Music Banter

Hmm.

It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Things have got quite dusty in here.

Sorry about that. I’ve been away, getting married. Long story, the stuff of legend. Honest.

You know what, though- weddings are actually fairly bland affairs. The whole point of them is their normality. ‘Ah yes,’ you say to yourself as the bride’s father gets up to make a speech, ‘here’s this bit, and then that bit and that. I know exactly what’s coming, life is ordered and these people are settling down.’

So move along, nothing more to see.

I’m easing things back in with a review of an album by someone I once rather uncharitably referred to as ‘Swansea’s answer to John Denver,’ before going on to talk vaguely of ‘happy-clappy acoustic singalongs’ and ‘toe-curlingly bad versions of biblical psalms,’ without really directly referring to him as such. I looked at it and went ‘well, it’s fine, isn’t it? I’m not really talking about Rich, and it’s not as if he’ll read this.

Then something strange happened. Rich read my post and strangely, instead of threatening to punch my stupid face in, he did something I didn’t expect at all.

He sent me his album to review.

It’s called ‘The Essence of My Life,’ and it was waiting for me when I got home from the states after my wedding. As I slept off jet-lag and tried to stave off the thought of the horrors that awaited my poor wife in her marriage to me, I popped this on and gave it a listen.

It is exactly the kind of album I would have expected my old mate to come out with. I should say as well that I find it entirely impossible to be objective about it as music in itself. At least I’m honest, eh? Richard Craine is an old pal of mine, and this makes me smile when I play it because it’s so reflective of his personality.

Of course, I think he’s a person well worth getting to know.

Yes, but what does it sound like?

Err, Bristol’s answer to John Denver? Guess you want more than that?

Actually, he’s more like a British James Taylor putting on an American accent. John Denver ain’t in there, not really.

The songs on this album are simple and direct. Rich relies on his skill on an acoustic guitar, and his clear, strong voice to tell short, intimate songs which are well-observed, candid and deeply personal. About half the songs have a full band on them, or the odd little embellishment here and there from a musician, but mainly, it’s just Rich and his guitar.

‘River Stroll’ is a good example of this approach- it’s a quiet and reflective song, bass and simple percussion underpinning Rich’s playing as he sings openly and honestly about realising how happy you are with someone whilst out on a walk along a riverbank. It’s sweetly touching, and utterly unbothered by the hovering demons of cliche. Dubstep, this ain’t. I don’t think Rich’s bothered much about that.

Another stand-out for me is the title track,The Essence of My Life where he’s simply and honestly telling the woman he loves that things were rubbish before she was around. ‘there was no reason in my mornings till you there/now I just lay here… watching the sunlight in your hair.’ Not exactly uncharted territory, lyrically, but that isn’t the point, is it? Love is not a new thing to the world. To you, however, it’s new. It’s powerful, it’s wonderful. Love transforms your life, if you let it. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that.

Another highlight of the album for me is a song I played live with him a few times. ‘Mistrust Mistreatment and Misunderstanding’ skirts that fine line between genius and disaster. You see, it’s an upbeat country shuffle concerned with the three women who always seem to follow him around. Ah, I hear you say, a reference to the three blind Muses of Greek Myth, a reference gleaned from his Classics education?

Not quite. These three women are Miss trust, Miss treatment, and… oh, I think you get the picture. The song is an account of the trouble they cause him. It’s a terrible pun. Terrible. That’s what makes it so wonderful. I love it.

Love’s Just one of Those Lies is a great song, too. It’s a quiet dissection of the coldness beating beneath the heart of every supposed nice guy after too many disappointments in love, when eventually you’re just going through the motions because to stay cold and heartless is easier. As a nice touch, this is the one song on the album where he gets his wife (the very talented Mirelle Mathlener) to do backing vocals. Ah, domestic bliss.

‘Memory River‘ is more of the same- a look back at the past where all there is regret, the sting of missed chances and the ticking of the clock. ‘I never learn to be once bitten twice shy, I just get more desperate when I hear goodbye,’ and I think we all know how that feels.

Elsewhere, he tells us that ‘I live in confusion/not far from desparate/in a state of loneliness/too far from love’ and basically tells us that whilst he seems all confident and happy, it’s all just done with smoke and mirrors. Makes me want to give him a big old hug.

Richard Craine’s website is here:

http://www.richardcraine.com

Why not email him and ask him about the birthday card he and I made for his girlfriend in 1998? If you’re lucky, he might still have the photograph we used. If you’re really unlucky, he might send you a copy, hopefully with the guitar sticker still attached.

I’m also going to include this youtube video, mainly because I want to draw attention to this remarkable beard:

Ladies and gentlemen, Richard Craine. The Man. The legend. The Visionary. A man who I am privileged to know.

Everyone knows who U2 are, right? Ageing stadium rockers, miniscule singer with a giant ego, god-botherers, sometimes a bit too keen on sticking their noses in where they don’t belong, more like a giant, world-straddling brand than a rock group? With Or Without You, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Live Aid, Mullets, good old Oirish boys who are proud of where they come from but outsourced their ridiculous wealth so their homeland gets no tax monies from all those album sales. Bono’s friends with Barak Obama, Bill Gates and the pope. He’s a dilettante and an egomaniac, a man who spends more time prancing about trying to save the world than he does no his music. That’s them, right? They’re horrendously unstylish, awkward in every way, lumpen, lumbering and just plain unsexy, the opposite of all good rock and roll, right? Most of all, of course, it’s that singer, that Bono. What a collossal ego, right? Wants you to believe he has the answers just because he’s up on that stage?

Wrong.

I’m going to take you back to my bedroom. Steady on, now.

I was fifteen. It was 1993, and I was a desparate, disaffected teenager, looking for an escape from a drab and desperately sad reality that I could hardly even talk about, much less come to terms with. Most important, like teenagers everywhere, I wanted- something other. Something to lift me up. Something to transcend the mundane.

And then I found it. I found it in a strange, subversive and endlessly obscure band who I loved, whose music took me to places I’d never been, who seemed to speak to me alone in my room. Listening to this strange band seemed to open up new possibilities, draw the curtain back on new worlds.

I’d discovered music a while back, when Meat Loaf and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles had been supplanted at the top of the UK charts by a wild, unsettling chunk of distorted guitar, sleazed-up vocals and pounding rhythms which were unlike anything else, but now this band were touring the world. Strange reports were on Radio 1 every day of increasingly bizarre scenes at their shows, giant screens full of deconstructionist slogans, papier mache models of the band dancing in the crowd, a singer dressed as the Devil singing songs about selling your soul whilst giant TV screens displayed the slogan ‘Everything You Know Is Wrong.’ It was dizzying, it was exciting, and I wanted a part of it.

This is the band that made that sound:

And this was their singer:

Now, I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure that is not a man who is unaware of how he comes across. It sure likes interesting, don’t you think?

I certainly did. So I went out and bought the band’s new album. The first album I ever owned. ‘Zooropa.’ An absolute masterpiece and still, in my opinion, one of the greatest albums ever made. From the strange buzz of feedback and babbling voices chiming ‘What Do You Want?’ on the opening title track, through the slow, industrial rattle of ‘Numb’ to the sad romance of ‘Stay,’ the angry father/son confrontation of ‘Dirty Day’ and the world-weary voice of Jonny Cash singing about being a wanderer in a strange futuristic wilderness, and then a klaxon in the emptiness which chimes out unexpectedly after the last song, and then teminates in a sort of electronic sob, it’s a record that oozes strangeness, that absolutely throbs with the bizarre. I love every song on it, for completely different reasons, and as a whole it’s a wonderful, wonderful 51 minutes and 15 seconds of anyone’s life.

All through the record, Bono’s lyrics reflect ambiguity and confusion, a sense of having no direction, being utterly lost in a dizzying world, questioning everything, claiming that ‘uncertainty can be a guiding light’ as he views the modern landscape of slogans and disinformation around him, and finds it lacking. So what does he do? He chucks out a whirlwind of ad slogans, lyrics about lucid dreams, false promises and lies whilst dressed as the devil, and beaming pictures of lonely cosmonauts to stadiums full of people.

Here’s the ‘Numb’ Video, which I promise you is musically about as far away from your preconceived idea of U2 as you could ever get.

And here’s some live footage from then: First up, here’s ‘Lemon’- a sort of futuristic disco song about despair, futility, and the pointlessness of all our efforts- ‘a man builds a city/with banks and cathedral/he turns his money into light to look for her… these are the days when our work has come asunder’ and the redemptive moment at the heart of darkness- ‘midnight is where the day begins.’

Next we have With Or Without You, an old song off their Joshua Tree days, the kind of song that gets featured in montages in Friends, a safe song, which all of a sudden seems to have that little bit more Edge (see what I did there? Oh, never mind) to it when it’s a gold-suited Devil singing about giving your soul away. Oh, and whilst we’re about it, my god, that boy had a voice on him then:

The Zooropa show closer ‘Love Is Blindness’ off the preceding album ‘Achtung Baby,’ which segues into an absolutely ASTOUNDING version of Unchained Melody. If it doesn’t break your heart, then you are a cold and dead person, lying to yourself.

This is U2 as they were back then. My U2. Wild and ambiguous, four mad souls dancing at the heart of a gleaming, chaotic, contradictory whirlwind of glitter, gold and love, and keeping their heads about them whilst they did it. They were the best band in the world. The strangest band in the world. The most daring rock stars ever. The band that saved my life when I was fifteen and my mother died.

This is my U2. Zooropa is a classic album you thought was shit. Everything You Know is Wrong.

This article has three openings. Choose which one you like, according to taste, then read the rest.

Opening 1:

Poor Courtney Love. She’s a tragic footnote in the story of one of music’s cultural icons, the late lamented lionised Kurt Cobain. She’s a woman in a man’s world whose junkie husband ran out on her in the worst possible way, and whose life has been a struggle ever since. People like Michael Stipe and Billy Corgan reached out to her to try and keep her together with varying success as she struggled to remain true to her artistic muse in the face of the most difficult set of circumstances any female rock musician has ever faced. Still, the very fact that she’s still on this planet is a testament to her tenacity, the power of the human spirit. She’s flawed, sure, but she’s beaten the odds to even be here. This album happened against all the odds. For that she is to be commended.

Opening two;
My god, what a bitch Courtney Love is. A fucking obnoxious monster who destroys everything she touches, ruined her husband’s life and causes chaos in her wake. She’s a disaster area, a piece of human wreckage who squats on her wonderful husband’s legacy like a shit stain on the Mona Lisa. She’s an embarrassment, a modern day Nancy Spungeon who is wedded to her own pathetic drama, and her life is a cautionary tale for musicians, celebrities, and women anywhere. Her life is a mess, and thank goodness her daughter has finally been taken into care. The only surprising thing about her is that she isn’t dead right now.

Article Opening 3;
Courtney Love was actually a musician, once. the frontwoman of Hole, she was a captivating, mesmerising stage presence, a tattered angel in a torn baby-doll dress, spitting venom and sparing no-one, not even herself in the bravest act of truth-telling to come along onstage for a long, long time. She’s the woman who wrote ‘Doll Parts,’ ‘Celebrity Skin,’ ‘Miss World,’ and ‘Jennifer’s Body,’ which still sound as awesome as they ever did. She was a musician worthy of being discussed in the same sentence as PJ Harvey, Bjork, or Patti Smith, and she has been an inspiration to a series of female performers ever since.

Pick up reading here
And now she has a new album out. Of course, it’ll be judged not just on the music, but upon which version of Courtney Love you believe in.

Let’s be honest, none of us actually know her. We know what we see, and what we read, in the press. This isn’t going to be a rant about the media, it’s merely an old philosophy student’s acknowledgement on the limits of knowledge. I don’t know what Courtney Love is really like. You don’t either. We project our picture of her across her music in a way that we do with everyone. Everyone who makes public statements is doing so with one agenda or another. She can come across as a bitch. Fair enough. I don’t pretend to know that for certain.

But what does it sound like?

It sounds like Hole. Maybe the drumming isn’t as good as Patty Schemel’s was back in the day, and Eric Erlandson isn’t on board, but let’s be fair- this band is defined by Courtney Love. It always was. There’s a bunch of other musicians on this album, but there’s no doubt whose vision is being carried out here.

And, well, it’s not bad. It’s a bit slick in places, closer to ‘Celebrity Skin’ than ‘Live Through This’ or ‘Pretty on the Inside’ in its sound, but she’s still got it. Her voice is still the powerful instrument it always was. Listen to ‘Loser Dust’- she’s yelling like she always did, shredding her throat in that way you get from no other singer since…. some guy in some Grunge Band.

Lyrically, the same themes are here- the girls who let themselves be used, the superficial lure of glamour and excess, and just how desperate those moments when you wake up alone can be. ‘so you’re lying in your underwear/in someone else’s bed/and the silence is so dangerous..so I have another cigarette/ and I try to forget’ is the same story as ‘When I wake up in my Make-up/it’s too early for an address,’ still being told.

‘Samantha,’ with her refrain of ‘people like you fuck people like me’ is another girl caught up in destructive behaviour, pitied and reviled in equal measure.

You know she’s talking about herself. You also know that the biting contempt in her voice is directed inward more harshly than anyone else ever could.
She also still rocks pretty hard: Skinny Little Bitch is one of a couple of songs on the album which seem designed to make a bunch of young folk jump up and down and bang into each other. It seems to be working, too, if this live video is anything to go buy;

She isn’t always successful; on Letter to God, she asks how on earth she got to where she is:
‘I never wanted to be the person you see… I always wanted to die but you kept me alive/can you tell me who I am?…I never wanted to be/some kind of comic relief’ It’s groaning under the weight of The Myth of Courtney Love. She’s sick of it. She wants to escape it. But here’s the rub- she seems in love with the attention it gives her. Plus it doesn’t have much of a tune.

Long Ride Home, the last song on the album, is just her and a guitar. I may be nuts but it sounds like Bob Dylan, I swear it. And strangely, the comparison’s apt- the two are both so completely in thrall to their own mythology that no sound they make, no word they speak is judged in and of itself. Dylan, you could argue, is more in control of that, but Courtney isn’t going down without a fight.

‘It’s a long ride home and my head is bowed/and you’re no comfort to me now/and it’s fully loaded/and it’s set on stun/at least I know that I have won/and my wig’s on crooked/and I got no shoes…I don’t care what it takes my friend/I will never go hungry again.’

This is the song that seems to be most directly about her. She knows how fucked she is, and she knows it’s a long way back up from where she’s been. It’s a fitting final statement of who she is, and where she is. Maybe she’s a little wedded to her own mythology, but this is her story, it’s who she is. She can’t let it go, she doesn’t dare. It’s all fucked up, but she’ll find a way to go on.

I like Tunng. It’s a really good word. It sounds good to say, like ‘tongue,’ but somehow more visceral- you savour the sound as it comes out of your mouth. I may just sound nuts but I do genuinely like language that much. t’s fun. It feels good to make those sounds.

Much like this band. I saw them about a year ago when they were touring with the wonderful Tinariwen as part of some grand and worthy cultural experiment about combination of cultures, which was actually about having a grand good time. It was one of the most genuinely diverse line-ups I’ve ever seen. There was usually about six people on stage at a time, with Tuareg instruments, electronic beats, pottery drums, guitars and banjos were all mashed up together in a wonderful, riotous mess. I guess they’re folktronica. The thing is, out of all the bands I’ve heard called that, Tunng are the one who seem to have understand that if you’re going to use all these other instruments, you’ve got to give them heart. I think they’re fairly unique in this, though I would also say bands like Found, Lemon Jelly, The Acorn and perhaps at times the Guillemots are wandering through the same musical landscape.

And so to the album- it’s called ‘And Then We Saw Land’ and it’s their fourth. It’s probably a progression from their early works, realising the potential they displayed. Yeah, all of that most likely. I don’t actually know, to be honest, I’ve only heard this album. Most people writing reviews probably won’t admit that. That either makes me refreshing or unprofessional, take your pick, maggots.

but my goodness, this is a beautiful assortment of songs which lodge in the brain, in very different ways. Opener ‘Hustle’ fades up with a strange, pulsating synth sound which gives way to a jaunty acoustic guitar figure and a song which seems to be about someone being gone, but that not being such a bad thing after all- ‘And I will Hustle, Hustle, Hustle to be free,’ singer Sam Genders intones, joy in his voice. Things have been bad, but they ain’t going to get him down.

And so it is throughout the album. There’s undercurrents of melancholy here and there, sad little recollections of regrets and missed turnings (I think that this album may have been written during a break-up, but not a particularly bad one) which are there, but are somewhat overshadowed by the sheer joy of life, and of finding out what’s next.

Standout tracks for me are ‘Sushimi,’ a big, epic chant-along with fantastic drums on it, ‘The Roadside,’ which a naggingly catchy hymn to movement and progression, and ‘don’t look down or back’ which sounds like the feeling of waking up on a summer morning., and talks about a girl waking up alone and coming to terms with it.

Yes, this is a complex beating heart under that cheerful exterior. Tunng have cried and felt so sad, but they never forgot how to dance.

Kele Okereke, of Bloc Party, has gone solo, releasing a new album, ‘The Boxer’ on the 21st of June. He’s also saying he wants to ‘go dance,’ which has been kind of apparent since they released ‘Flux’ in 2007 but there you are. What with the guitarist, Russell Lissack, releasing a new album with his band ‘Pin Me Down’ this month, and Drummer Matt Tong’s stated interest in ‘trying something else for a while’, it sounds fairly likely that Bloc Party are pretty much finished as a moving concern. Certainly, all concerned are moving on with their lives pretty quickly, at least for the moment. It seems a good time, then, to take a look at their debut album, ‘Silent Alarm’.

For me, this is their best album, because it was truest to their identity as a band. On its release, in 2005, there wasn’t actually that much going on in British Music. Britpop had been and gone a few years before, and Radiohead had disappeared into electronic backwaters which, although captivating and wonderful in their own right, didn’t quite have the same capture on the zeitgeist, the musical imaginations of the young as they once did.It had seemed to be America’s turn, for a while, and sadly they’d had nothing more to offer than a seemingly endless stream of horrific Nu-metal dross like Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park. In this climate, Bloc Party were a bit of a breath of fresh air- vibrant, angry, and exciting. I remember hearing ‘Helicopter,’ with its angular, urgent guitar parts, and ferocious drumming, and dancing round my room on my own for half an hour, like a giddy school kid.

The whole album was like that, the supercharged sound of a band who had paid their dues together live, and sounded fantastically tight and together. A lot of this was down to Tong’s drumming, in my opinion- just listen to ‘Positive Tension’ where he carries the track on his own for a good minute before anyone else really does anything, and it’s fantastic. A good friend of mine once said I drum a bit like that. I was glowing, I tell you, as when I heard this I genuinely thought he was one of the best drummers I’d heard in ages.

I really Like Lissack’s guitar playing on this record, too- it’s taught and angular, and seems to have learned all sorts of interesting lessons from Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood about how to be abrasive and soulful at the same time. He also sounds like an afficianado of Gang Of Four’s Andy Gill, and it can be argued that this album is one of the major reasons that Gang Of Four were a fashionable name to drop, and that other bands were trying to sound ‘edgy’ and ‘angular’ for a year or two afterwards.

What else? Kele’s lyrics, which, for me, later devolved into incoherence, captured that magic in a bottle which someone like Thom Yorke or Mark E Smith manages- he’s not storytelling, more conjuring up images and atmospheres of a sort of modern unease. When he sings “Are you Hoping for a Miracle?” you don’t quite know the specifics of what he’s talking about, but somehow it feels right. In the same way, ‘This Modern Love’ is indirect, both hopeful and anxious at the same time. The lines ‘To Be lost in the Forest/to be caught adrift/you tried to reach me/you bought me a book’ addresses those indirect ways in which we try to reach out to those we love, to communicate through other means than words. In the same way, his promise in ‘So Here We Are’ that ‘I made a vow, to carry you home/I really tried to do what you wanted’ is touching, but also speaks of a certain weariness with romance. You don’t get any answers, because the protagonist doesn’t seem to have any answers.

More than the original contributions, however, it was the fact that this band sounded like a unit- unstoppable, completely together, the musical equivalent of a sledgehammer. I almost saw them live in a 200-capacity venue just before this album came out, but I was ill. Still kicking myself about that one, it would have been fantastic. Check this video of their UK TV debut out to see just how energetic and exciting they were at that point:

Luckily, Silent Alarm is there to record what they were at that time. If they don’t make any more records, it will remain as a testament to this band at their best.

ArdentJohn are a five-piece outfit who have been kicking around in Scotland for the last few years, and have made a bit of a name for themselves locally, without ever really exploding into national consciousness. I guess these days, you’d call them folk rock. Back in the day, of course, we’d call them ‘a bit like Travis.’

Their first release, ‘Legoland Towns / The Power Of Panic’ came out in 2006, and at the time it got some good reviews in the local press, but then, well, not much. The band just plodded on. And that’s kind of what you’d expect, listening to their music. There’s nothing inherently sweeping or dramatic about them. They’re just- ambling along, quite nicely, but without anything particularly going on.

If I was to describe this album in one word, I guess that I would pick ‘tasteful.’ That’s not a bad thing, not at all. Tasteful curtains, tasteful ties, tasteful wallpaper, tasteful floral tributes on the grave of a recently deceased member of parliment who died cycling through London traffic (please, Cameron, just fall off that bike of yours and under a white van, that’ll connect you with the working classes you smug thumb-faced git!)- all of these are good things.

Tasteful music, though? Not sure I’m on board with that. Music should at the very least aspire to grab your attention.

Quiet music? Fair enough. Peaceful music? ok. Ambient music, even? I’m down with that- I spent a lot of my teenage years dropping off to Brian Eno’s ‘Music for Airports,’ and it’s wonderful in its place. The problem here, however, is that Ardentjohn have somehow managed to make background music, whilst still ostensibly wanting you to actually listen to them.

It’s fairly reminiscent of a bunch of different things- ‘Colours of the day’ sounds like something American Music Club would have put together, ‘Follow Me’ sounds a bit like Tom Macrae, and the whole thing, as I’ve already said, sounds like Travis. It also sounds a bit like Sabai, a band I was in a while back in Edinburgh who did similar things with a violin and electric guitar. Oh, the glory! Oh, the rivalry! It could have been us! Well, no it couldn’t, but I digress.

The problem is that there isn’t anything to grip you about this band’s music. To use American Music Club as a comparison, whilst the background music is similarly understated, what makes it work is the immediacy of Mark Eitzel’s voice. In a similar way, one of my favourite lost bands, The Unbelievable Truth, highlighted their singer Andy Yorke’s pure voice (slightly better than his more famous brother, I always thought, though I’m aware that’s a minority opinion) through the space in their music. That’s lacking here, to me.

Ardentjohn’s singer, Keiron Mason, is good enough in his quiet way- his voice has a certain quiet yearning quality to it, but it doesn’t really grab you. It’s competent enough to not be gauche like, say, Stuart Murdoch of Belle and Sebastian, but there’s nothing distinctive about it. It just sounds- nice. Warm.

Ok.

I don’t want ok. That just isn’t enough for me.

Now don’t get me wrong, Ardentjohn are sometimes pretty good. ‘Where All Paths Lead’ is a good song, as is ‘Home.’ ‘One Step Behind’ is pretty cool, too- it aims for Belle and Sebastian and kind of hits Maximo Park. Still, there’s nothing urgent about them- you can’t quite bring yourself to care that much, or to feel any particular emotions when listening to their music. Maybe a bit warm and cozy?

Not much more than that.

I LOVE Post-Rock. I LOVE Godspeed You Black Emperor! I love Cellos, I love apocalyptic violins and drums and guitars which sound like they’re being recorded in a Cathedral. I love the noise, I love the slow build-up of tension in a fifteen-minute feedback epic, I love the absurd, over-the-top drama, passion and sheer excitement of this music.

All this in mind, you might be forgiven for thinking that I’m not exactlygoing to be entirely objective when reviewing this latest piece of music- A Silver Mount Zion’s ‘Kollaps Tradixionales.’

Oh, but you’re wrong. I’m cold and objective. Like ice. I clinically examine all the music I listen to and dissect it with an objectivity which is both breathtaking and chilling in its coldness.

Oh, hang on, no, that’s a lie, isn’t it?

I had all kinds of excitable emotions when putting this album on. It was going to rock my world, it was going to transport me, I was going to hear the future of music, it was going to be brilliant.

And it was… ok.

It’s a Silver Mount Zion doing what they do- orchestral stuff, mournful dirges played out on the violin to a backdrop of distorted, angry guitar whilst drums clatter and rumble in the background. And it’s what they’ve done before.

There is a little progression- the songs are a little more riff-like than in the past at times. This is most notable on the second track, ‘I built myself a Metal Bird,’ which sounds a lot like Sonic Youth’s ‘Tunic’ would have if they’d had a string quartet in tow. That’s a pretty cool thing to sound like, by the way. I don’t want to sound like I don’t like this record, as I can already feel it growing on me on the third listen. There’s something refreshingly primal about their sound- the way it seems to have been conceived with no real thought about how things are supposed to work.

So what’s my problem?

There’s a lot of answers to that, but I suspect it boils down to two things. First, familiarity. Much like the aforementioned Sonic Youth, there’s a point at which a music which sounds unique and spectacular starts to get a bit, well, samey. We’ve heard this whole end-of-the-world-music-with-strings thing before, and it’s no longer a gimmick. Can its charm survive if it was simply the norm, as conservative and expected as guitar bass drums and vocals? After all, if Post-rock is to be what its title implies, that’s what’ll happen. Certainly, there’s a lot of bands out there happy to do this- to take the musical blueprint that Efrim Menuck and his various cohorts have laid down. Listen to Gifts from Enola, the Evtaporia report, Explosions in the Sky, Lipsync for a Lullaby and a thousand other bands and you’ll see what I mean. With those bands it feels ok- they’ve got their own take on things, and somehow for lesser lights your expectations aren’t as grand. They’re meant to look like reflections of the originators, as that’s what they are.

For these lot, though, the bar’s a little higher. They came up with this shit. They began it. They epitomize it. You don’t listen to them to be reminded of a band who blew your mind, you want it blown in other ways.

Another minor gripe is Ephraim’s voice, too- it’s kind of a three-way cross between Húsker Du’s Grant Hart, Win Butler from Arcade Fire, and that shouty guy out of Modest Mouse. Not exactly melodic. It’s over this record more than the others, and for me it actually kind of spoils the opening 15-minute epic, ‘There is a Light.’ It’s a shame, because I find myself wondering about the possibilities of this music. I imagine how this band would sound with a vocalist like Thom Yorke, Wayne Coyne, or even a darker, deeper voice like Nick Cave. Actually, if he teamed up with Warren Ellis’ Dirty Three, that’d be amazing, but I digress.

The point is that on this record, they seem to have fallen into that all-too-familiar trap which means that independent and ‘alternative’ (whatever the hell that debased term means any more) means singing out of tune, being deliberately abrasive. It’s a shame, because to my mind that one musical decision takes the gloss off something which could otherwise have been absolutely transcendent.

So, a good album, but not a great one. And perhaps one whose flaws signpost the way forward.

This, the fifth album from Bristol’s finest (sorry, Portishead) is eclectic as ever- a diverse array of different vocalists, and a magpie approach to musical styles and sounds. Only right and proper, too- this did take seven years to make, after all.

It does hang together as a whole, however- there seems to have been a decision to make things a little faster, and perhaps a tad more danceable than a lot of Massive Attack’s more recent work. This is by no means the rule, however- you certainly can’t accuse this bunch of being repetitive.

That said, there are certain moments when you find yourself noticing familiar signatures in the music. Here and there are basslines that you feel you’ve heard before, a swirl of guitar feedback which casts your mind back to the dark, stoned paranoia of Mezzanine. These are just that, though- signatures, the kind of fingerprints which a sign of identity. Even Horace Andy’s voice is used a little like this- it’s a familiar note which helps to tie this album together as a work which, although it has its own identiy, has a strong place alongside Massive Attack’s existing body of work.

Worth waiting seven years for? Well, this isn’t exactly the second coming, if you take my meaning. The thing is, this doesn’t really come with any expectations like that. It’s simply Massive Attack working at the pace to which they are accustomed. It’s also way, way better than 100th Window, the disappointing successor to Mezzanine.

If it takes them till 2017 to get the next one done, I’m fine with that.

Here’s a track-by-track run-down of the album.

Babel- descending bass line sounds like Joy Division’s ‘New Dawn Fades’ combined with some kind of jazz-rock, Drum and bass thing. Faster than most of Massive attack’s stuff. Pretty good but not grabbing.

Splitting the Atom- a sort of strange haunted echo of a northern soul song, vague echoes of something like ‘Ghost Town’ updated for credit crunch times. Mushroom’s ‘the bankers have bailed/the mighty retreat’ and his menacing whisper reminds me of his work on ‘Inertia Creeps.’

Girl I Love You- sounds like it could have fitted on Mezzanine, all edgy guitars hovering on the edge of the track, and driving basslines that create tension in the stomach, whilst Horace Andy proclaims a kind of desparate love over the top- when he sings ‘if you love me that much you will stick around’ sounds desparate, frantic. To my mind, the rhythm track on this isn’t up to the beats on Mezzanine, but that’s really a nitpick. the brass section freak out towards the end is pretty cool, too- it takes the chaos and turmoil of something like Radiohead’s ‘National Anthem’ and makes it a little more manageable, segueing it into a shimmering synth crescendo which fades out.

Psyche- dizzy and urgent, cycling figures of acoustic guitar is the perfect, twitchy backing track for Martina Topley-Bird to croon her strangely serenely crooned lyrics of chaos. ‘dissolving who we are… we’re on a foreign shore.’

Flat of the Blade- sounds like Warp Techno, Guy Garvey sings ‘I’m not good in a crowd…things I’ve seen will chase me to the grave’ over an eerie chorus of hummed harmonies, rattling beats that sound like rusty cemetery gates. It’s reminiscent of some of Thom Yorke’s solo work on The Eraser, probably because it shares many of his reference points. As elsewhere, a brass section is employed on this track, with the express intention of sounding like the inside of a crazy person’s head.

Paradise Circus- a standout track on the album. Handclaps and what sounds like marimba provide the background for Hope Sandoval’s indolent, breathy vocal: ‘the devil makes us sin/but we like it when we’re spinning in his grip.’ It’s the closest the album has come yet to a moment of calm, and it’s more like sort of stoned, debauched exhaustion- one can almost picture Sandoval lying on twisted and stained sheets at the centre of some scene of depravity, surveying the madness around her. Not that I am picturing that, you understand.

Rush Minute- another track that could have fit on Mezzanine, 3D rapping anxiously about ‘Borstal Blues’ and ‘Broken Homes’ over some Eastern-sounding drones, pulsing bass, and beats which recall the first Bloc Party album. Massive Attack can do this in their sleep, but it’s still a good track.

Saturday Come Slow- a track that just starts with Damon Albarn and an acoustic guitar builds up to a big crescendo, ominous swirls of noise like thunder, but somehow Damon’s cry of ‘Do You Love Me?’ is somehow a little too direct. The least effective track on the album, mainly because Damon sounds a bit too whingey.

Atlas Air- stomping four-to-the-floor beat, and a mad kind of church-organ wurlitzer solo, before a massive wall of fuzz guitars and a disco beat kick in- it’s like a panic attack at a Northern Soul night. You kind of see what they were aiming for with the faster beats- a sense of movement. It’s kind of reminiscent of Garbage’s slick air of danceable menace. The final technofied coda sounds a bit too much like the kind of music that people are always dancing to in films like the Matrix, just before a fight breaks out. Still, if I was standing about in a club wearing a long black leather coat, it’d probably make me dance.

Here’s the first album I was really waiting for in 2010- Midlake’s ‘The Courage of Others.’

I fell in love with Midlake a year or two back when I heard ‘Roscoe’ on Mark Radcliffe’s show- it’s a wonderful piece of folk-rock, exhibiting both grace and charm, and an unexpected, meandering way with melody that kind of takes you by surprise and sweeps you off your feet. The album it came from, ‘The Trial of Van Occupanther’ was like that all the way through, and contained all sorts of wonderful lyrics about how good it would be to live in 1891, or to lose all you had and start again. There was a quiet, whispering pastoral spirit at work in the songs, and it spoke of a desire to retreat from the modern world of ‘hundreds of chemicals’ to the hilltops and the village, which ‘used to be all one really needs.’ It’s exactly the sort of thing I love, and it’s one of my favourite albums of the last few years.

The pre-publicity around this album was that they were referencing british folk-rock bands of the ’70s like Fairport Convention. Span and Pentangle, and I fucking love those bands. Give me a Cardigan, a violin reel and a lyric lifted from a fifteenth-century madrigal about elves and I am there, dude. I was kind of salivating about this one.

And on first listen, does it live up to my expectations? Well, kind of.

It’s sweet, sweeping, big, and is stretching out, trying to find that epic sense of space that the best albums have, and the influence of those referenced bands is certainly there. In ‘Winter Dies,’ for instance, there is a long instrumental section where you can hear the band stretch out, and they’ve clearly decided to show us what they can do as musicians.

The next song, ‘Small Mountain,’ calls forth images of Led Zeppelin’s more floral moments with its arpegiatted guitar and flute intro, and is charming and mellow. When the song kicks in, however, it doesn’t quite hold your impact. This pattern is repeated a lot throughout the album- a charming introduction gives way to a slightly underwhelming song. There are some exceptions- ‘Core of Nature’ is a highlight for me, so far, with it’s talk of a retreat into ‘woods which I walk through alone’ it harks back to the themes and musical ideas of previous album. It’s songs like this one which show that perhaps their next album will be a better version of this idea- if I’m being optimistic about this record, I would say that perhaps they are reaching for something which
they fell short of this time, but will maybe be able to reach next time.

There are plenty of reasons to be optimistic ‘Rulers, Ruling All Things’ is fantastic, just slightly missing the mark but still lovely in its glitter Tim Smith’s refrain of ‘I only want to be left to my own ways’ set above a huge, echoing cavern of flute music and twinkling sounds. It’s nice, but- you just wish the melody was a little stronger.

That’s the story of the album. Somehow, there isn’t quite the same immediacy in this collection of songs that ‘Van Occupanther’ had- the songs aren’t quite as strong (you feel that a lot of them started off as jams, rather than musical ideas the singer brought to the band) and just a little too often they tend to favour atmosphere over impact. It’s pleasant enough, but it feels just a little less focussed than the last record.

I can see this will be brilliant when summer rolls round- I’ll sit out under a tree with my mp3 player and listen to this with a book and perhaps a bottle of real ale, and I will glory in my folkishness. I’ll also have probably backed off my original high expectations and would write an entirely different review of this album. For now, though, I think I’ll view this as a qualified success, and something of a missed opportunity. For all my criticisms, it’s still my favourite new album of the year so far.

So the moment finally arrives. Throngs gather. The clamour of nations grows silent. And across the land all music-loving folk wait.

But unfortunately, they’ll have to wait for a new Radiohead album a little bit longer. In the mean time, here’s my top album of the Noughties. Once again, it’s a choice which I’m sure will astound and repulse in equal measure, and leave most people who read this scratching their heads and going ‘who?’

So, my top album of the years 2000-2009 is Tom Mcrae’s ‘Just Like Blood.’

It’s the second album from the acoustic singer-songwriter, and is a marked progression from the pared-down grace of the first. Mcrae started off as your bog-standard one-man-and-his-guitar outfit, and whilst his debut had been remarkable, dark, and intimate, ‘Just like Blood’ was a step forward. The first song, ‘A Day Like Today’ starts with what sounds like a marimba or a thumb-piano, picking out a repeating melody that switches round as the drums kick in, and a strange, eerie sound that I think is a guitar starts to resound like an unhappy ghost before Tom whispers ‘Welcome back/says the voice on the radio/but I never left/I was always right here,’ which is one of my favourite lyrics of all time. It’s a good illustration of what he does well lyrically, addressing his audience directly, and noting the strangeness of life, and the things people do. You can tell it’s part of his plan- this is the first song on the album, deliberately so. The song stands up in its own right- a desparate, wailing hymn to obsessive love- but it’s also a very deliberate entrance point to the album.

In the same way, the last song, ‘Human remains’ is directly addressing the listener. ‘You’re looking away/looking for what’s next’ which is exactly what the average listener is looking- going through their CD collection, wondering what to listen to next. As a way of directly addressing the listener, it’s remarkably effective. This song about wading through the ashes of a relationship is suddenly being sung directly to you, involving you, making you feel like you’re the target of his anguish.

The rest of the album is fantastic, too- ‘Stronger than Dirt’ is a fantastic account of that feeling you have when you’re walking through tragedy, concentrating on just putting one foot in front of the other, knowing that somehow you’ll survive. ‘When the dust has cleared/I will still be here/will you?’ he sings, and as he does so, the song resolves into a blissed-out peace, the kind of zen acceptance that comes over you when you know that you’re about to split up with someone and soon things will be easier. The album is full of little touches like this, where the music and the theme reflect each other perfectly, and augment each other.

It’s ‘Stronger than Dirt’ which is emblematic of the whole album- the rest is about dreams dying, crumbling expectations and the terrible sad knowledge that love is slipping away. On that one song (and perhaps to a lesser extent on another, ‘Ghost of a Shark’) you see the way out, and the way onward.

Tom Mcrae went on. He’s made other, slightly happier albums since, but none which quite hit the mark in the way this one did. It may be a classic heartbreak album, and he’s certainly not the first person to plough this lyrical furrow, but on this album, he does it with a steely-eyed grace and unique artistry which is all his own.