Category: Reviews

In no particular order:

Strange House – the Horrors

Excellent hammond-organ-and-grinding-guitar driven gothic pastiche of garage rock that starts with a cover of “Jack The Ripper” just to let you know that they know that you know. A vibrant, literate and surprisingly affecting wild ride of an album that, like all the best Goth, lets you in on the joke.

CSS – CSS

A sexy, mischievous energy and a love of American New Wave and 80s pop make for Brazil’s coolest export since Sergio Mendez. Fun, infectious, and liberated/ing.

Mantaray – Siouxsie

Free from the weight of the history of her previous bands, Siouxsie survives her transformation into an “artist” in the “content industry” with dignity intact and voice better than ever. She deserves better backing but this is still an excellent album. Find the videos “leaked” on YouTube and catch her live next year.

Fur And Gold – Bat For Lashes

A wonderful continuation of the English tradition of fey, visionary, referentially open popular music that starts with a harpsichord riff and goes on from there. “Prescilla” is my favourite song of the year.

The Imagined Village – The Imagined Village

If a camel is a horse designed by committee then The Imagined Village is Bat For Lashes delivered late and over budget by a PFI conglomerate.

Prinzhorn Dance School – Prinzhorn Dance School

Sadly for an art school joke band, “The Horn” have some good songs and an often melancholy vibe that distracts from the important stuff like them making their own teapots. A slow, disquieting, stripped down, bassy, indie rock sound.

Sighs Trapped By Liars – The Red Krayola with Art & Language

The American rockers and the English conceptual artists team up for an album with a very contemporary-sounding retro psychedelia and cool rock feel and a pair of female vocalists mirroring the pair of male lyricists. The songs are about Rimbaud, the editors of October, Samuel Beckett, various economic idiocies and several artworks by Art & Language. They are understated, savage, and very successful both as left-field music and left-wing art.

We Are All Pan’s People – The Focus Group

More of the excellent same from one of Ghost Box Records’s stable of English retro-electro outfits. Analogue synths mashed up with library albums of spoken word and incidental music tracks underwitten by the brooding feel of a countryside that is more Summerisle than Ambridge.

An End Has A Start – Editors

If Coldplay’s management had told them to try to sound more like Joy Division this would have been the result. Near-empty stadia await.

Our Love To Admire – Interpol

No, you can’t be the next Coldplay either. Not yours. What happened to the band that produced “Turn On The Bright Lights”?

War Stories – UNKLE

Heavy, rocky, gothy, post-Trip Hop dirty beats from UNKLE. Forget the insipid electronica of their second album and enjoy the sonic attack of this affecting and danceable return to form.

Myths Of The Near Future – Klaxons

Dance opportunism from some very well-read indie boys but who cares when it sounds this good? “Atlantis To Interzone” is a classic and if they can avoid going prog rock then great things await them.

OK, what did I miss?

If I wanted to make this blog linkbait I would just post snarky comments about Goth icons’ latest offerings and watch the Adwords revenue come pouring in.

But I don’t. So when people get the wrong end of a slightly more nuanced stick than I feel they are giving me credit for I feel I need to revisit what I have written.

This means that I have four things to say about my comments on Mantaray:

1. I like the album. I said I did. It has grown on me even more with repeated listening, and it was great to see Siouxsie on Later With Jools Holland.

2. I stand by my comments about Siouxsie’s inconsistent pronunciation of ts as ds. Compare even words in the same song never mind different songs or previous albums. I concede that I cannot know why this is the case.

3. I also stand by my comments about the music. It is content by the traditional two producers. It is competent content, and probably all that is possible at this point in history, but it is still a comparative disappointment as a backing for such excellent vocals.

4. If you love music then be willing to look inside the box rather than just accepting the marketing speak. Content isn’t questioned and makes no mistakes.

Just to re-iterate: I have some criticisms about Mantaray’s production (none of which are aimed at Siouxsie, who is on top form here) that I hope can be addressed for the next album, but it’s a very good album so go and buy it.

Art and Language wrote lyrics that The Red Krayola (nee Crayola) set to music for three albums in the 1970s and 1980s. After a gap of more than twenty years they have got together again a fourth time for “Sighs Trapped By Liars”.

The album has a summery psychedelic rock sound that is very contemporary in its smooth retro feel. The songs are about mirrors, the authors of “Art Since 1900”, economic and social anecdotes and the texts of various Art & Language artworks. The lyrics, written by the two male artists of Art & Language, are delivered by two female vocalists, continuing the mirroring theme.

The sleeve notes mercifully contain brief explanations of the lyrics as well as the text of the lyrics themselves. These are songs that are deceptively easy on the ear. Their usually laid back feel hides a musical as well as a lyrical bite. Art & Language’s paintings are still texts, and The Red Krayola’s songs are still incisive.

“Four Stars” (about the authors of “Art Since 1900”), “Laughter At The Foot Of The Cross” (about a story by Rabelais), “Hostage” (the text of a series of paintings by A&L) and the title track are my favourites from an album of thirteen strong tracks.

Sometimes Art & Language’s lyrics and The Red Krayola’s instrumentation are both unstructured enough at the same time that they give neither singers nor listener enough to work with. This can be disorientating, which is presumably the point, but it does rob a good anecdote (“Jerry Fodor’s Story”) of its satisfying conclusion.

You can get the album from any online CD store or on iTunes. I recommend very highly that you do. There are previews on some sites, notably Amazon, so don’t just take my word for it.

Siouxsie Sioux has been making music since1977 or so but Mantaray is her first solo album. Her last album with The Creatures, “Hai!”, was marked by meandering lyrics and over-produced vocals. Mantaray is a real return to form with much more focussed songwriting and a clearer voice.

Much has been made in reviews of the personal nature of the lyrics on this album compared to Siouxsie’s work with The Banshees and The Creatures. I’m not sure about that. If songs about bees and oceans are personal then songs about deceptive lovers and new found freedom might be impersonal. The album has all of these.

This is a good album but there are two things I would bemoan. Both are a product of the economics of this album, which seems aimed squarely at the American, probably college radio, market.

The first is Siouxsie’s newly Americanized pronunciation. She slips in and out of ts as ds on the same track and it detracts from the power of the vocals. I love both English and American accents but I prefer one or the other from the same person on the same song and from someone who has sung in the former for so long the latter can be jarring.

The second is the instrumentation. It is slick, polished, soulless content. I can see the producers brainstorming each track: “this one should be punky, this one grungy, this one a torch song”. Siouxsie’s vocals deserve much more than such safe corporate lullabies as backing.

This is a strong enough album that hopefully the next one will give Siouxsie the room to experiment that produced the sound that drew the corporate zombies on the mixing desk to her in the first place.

Compared to past glories this is only as good as Superstition, but much better than Anima Animus. Even just Siouxsie as content would be much, much better than no Siouxsie at all. And this is not just Siouxsie as content. A new found strength indeed…

I’ve read and watched an awful lot of very bad werewolf stories over the years. I think the absolute worst was the episode of “Journey To The Bottom Of The Sea” where – actually it’s so bad I’m not even going to tell you. But at least it didn’t have the obsession with human squalor and misery that the likes of Alice Borchardt and S. P. Somtow inflict on page after page of for-the-love-of-god-get-on-with-it filler while failing to find anything to say or do with their characters.

I mention this only to plead that I am not entirely a drooling lycanthropy fanboy despite the fact that I am here to express how very wonderful I think Martin Millar’s (“Lux & Alby”, etc.) new novel “Lonely Werewolf Girl” is. Yes, that’s the title. Yes, that’s the cover. And, yes, the author does mention “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” as an inspiration in interviews. If these things appeal to you then great. If they don’t, and they didn’t to me, don’t let them put you off. It’s brilliant.

You can read a sample here.

Technorati Tags: review, werewolves

Cover by ROMAN DIRGE. Story by ROMAN DIRGE.

Interior art by mistake. It looks like someone has just discovered the airbrush tool in Photoshop. “Hey! Let’s smear indistinct greys around with no regard for light sources, shapes, textures or different brush sizes!” It is embarrassingly bad art. No, it’s not atmospheric. Not unless the atmosphere smells strongly of methane.

But the cover and pre-order sheets say ROMAN DIRGE. Not REMEDIAL PHOTOSHOP AIRBRUSH STUDENT. ROMAN DIRGE.

So it’ll sell a few copies and piss a lot of people off. Including any comic shop owners who feel they’ve been mis-sold the damn thing when it turns up in this week’s orders.

If this was a media blog I’d now produce some profound insight into how this is an example of how not to squander the relational capital that artists build up with their audience. But it isn’t, so I won’t.

Technorati Tags: comics, review

Whisky Dave has posted some classic Sunshot gig footage on Youtube. There’s clips from two shows:

Middlesex University

Sunshot at Middlesex University part 1 of 4
Sunshot at Middlesex University part 2 of 4
Sunshot at Middlesex University part 3 of 4
Sunshot at Middlesex University part 4 of 4

The Bull & Gate

Sunshot at the Bull & Gate part 1 of 5
Sunshot at the Bull & Gate part 2 of 5
Sunshot at the Bull & Gate part 3 of 5
Sunshot at the Bull & Gate part 4 of 5
Sunshot at the Bull & Gate part 5 of 5

Technorati Tags: music, video, sunshot