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.