Monday 27 April 2009

Metric - Fantasies

Album-of-the-year you'll never hear.

Fantasies, the fourth album from Canadian quartet Metric, should by all rights be one of the biggest albums of 2009. It won’t, of course - the music industry doesn’t work that way. But any such heady combination of nailed on vocals, commercial hooks, lyrical populism and tightly-constructed songwriting deserves to produce the string of hits and subsequent ‘sound of the Summer’ feel that it surely would were it released by any more popularly recognisable act.

Right from the Garbage-esque opener ‘Help I’m Alive’, Fantasies grips you by the balls and refuses to let go until you’re singing, dancing and, hell, proselytizing until everyone around has either joined in, or wandered off to the Radio 1 playlist wondering what this music that the taste-setting bods refuse to give deserved exposure could possibly be. Indeed, were ‘Sick Muse’ to be given the radio play it undoubtedly deserves, there’d be a guaranteed top-10 single on the band’s CV. With singalong chorus, textbook indie guitars, and genuine girl power vocals, it’s a freakishly brilliant song.

The real genius of the album, though, comes in the awesome ‘Twilight Galaxy’. Built on Postal Service-esque lo-fi beats and shimmering synths, it’s here where the band sound most at ease. Balancing soothing loveliness with insane slow-burning catchiness, you’ve never wanted Emily Haines more.

The subsequent ‘Gold Guns Girls’ unfortunately, suffers in comparison, desperately trying - and someway failing - not to sound simply like a sped-up version of the previous track, pimped out with extra guitars. Typically, given the album’s commercial sensitivities, though, mark this song up as an offering by the staggeringly inferior Paramore, and the uninformed would lap it up. And it’s a pattern followed again, and again, throughout the album (except, perhaps, on the somewhat insipid 'Collect Call' - the token 'slow song', lacking the conviction to fully convince).

As with anything so pop-sounding, doubts persist over the album long-term appeal. But then, for a ‘sound of the Summer’ album, immediacy rules supreme over longevity. And with immediacy in spades, it’s time the mainstream woke up to the strengths of Canada’s best non-Crystal Castles export.

C.S.

Sunday 26 April 2009

Twisted Wheel - Twisted Wheel




Eponymous debut provides serious punk-a-long promise

Northern three-piece Twisted Wheel have finally released their self titled debut album following on from a little heard 5 track LP in July last year. Despite a scathing review from NME, whose main problem with the band seems to be that they were given a vote of confidence from Liam Gallagher, which is admitably rather like having your ex-rocker uncle turning up at your gigs), these guys have done their time on the gigging circuit and are finally reaping the rewards with a solid album of songs that owe more than a passing nod to the punk rock 70s giants.

Listening to the opening track, ‘Lucy The Castle’, you could be forgiven for thinking that you'd accidentally put The Jam on instead. Punchy and in your face with a toe-tapping drumbeat it's a great start to the album. Followed by the too-short anthem ‘She's A Weapon’, it all seems to be shaping up nicely. Unfortunately, by striving for variety, the Wheel have come up with ‘We Are Us’ and ‘Strife’, slower, Brit-rock style songs, which sandwiched between faster, punkier tracks, show creaking weaknesses in lyrical ability. Their attempts on social commentary are at best unenlightening and nothing we haven't heard before.

Having said that ‘Let Them Have It All’, gets the second half of the album back on track. With definite influence taken from happy-go-lucky indie sounds, this is a fierce, upbeat tune with dancefloor potential and an overcharged middle solo. Twisted Wheel are at their best when not trying so hard, pounding guitars and lyrics that you don't so much sing-a-long to, as shout and scream, the anthems of ‘She's A Weapon and You Stole The Sun’, are real belters.

Twisted Wheel deliver gutsy, punky, rock and roll with some genuinely good songs. It may not be about to start a musical revolution but it'll get you stomping your feet

A.O.


Monday 20 April 2009

Franz Ferdinand - Tonight: Franz Ferdinand

Innovative return for British indie leaders

The “difficult third album”: an infamous rock cliché, never more true than for Franz Ferdinand. Four years after You Could Have It So Much Better, and almost eighteen-months after re-entering the studios, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand finds a more inventive and less-formulaic band than the Britpop revivalist leaders of previous offerings.

Despite a more evolved sound, though, it would be misleading claim a massive sonic departure has taken place while the band have been away. Lead-single ‘Ulysses’ picks up from the gender-bending seduction of the debut-album’s ‘Michael’, with Kapranos’ half-whispered, half-desperate vocal delivery at perfect ease with disco-guitar instrumentation. The later ‘Can’t Stop Feeling’, meanwhile, sits comfortably alongside ‘Take Me Out’ as owner of FF’s most infectious riff. It certainly isn’t just standard Franz Ferdinand fare here, though: ‘No You Girls’, is driven by a sound so reminiscent of David Bowie’s ‘DJ’ as to demand direct comparison, while the opening of ‘Dream Again’ could easily be his ‘Warszawa’. Indeed much of the album carries a watermark of Berlin-era Bowie, breeding the same combination of dance floor friendly pop riffs and darker lyrical matter. “Heroes” after the wall came down, perhaps.

There is, though, one track which entirely and utterly dominates Tonight: Franz Ferdinand. Clocking in at just shy of 8 minutes, and just under a fifth of the entire album’s running time, ‘Lucid Dreams’ is perhaps the furthest from their comfort zone that the band have ever been. From nowhere, after 4 minutes of sonically intensive indie rock, suddenly a full-on acid house breakdown gatecrashes the party. All heavy drumbeats, crashing percussion rhythms and schizophrenic electro riffs, this wouldn’t feel out of place in a Simian Mobile Disco setlist. And it completely and utterly works. Coming out of a spin of Tonight:…, there’s only one track you’ll remember. The black hole in the centre of the album, devouring the entirety of the energy from around it. If ever there were a suspicion that Franz Ferdinand had a defined sound that they were incapable of diverting from, then this track is the entire case for the defence.

Tonight: Franz Ferdinand? Tonight: Lucid Dreams, thanks very much.

C.S.

Saturday 18 April 2009

Kings of Leon - Only by the Night

An RH Online Retrospective

The eagerly awaited fourth studio album from the Followill foursome; the UK’s third biggest selling number one album of 2008; two Brit awards; three Grammy nominations; a UK number one hit single. It is fair to say that the boys from Nashville, Tennessee have come a long way. Moving away from the quirky Southern Rock sound of Youth and Young Manhood and Aha Shake Heartbreak, towards an epic, anthemic, stadium trajectory.

From the opening moment we hear the familiar sounding two-note ‘Because of the Times’ guitar riff, only with a delightful twist of a gut-punching snare drum, and a second effects guitar, creating incredible unearthly phonics in the background. And then… Caleb, his expressive, raucous voice, singing about pure elation, while the musical storm bubbles up from the sea around him, to generate a sinister but musically enriching overture.

Following ‘Closer’ is the grimy, distorted guitar sound of ‘Crawl’, a truly anthemic record with everything you could possibly desire from a rock song. All about the guitars. ‘Sex on Fire’ follows, with admittedly clichéd lyrics, giving listeners one of the biggest sing-along anthems of the year. ‘Use Somebody’, meanwhile, steers off into completely new KOL territory; a rock power ballad? Caleb’s longing vocals and the infectious ‘oooh woooah’s’ in the chorus just broadened the band’s listener audience even further.

‘Manhattan’ shows evidence that KOL have not lost their roots and influences of the southern, countrified sound, and even in ‘I want you’ with the almost banjo-like subtlety on top of the sturdy bass riff.

The outro track ‘Cold Desert’ is as raw and pure as can be. Recorded in one sitting, Followill reeled all but the first verse completely off his tongue while in a drunken state of euphoria. His honest and meaningful lyrics are supported greatly by the expressive profundity in the music. A soft drum rhythm behind a driving bass riff with eclectic and experimental guitar sounds eventually fading out, drawing only by the night to a alleviating close.

It is no doubt that ‘Only by the Night’ has made the family Followill incontestably massive, and truly one of the biggest stadium bands of 2008/09.

V.B.

Trouble in Paradise?


RH Online previews Latitude 2009


In 2007, in only its second year of existence, Latitude festival secured the major coup of bringing Arcade Fire to its closing headline slot. The following year, its reputation had grown so strong as to attract Franz Ferdinand, Sigur Ros and Interpol to top the festival bill. The festival was showered with praise for its musical versatility, relaxed atmosphere, and its willingness to offer prominent stages to non-musical acts. ‘The new Glastonbury’, delighted ticket holders proclaimed. Latitude: a festival on the rise.

Fast forward to April 2009, and an air of disgruntlement pervades. Internet message boards choke with unimpressed fans: unimpressed at the quality of act announced; unimpressed at the way announcements have been handled; unimpressed about the price rise which has accompanied the apparent decrease in headliner quality. Worried, even, that tickets bought in expectation of further improvement will prove impossible to sell on should the billing not improve.

There are, of course, some very fine acts already confirmed for the festival. Bat for Lashes, Editors and Doves all fall firmly within the exciting category, while taken on their own merits, Pet Shop Boys are an act of massive repute. Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds would surely seem a brilliant signing, and entirely befitting the nature of the festival, had he not appeared in 2008 with his other band, Grinderman. The less said about the appearance of Grace Jones in the Saturday night headline slot, of course, the better. Yet despite a number of positive, something, somewhere, smacks of lost inspiration amongst those charged with securing acts - a feeling hardly helped by envious glances cast at Glastonbury’s stellar Springsteen/Blur/Young lineup, and the staggering news of Radiohead’s involvement with Leeds/Reading.

More disconcerting, perhaps, is the manner of the announcements thus far. From Uncut revealing the headliners to subscribers (and thus the internet) a day before the official announcement, to the ridiculous situation of seeing Bat for Lashes announced twice - once while already on the lineup poster - an aura of confusion surrounds the direction of the festival.

Hope, of course, remains. Latitude’s major strength has always been its diversity. Official board moderators maintain that each stage will yet announce acts to rebuild the festival’s ‘wow’ factor. In previous years, many of the greatest performances have come away from the main stage, on the Sunset arena buried deep in the woods.

‘More than just a music festival’, the festival literature says. With 4 months to go until it kicks off, many fans would rather see the organisers ensure that it doesn’t end up as something less.


C.S.

Thursday 16 April 2009

The Dead Weather - Hang You from the Heavens (single)


Released to little genuine fanfare, The Dead Weather (the new collaboration between Jack White and the Kills’ Alison Mosshart)’s ‘Hang You from the Heavens’ is everything Alicia Keys must wish ‘Another Way To Die’ had been.

Approaching overdose levels of dirty guitar, tribal beats, and pure greasy-hair-and-sweaty-bodies rock goodness, Mosshart’s angry/sexy vocalising lends the perfect counterpoint to White’s determined instrumentalisation, producing a partnership which leaves you wondering why they never thought of this one before.

And spare a thought for the truly brilliant B-Side cover of Gary Numan’s ‘Are Friends Electric?’, featuring Mosshart on pure adorable cigarette lisp form.

The superband to watch in 2009.

C.S.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz



Electro-pop receives vote-of-confidence from rock royalty


Having threatened it for most of the past 18 months, the synthesiser has finally usurped the guitar as the sound of serious pop music. When a band so knowingly, devotedly punky as Yeah Yeah Yeahs ditches blazing riffs for electronica soundscapes, the mark of victory has been reached: rock is dead. And it’s never sounded so fucking alive.

It’s Blitz, then, is the iconic product of the revolution. Taking all the best melodies the band ever produced, toning down the guitars, and committing to mature and intelligent song writing, it’s an album that’s both breathtakingly original, and incontestably rooted in the energy and delivery that characterised the band’s brilliant 2003 debut, Fever to Tell. If Show Your Bones was a hint of things to come, It’s Blitz is the opening of the cocoon and the emergence of the fully-formed new creature; with wings, crackling sparks of pure electro-pop.

From lead single ‘Zero’ and the guaranteed floor-filler ‘Heads Will Roll’ (surely guaranteed to top ‘Song of the Year’ lists come December, with a hook so infectious you’ll be humming it to yourself forever after) via the heartbreaking ‘Soft Shock’, creepingly affecting ‘Runaway’, to the jangling music-meld of ‘Dragon Queen’, It’s Blitz produces standout track after standout track.

It is, though, penultimate offering ‘Hysteric’, channelling all the beauty of the 6-year old ‘Maps’, and a chorus of which 70s era Blondie would have been proud which best displays the true maturity of song-writing which infuses the entire album. Suddenly, Karen O is Debbie Harry delivering 21st Century ‘Atomic’ to the admiring masses. And it couldn’t sound better if it tried.

It’s with understandable trepidation that a fan might approach the idea of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs embracing the fad for the electro route. They were, after all, hardly producing ineffective material with the trusty guitars. Thankfully, with It’s Blitz, Karen O and her painfully cool band-mates manage not only to deliver a frankly brilliant album, but to retain the sound that is so quintessentially YYYs. Long live the synth.

C.S.