Flo Rida not only listenable, but enjoyable. Wonder why the bloody hell you’re listening to Journey, or why nobody has used My Sherona as a hip-hop beat before. Wear out your rewind button trying to spot Rod Stewart, or hope nobody you know thinks you’re actually listening to Vanilla Ice. Or just stick it on, switch your brain off and dance your arse off.

Critics wondered whether previous release Night Ripper would date poorly, with many of its samples very much of its time, but the sheer range of the music involved means that each listen reveals something intriguing and new, even if you’d rather not still have to listen to Fatman Scoop. Whilst Girl Talk has once more sliced up the ringtone charts and thrown them into his musical blender with the inclusion of the likes of the ubiquitous Soulja Boy, Rihanna, and everyone’s favourite sample Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, again there are enough stone cold classics torn apart to keep the record almost timeless, whether from bona-fide hip-hop greats (ODB, Missy Elliott, Public Enemy) or the likes of The Cure and The Beach Boys.

Whether Feed the Animals is accepted as a hip-hop record is unclear, but to deny it would be to suggest that rap is completely averse to any innovation or inspiration. To accept it would suggest there is still life in the genre, and that Girl Talk may well be the Superstar DJ to save it.

A drunken day at Evolution in some marketing exercise known as NewcastleGateshead

Evolution is the north-east’s premier Bank Holiday Monday on the lash, and although this year’s line-up didn’t look particularly strong, it’s a chance to watch a load of bands for a ridiculously small sum of three English pounds (sadly the same price as the lager: Evolution is the only time of the year you go to the Pitcher and Piano to save money). And it was sunny this year as well. Top stuff.

Sunderland’s This Ain’t Vegas opened the proceedings at the Spillars Wharf stage, firmly stating their mackem credentials to a partisan crowd. It’s a great set from the Wearside indie-types, so often forgotten in the wake of fellow wheese-keys-are-these lads, the Futureheads.

The Whip are next. They play their best tune while I’m at the toilet, the rest of their set is, well, toilet. Instantly forgettable generic electro, with a frontman who is achingly desperate to be cool. His craic with the crowd is woeful, and he’s wearing a Batman t-shirt that was a cliché when Kele Okereke did it three years ago.

I’ve heard really good things and really bad things about Glasvegas, and I’m now siding with the latter. They come across as massively dull, and the Glaswegians’ name is reminiscent of the tendency of the inhabitants of various crap South Durham towns to add ‘Vegas’ to everything. I never want a night out in ‘Crook Vegas’, and I’d rather not have to listen to this lot again either.

Down on the other stage, I’m attracted to Hercules and the Love Machine by their links with my favourite transvestite New Yorker, Antony Hegarty (of Antony & the Johnsons fame). This project however lacks the immediate charm and beauty of his earlier work, as we’re presented with a poorly-timed cacophony of crap disco.

Duffy is a diminutive little minx, but fills the stage with a presence and a voice far beyond her tiny frame. It’s all a little bit Radio 2 though, although altogether less irritating than fellow soul-lite exponent, Adele.

Reverend and the Makers are bloody awful though. Poorly-informed leftist sentiment delivered by a raving tosspot who looks more likely to mug your gran then deliver any of the ‘peace and love’ he kept spouting on about.

I try to like Kate Nash, I really do, as by now the debacle that is backstage has made me decide to slum it with my mates who have assembled to watch her. She’s late, confuses stroppy little piano-smacking with charisma, and chucks glottal stops all over the shop. I get through one song before I can’t take any more of her mockney tedium and head for the bar.

All in all, Evolution remains a good day out. Next year we just need to hope for a better line-up. And more sun, please.

Whatever Happened to My Rock and Roll? (I'd rather not have the BRMC reference, but it fits the piece, reet?)

I can’t be alone in thinking that we’re on the edge of Something Very Shit Indeed.

You know the line in Fight Club about how our generation has no great war, no great depression? That our Great War is a spiritual war, and our Great Depression is our lives?

Pretty soon we’ll see how much shit hits the fan when we experience our Great War and our Great Depression at the same time (only after we’ve explained to a generally moronic and apathetic public that we’re using ‘great’ as a pejorative). Religious nutjobs trying to outdo each other in the Rank Stupidity and Death to Innocent Civilians stakes, and inflation threatening to go through the roof. Don’t get me started on the price of chicken. (Doesn’t seem to be affecting KFC though. Bastards.)

Anyway, I digress. What annoys me is that something somewhere is clearly going quite tits up, and Boris Johnson runs our capital city.

But on my radio is some berk telling me that she’s so lovely, she’s so lovely, she’s just so fucking lovely.

We’re all aware of the proliferation of NME diet-Libertines dross in the British music scene these days, but something a little deeper, a little more worrying struck me a month or so ago: the uber-pretentious music site Pitchfork’s main problem with the new Billy Bragg album is that it’s not political enough

They lamented that he’s foregone the polemic couplets of yore and made an album that’s, well, happy. They were criticising a man who remains one of Britain’s greatest living songwriters, who has produced another solid record, for not remaining the leftwing, Red Wedge firebrand he was so regularly caricaturised as. Often lambasted as a relic of Old Labour, a broken-record champagne socialist who shunned his roots, it appears we still need him to Help Save the Youth of America, and apparently the UK too. We still need him, and people like him, to speak for us.

It’s not, in essence, this idea I have a problem with.

I don’t disagree with the idea that musicians should speak for the disenfranchised and the jaded. Rock music in particular should be a simmering bastion of political dissent. Rock music should be rocking against racism one day, then shouting ‘cunt’ on live telly the next.

What worries me is that Bragg is a 51 year old folk-singer who clearly doesn’t want to be just a political songwriter, yet for some reason we are now yearning for him to be just that.

That’s because there’s nobody else. British music is a lethargic mess of indifference that only gets its arse in gear when they can make money from a cause they, in all honesty, know nothing about. Moody teenagers find solace in rebellion. Where’s the rebellion in the homogenized radio-friendly NME twat-rock that they’re force fed now? Once they had the Clash or Nirvana. Now they have the Kooks.

And we certainly can’t rely on Luke Pritchard to point out that the only way ID cards will save us from terrorism is if they’re nine feet by seven feet and made out of Kevlar (so we can hide behind them the next time some fuckwit sets fire to his shoes on a 747).

I wonder what the Twang’s opinion on the current plight of the Burmese public is. Does anyone think they actually have one? Does anyone care?

Is the View one of the stupidest band names ever? Is there actually a single thought between whole lot of the scruffy Cornershop-raping cunts?

When this generation shows our grandchildren the popular music of our day, what will they think? Will they be inspired by a Lennon or Stummer type figure, or be too busy scratching the microchip that’s implanted in their face because we were a generation that didn’t care, and looked to Alex Turner for social commentary? A generation that failed to see the irony of watching Big Brother as everything fell apart around us?

I’m not sure if the lack of activism amongst musicians is a result of the aforementioned apathetic and moronic public, or the root of it. It’s a chicken and egg situation, but chicken is too fucking expensive and we’re looking to the Hoosiers to save us.

Billy Bragg - Mr. Love & Justice

It’s six years since his last album, and you could be forgiven for thinking we need him more than ever. The Bard of Barking, Billy Bragg, returns with Mr. Love & Justice. That it was originally to be entitled the rather clunky Mr. Love & Social Justice should tell you all you need to know about a man who for almost three decades has been a bastion of left-wing political dissent.

However, although he is most famed for being a political song-writer, it irks Bragg that he is known just as a political songwriter, and understandably so. The likes of A New England, Greetings to the New Brunette and The Milkman of Human Kindness underscore the fact that, socialism aside, Bragg is one of Britain’s greatest living songwriters.

Much of the politics have been left at the door for this new album, with Bragg instead producing an album mainly consisting of love songs, like the tender You Make Me Brave. Many of these paeans, however, are devoted to continually opaque subjects, letting politics once again rear its head through the medium of the trusty allegory.

In opener I Keep Faith, we’re not entirely sure what Bragg is holding on to. A lost love, it seems, but of what? A woman? His country? A God? Whilst bigotry masquerading as faith may be behind the majority of the world’s problems, the realistic Bragg comments that a world without faith is a world for the worse.

Whether I Keep Faith is about Britain or not, Bragg’s love of his country is a recurring theme. Listening to the track on a sunny day, all optimism and sumptuous backing, could well convince you that the UK isn’t actually shite, an opinion you’d then be sharing with a man often lambasted for anti-British rhetoric. Bragg spent his time between his last record and this one writing his first book, The Progressive Patriot, a polemic on nationalism and how liberals can (and should) finally reclaim the Union flag from the far-right. This shines through on The Beach is Free, a touching tribute to the historic British coastline, underpinned, in typical Bragg style, with a lament that our countryside is dying on its arse.

It is only when the politics lose their subtly and symbolism that the album stumbles. O Freedom questions “how many liberties must we lose in your name,” but it’s a trite, simplistic song with some truly grating couplets, like “defence” with “evidence”, with a rhythm very similar to Feist’s Sea Lion Woman. Although it is an admirable sentiment, and a timely reminder about the erosion of our civil liberties (ID cards continue to loom over us like a badly-laced jackboot), you can’t help think Bragg has chosen an easy target, and that he hasn’t aimed particularly well. The days of Help Save the Youth of America and Between the Wars seem long ago, and thankfully age has mellowed Bragg somewhat. Sing Their Souls Back Home and the title track have a political edge, but not in the O Freedom sense that it’s like being twatted in the face with the Independent. Mr. Love & Justice in particular is a feel-good song, not in keeping with the bitter cynicism of many protest songs of today. He is at his most acidic on The Johnny Carcinogenic Show, a sideswipe at the tobacco industry with what little merit it has softened further by the god-awful wordplay of the title.

Musically too, Bragg has progressed since his earlier days. Once just one angry young man with an acoustic guitar, for his past few albums he has been working with backing group, the Blokes, lending a more rounded, deeper sound to his work, similar to that of Richard Hawley on last year’s excellent Lady’s Bridge (Mr. L&J is available as a two CD special edition, the second disc featuring a solo Bragg).

Sing Their Souls Back Home is bizarrely reminiscent of No Woman, No Cry in it’s intro, the rest of the song with an apt gospel twang. I Almost Killed You is a travelling song, all skiffle-like and ramshackle, and Something Happened’s musings on the definitions of love and lust have a taut electric backing rarely heard in his work. Farm Boy is minimalist, yet soulful, another bittersweet track demonstrating admiration of the British countryside, juxtaposed with the fact that the farm boy in question is a solider serving in some forsaken desert, dreaming of a return to this green and pleasant land.

It would have been too easy for Bragg to produce an album along the lines of Neil Young’s Living with War, an LP devoted entirely to condemning George Bush. A few discretions aside, he has instead produced a warm record which reminds you of his song-writing qualities rather than his reputation, though which still possesses the trademarks of a man who, love him or hate him, cannot be ignored.

Malcolm Middleton - Slight of Heart

He’s nothing if not productive, Malcolm Middleton. Slight of Heart is his third album in four years, hot on the heels of the irony-tastic Make Malcolm Middleton Christmas Number One campaign, headed up by the ever-tedious Radio One and thousands of Facebook types, seemingly desperate to get the We’re All Going to Die bandwagon to the festive top-spot in place of, erm, a bandwagon.

Whilst this hype did give Middleton a moment in something resembling the spotlight, and this new record could therefore be his biggest selling to date, the prolific nature of his output seems to have been at the expense of consistent quality. Middleton’s first album after the split of Arab Strap was a bittersweet opus of malevolent folk, spiked adeptly with infectious synth, but its follow-up was weak in parts. Slight of Heart has entirely removed the electro sensibilities of that early record, Into the Woods, and we’re left with something which sees Middleton conforming to stereotype, a dreary album of Scottish miserablism without the self-effacing wit we originally loved him for, nor the instantaneous hooks that defied his pessimistic outlook.

Much of it is simply too dull, and that’s before you decide whether his well-trodden lyricism of unrequited love, laziness and hitting the bottle is a well-worked trademark or a tiresome cliché.

Its not, however, an album that’s completely without merit, and opener Week Off finds Middleton in fine form on typical subject matter: doing nothing, writing songs and getting pissed. It’s an introduction, though, that serves mainly to underline the failings of track two, the lyrically awful Blue Plastic Bags (which contain “six bottles of Stella, Jacob’s Creek and 20 fags.”), a song which, even by Middleton’s standards, is ridiculously world-weary. Total Belief is nothing we haven’t heard him do better before and Just Like Anything just seems, like, tired.

Follow Robin Down picks things up again, with a fuller sound in comparison to the mainly acoustic-with-a-bit-of-string composition of the rest of the album, but Madonna cover Stay will have Samaritans phonelines working overtime, and not in a good, Elliott Smith way, merely a please-make-it-stop way. Marguerita Red begins with a jaunty introduction, but loses its way hopelessly, and Love Comes in Waves begins tunelessly and meanders off into pretty much nothing.

It seems the step-backwards that A Brighter Beat hinted at has unfortunately became a fully fledged leap, Total Belief having Middleton lurching into an all-too-serious point that “this is shit, and that is shit, and being shit is great.” The man also once said “I don’t wanna write these shit songs any more” and it was once ironic. Now it’s a little too close to the truth.

Cat Power - Jukebox

The changing career of Chan Marshall, under her ever-bemusing moniker Cat Power, is perhaps most easily illustrated in a comparison of her two LPs of cover versions. The first, the rather unimaginatively titled The Covers Record, came at a crossroads in her career, before she made the transition from kooky, jazzy singer-songwriter to indie-darling with the acclaimed You Are Free. This new release, under the all-too-obvious name of Jukebox, comes off the back of both her biggest album to date, The Greatest, and a privately turbulent time which saw her successfully battling alcohol problems.

Like her previous release proper, Jukebox sees Marshall on the periphery of the mainstream, her once lusty, breathless vocal again giving way to a more bolshy sound, the charming minimalism of gems like I Don’t Blame You replaced by the fuller sound of backing band the Dirty Delta Blues (making their first appearance on a Power record). Whilst the delivery itself may have changed, the sentiment behind it hasn’t; Marshall remains one of the most delightfully earnest singers in music today, capable of being as heart-rending as she is heart-warming, without ever degenerating into schmaltz or slush. It’s the occasionally heavy handed support of her band that can grate, however.

As on The Covers Record, Marshall does not so much cover a track, as break it down, tear it apart and piece it back together. Possibly in the dark. Anyone who’s heard that album’s reworking of the Rolling Stones’ supposedly-untouchable Satisfaction should not be surprised by opener, Theme from New York, New York, but they will be.

(Yes, that New York, New York. Yes, the Sinatra one.)

Gone is the triumphant leg-waving, in is a dreamy ode to her adopted home city, almost indistinguishable from the original, and certainly unidentifiable from the opening bars; this is a world away from the cliché that closed a million wedding receptions.

The reworking theme continues throughout the rest of the record, transforming works as diverse as that of Billie Holiday (Don’t Explain) and James Brown (Lost Someone), as well as traditional American song Lord, Help the Poor and Needy. She even takes to adapting a song of her own: Metal Heart originally appeared on 1998’s Moon Pix album. Both have their merits, although on Jukebox it is a tad too glossy, again underlining the changes in Marshall’s approach.

An album of covers will invariably hint at influences and produce hints of tributes, and Bob Dylan is the subject of deification here. The only original track on the album is Song to Bobby, which sees Marshall recalling her attempts to meet her idol, and there’s also an appropriation of I Believe in You, which is a highlight. The opening of Song to Bobby even has Marshall apparently attempting to sing in a Dylan-style drawl as she laments those missed opportunities in a bittersweet homage. However, anybody interested in Power/Dylan crossovers could do worse than check out her flawless attempt at Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again, recorded for the I’m Not There biopic.

With her problems behind her, the current Bob Dylan revivalism, and a cleaner, more accessible sound, Jukebox could well be the album that introduces many to Cat Power. It could win her a new breed of fans, but it’ll be her next original release that will decide how older fans feel about her ever-more polished sounds and their flirtation with the mainstream, as well as the burgeoning amount of press hype this brings. Jukebox is by no means a poor album, but it’s also in no way one to be held up alongside You are Free.

Los Campesinos - Hold on Now Youngster...

There was, once a time when ‘pop’ wasn’t a dirty word. From the halcyon days of the sixties, up until the days of convention-smashing, globe-straddling superstars of the eighties, pop once merely meant ‘popular.’ Even Britpop did exactly what it said on the tin; it was quintessentially British, it was popular, and it was occasionally fucking fantastic.

Pop music wasn’t always pre-packaged shite, arranged and stylised on the conveyor belt of Idiots Texting Votes and the gravy-train of Cowell et al. And nor need it be.

Hold on Now Youngster… is pop music. Bloody brilliant pop music.

Los Campesinos’ hype-soaked debut long-player takes its lead from the underground alt-pop of the eighties, the band holding up Beat Happening’s Calvin Johnson as a messianic figure for the excluded and the poetic, the twee and the sugary-sweet, a subculture where mix-tapes still form a fundamental part of any burgeoning relationship, and a firm grounding in English literature is positively encouraged: “just don’t read Jane Eyre.”

Its an album that is equal parts innocent and intelligent, a deliberate doe-eyed charm juxtaposed against references ill-befitting its exuberance; obscure Oxford post-rockers Meanwhile, Back in Communist Russia, the aforementioned Eyre and Johnson’s K Records label all get mentions, teamed with self-depreciating honesty and anxiety, like “If there’s one thing I can never confess / its that I can’t dance a single step,” and “I know he took you to the beach.” Thankfully, there’s enough humour and self-awareness here to avoid such often trivial relationship issues plunging into the territory usually reserved for pseudo-angst emo shtick, and the too-clever-for-its-own-good standalone single International Tweecore Underground has been left out. All of the early favourites survive however, so we can be reminded just how good You! Me! Dancing! and Death to Los Campesinos! were, whilst being treated to a glut of equally well-crafted new tracks, which follow in the singles’ formula of massive choruses and knowing lyrics.

Pedantry it may be, but you have to admire the educated swipe that is “it’s bad enough you ever used the word as an adjective” and agree that “four sweaty boys with guitars tell me nothing about my life”, whilst 2007, The Year Punk Rock Broke (My Heart) tells us that Los Cam are so quaintly eighties that they still use their Walkmans, apparently.

Many people will love this album for many different reasons. It may speak to your dainty, fretful side. It may be the deft intellectualism, and the literate lyricism. Or it might just be the tunes.

No matter the reason, Hold on Now Youngster is an album that knows its audience, but grows beyond it and becomes the first great pop album of the year.