Muse
4/5
The Resistance
Muse’s latest album continues the journey from Black Holes and Revelations in terms of creating outer-space rock opera, to the point that one expects a libretto to accompany the album. ‘Uprising’ sounds like the band’s pitch for a new Dr Who theme: a big syncopated glam stomp with lyrics about ‘Them’, the ones that control us and keep trying to degrade us and so on. Particulary notable tracks include ‘United States of Eurasia (+Collateral Damage)’, due to it being a red-hot-go at writing their own ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, and ‘Unnatural Selection’ is the guitar-pounding Muse of ‘Muscle Museum’.
So far, so Muse: but then the album ends with the three movements of the ‘Exogenesis: Symphony’, which sounds exactly as you think it might. Had Radiohead continued down the path of ‘Paranoid Android’ and gotten themselves an orchestra, this is how things may have ended up – and it works better than you’d have given the band credit for. It’s as unsubtle and histrionic as every other Muse record and, while the playing is undeniably strong, it’s still infused with that vague ridiculousness that has characterised everything the band’s done over the last couple of albums. Still, in the event that Galactic Star Prince Zarkon sends his robo-armies to subjugate the Earth with the dreaded Omega Ray, this album could well be our only hope.
Andrew P Street
Available online.
Yo La Tengo
4/5
Popular Songs
Yo La Tengo is easy shorthand for ‘indie hipster catnip’. There’s no such thing as a casual Yo La Tengo fan: you’re either already completely committed or you’ve never heard of them. So, since no-one’s going to read this aside from other YLT fans, let’s just say that it is (of course) really good and (of course) that you’ve already got it. But, if you’re yet to hit the ‘order now’ button, note that the opening ‘Here to Fall’ adds ‘I Am The Walrus’-style strings to an oh-so-YLT organ/bass groove, while the downright groovy ’60s Fairfisa organ fest that is ‘Periodically Double or Triple’ boasts guitarist/singer Ira Kaplan’s neatest, most wry opening lines ever: ‘Never read Proust/Seems a little too long/Never used a hammer/Without somehow using it wrong’, with a keyboard solo that sounds like it was played with fists.
The most noteworthy difference to the last few Yo La Tengo albums is that the obligatory epics are all bunched at the end of the disc: the 9.39 slow-burner ‘More Stars than there are in Heaven’ leads into the single chord vamp of ‘The Fireside’, which clocks in at 11.25, before the near-16 minute closer ‘And the Glitter is Gone’.
Anyway, you’re not going to need convincing, since you’ve probably been out and bought it already – but there are worse things in the world than being right. Even when no one else understands.
Andrew P Street
Available online.
Juliette Lewis
1/5
Terra Incognita
Yes, yes, yes – we know how you can’t dismiss Lewis’s musical endeavours as being the dilettante fiddlings of a Hollywood star, since she’s more-or-less relegated her acting career to the backburner to focus on rock’n’roll. So, instead, we are forced to dismiss her endeavours solely because they’re crap. That’s not knee-jerk reaction, I should make clear. Lewis often goes out of tune (her voice has all the rough timbre of Concrete Blonde’s Johnette Napolitano with none of the power or control) and her lyrics are truly abysmal.
‘Noche Sin Fin’ begins ‘My endless night turned into the dawn of the early light/She loved she’s loved by everyone but no one at all’, while ‘Romeo’ witters about her ‘veil of illusion and strife’ (take a punt at what it rhymes with? Ooh, can you guess?) – and did she really have to type out the ‘hey hey hey hey/Ooh ooh ooh ooh’ chorus from ‘All Is For God’? No: no, she did not. The only winner out of all this is The Mars Volta’s Omar Rodriguez Lopez, whose production and musical work on the disc demonstrates that he’s easily the equal of TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek (who did similar duties on Scarlett Johansson’s Anywhere I Lay My Head) in terms of slumming musicians who can keep a straight face when employed by deluded starlets.
Andrew P Street
Available online.
Jay Z
2/5
The Blueprint 3
Jay Z is a rich and powerful man. His 11th studio album The Blueprint 3 stands as a testament to his wealth, influence and, above all, ego. Unfortunately, these things don’t necessarily combine to make a good hip-hop album. That is not to say that Jay Z has lost any of his talent: his rhymes are still well constructed and smooth. It’s that he has reached the point where he is boasting about his political power rather than his reputation on the streets, and that starts to get annoying after the first mention of the White House.
His guest roster (which includes Young Jeezy, Kanye West, Rihanna, Drake, Kid Cudi and Pharrell) all turn in adequate performances that neither offend due to lack of quality or amaze due to lyrical dexterity. Perhaps the most exciting collaboration is with Luke Steele from Empire of the Sun, although he is disappointingly limited to the chorus.
The Blueprint 3 is not a bad album, just a bland one. Necessity is the mother of invention, and therein lies the rub: Jay Z is crazy rich and really doesn’t need to do a thing anymore. Maybe it’s about time for Jigga to retire again…
Andrew P Street
Available online.
Arctic Monkeys
2/5
Humbug
Because the Arctic Monkeys appeared so fully formed on their 2006 instant-hit debut, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, regarding leader Alex Turner as a man of many moods is a challenge: on that first album and its sound-alike follow-up, Favourite Worst Nightmare, Turner set his sly accounts of nights spent down the pub against an appealingly scrappy garage-rock attack, which hardly seemed to reflect the nascent noodlings of a budding magpie. Here was a guy, you figured, who could go on making records exactly like these, as long as he continued to drink too much and view others’ motives with suspicion. Yet, last year, with the Last Shadow Puppets, Turner revealed his unexpected knack for ’60s-style orchestral pop; now, on the Monkeys’ third long-player, he’s pulling a left-field stoner-metal move.
Turner and his bandmates made half of Humbug in California with Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, who beefed up the guitars and set the tempo control to boogie. (Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford helmed the other half.) Sometimes Homme’s touch works, as in ‘Potion Approaching’, in which Turner sounds great unravelling his louche come-ons over a sleazy robot-rock groove. But the Monkeys are a lyrics-and-melodies band, not a texture-and-mood one and, with the singer’s vocals often buried under layers of guitars and keyboards, much of Humbug conceals the outfit’s special charm. Props for trying, dudes, but better luck next time.
Mikael Wood
Available online.
Julian Plenti
4/5
Julian Plenti is…Skyscraper
Julian Plenti is the new alias of Interpol frontman Paul Banks, a baritone who’s prone to wearing sunglasses indoors. He tinkered with the persona in New York nightclubs a decade back, before the advent of his bill-paying, arena-filling main act. The more cosmopolitan Skyscraper captures Banks’ playful side with a lecherous alter ego and loose song writing. Those used to Banks pumping his songs full of grey mud and frowns might crack up at the sleazy, slinking ‘Girl on the Sporting News.’ Fortunately, that loony tune comes on the back end of an album that supersedes expectations with a series of curveballs. Punchy numbers such as ‘Only if you Run’ and ‘Games for Days’ stay nearest to Banks’ established career path, adding electronic flourishes and a cobbled-together-on-a-laptop vibe to moody, anthemic rock.
But it’s the mellower moments that make this a captivating listen. Piano and upright bass delicately pluck under snippets of elephants, documentary interviews, horns, prayers and cinema strings on ‘Madrid Song’ and ‘On the Esplanade’. It adds up to a fabulous journey through the curiosity-filled mansion of a globe-trotting playboy (Banks sports leather loafers sans socks on the cover), but for the first time the buttoned-up, brooding singer sounds as if he has a sense of humour and a sex drive.
Brent DiCrescenzo
Available online.
