Jarvis Cocker
5/5
Further Complications
From the first razorblade notes of Cocker’s second solo effort, it’s quite obvious that our hapless hero finds himself in very fine company indeed. And who’d have thought it? Teaming up Steve Albini, the sonic troll behind Nirvana’s ear-busting In Utero, could only have made sense to the most disjointed of minds, but the insanity works – so joyously, in fact, that we ought to take a moment and give thanks for visionaries and misguided union.
‘Angela’, the sonic assault that launches Cocker’s first collection since 2006, casts off with very few complications at all. It’s pure garage hedonism, sanded down with the kind of roughhewn harmonies Elvis Costello once traded in, and it sets the tone perfectly. If it wasn’t for the distinctive Sheffield moan and the usual grimy observations (‘She’s nearly 23/ making four-fifty an hour/ complimentary shower’), you’d be hard pressed to say who this actually is.
The album moves on at frantic pace: ‘Pilchard’ is all glam stomp, spiked with the kind of audio experimentation that sounded far out in 1973. Keeping to the stylistic map, ‘Leftovers’ sounds as though Van Morrison might have, had he thrown in his lot with the Spiders from Mars.
The award for best track undoubtedly goes to ‘I Never Said I was Deep’, in which Cocker’s fondness for the common loser reaches in through your ears and has a good fiddle with your melancholia valves. You’ll start off sniggering, but by the finale you’ll be hurrying up the road, haunted in some way by what you’ve just witnessed.
Further Complications is not without its filler (see the Roxy Music wannabe, ‘Homewrecker!’), but it’s so well put together that you have to sit back and wonder at what he’s managed. He’s only gone and made the first album in years that demands listening from start to finish, programmable playlists be damned.
Jon Wilks
Available from www.7digital.com.
P.O.S.
4/5
Never Better
In a recent Web clip for MTV2, Minneapolis punk-turned-rapper P.O.S. tackles Pearl Jam’s ‘Why Go.’ Despite the nimble MC turning a grunge standard into a one-man electro-clash jam — intuitively dialing up beats and pounding away synth riffs — he remains surprisingly faithful to Eddie Vedder’s melody. It’s a suitable cover, if unusual for a hip-hopper, as a similar stream of exile and rage runs through his latest, Never Better.
Not that any rap fan would ever mistake the man born Stefon Harris for a Hennessy-sipping gangsta. He remains a working man’s rhymer. ‘We all toast the same PBR,’ he proudly boasts on ‘Goodbye.’ Still, his hardcore roots aren’t nearly as overt as on Audition (2006), which speaks more to his budding prowess as a producer.
The Rhymesayers-anchored ace rocks his own beats on half of his newest. Shady, robotic grooves dominate killer cuts such as the hyper-rhythmic single ‘Drumroll’ and the Lazerbeak-helmed ‘Purexed.’ Most impressive is P.O.S.’s ability to tastefully navigate rap-rock land mines, ditching screamo choruses (for the most part) in favor of harmonies and samples.
The Warped Tour staple drags in his hometown Doomtree crew on ‘Low Light Low Life,’ but for the most part this is a personal narrative. Dense verses are loaded with weighty subject matter, covering everything from family (‘Optimist’) to abuse (‘Been Afraid’).
The mesmerizing translucent mix-and-match packaging alone would make this album a triumph in an era of downloads, but the lyrically mindful rapper’s got the skills to back up the ambitious release. Case in point: He’s unquestionably the first artist to drop references to Fugazi and Savion Glover in the same verse.
Areif Sless-Kitain
Available at www.7digital.com.
Easy Star All-Stars
1/5
Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band
Following the novelty-tastic Dub Side of the Moon a few years back, reggae studio bods Easy Star All-Stars take on another classic album from start to finish in reggae style. You know, because that’s what the world’s been screaming out for. Remember all those petitions you signed begging for it? Yes, society: finally someone has listened.
It’s true that reggae was one of the few genres that The Beatles didn’t really explore (‘Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da’ is about as close as they got), but I confess to having thought of that more as a strength than a weakness. Here, the All-Stars and a wealth of guests take their shots at some of the best loved songs of all time, with mixed-to-awful results. It’s not all entirely pointless: Max Romeo turns ‘Fixing a Hole’ into a haunting dub track and Kristy Rock’s spirited vocal re-imagines ‘She’s Leaving Home’ as a two-tone classic-in-waiting. And speaking of two-tone, The Beat’s Ranking Roger turns up on ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’, contributing that pivotal ragga interlude that the song has hitherto lacked.
Elsewhere ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ has all its rhythmic changes ironed out, which works surprisingly well in the verses but makes the chorus drag terribly. Reggae rapper Matisyahu takes on ‘Within You Without You’ and turns it from sitar dull to reggae dull, and Michael Rose and Menny More had better watch their backs since I’m going to exact a terrible, terrible revenge on them for what they’ve done to ‘A Day in the Life’. Sleep with one eye open, guys.
Sure, this was doubtlessly a hoot to make, but who but an obsessive Beatles completist would give the smallest hoot about this album? Have you ever sat around thinking ‘My life would finally be perfect if I had a limp, overlong reggae version of ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’’ No, you have not. Considering that one of the great things about Sgt Peppers is the stylistic playfulness of the album, reducing everything to mid-paced off-beat shuffle robs the disc of much of its power. As such, Easy Star’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band is far more interesting than good, and not really all that interesting.
Andrew P Street
Available at www.7digital.com.
Silversun Pickups
3/5
Swoon
Last time around, LA cutiepies Silversun Pickups seemed like the aggressive indie-equivalent of Belgium’s dEUS – which made their signing to major label Sire seem downright odd. However, from the opening of ‘There’s No Secrets this Year’, the commercial reality of their signing becomes clear: Silversun Pickups are the new Smashing Pumpkins. Actually, they’re the old Smashing Pumpkins – the song could have sat comfortably on Gish – which is fine, since the existing Smashing Pumpkins seem to have abandoned their old sound along with all the non-Corgan members, the good songs, any sense of perspective about their music, et cetera. But I digress.
This quartet lacks the searing guitar solos, but otherwise puts all the elements together nicely. Brian Aubert’s got his Corgan whisper-to-a-roar vocals down; the overlaid guitars are pure Siamese Dream (listen to the thick-as-molasses tones on ‘Sort Of’); ‘The Royal We’ is drenched in strings, but rocks in a very Melon Collie sort of a way; the midpaced ‘Draining’ owes a debt to late-period Cure; and the closing ‘Surrounded (or Spiraling)’ quite literally growls out of the speakers.
So in short: yeah, it’s derivative; but it’s also very good, which is more important. There are worse crimes than making the best album the Pumpkins never managed, after all.
Andrew P Street
Available at www.7digital.com.
St Vincent
4/5
Actor
Annie Clark’s debut album Marry Me wasn’t just one of the best albums of 2007 – it also heralded the arrival of a prodigiously talented new artist. Then (barely) known as the 25-year-old guitarist in The Polyphonic Spree, she appeared seemingly fully-formed with gloriously beautiful, complex songs that sounded like the wide-eyed offspring of Kate Bush and Jane Siberry, but Actor shows that she’s actually something even more interesting: sonically inventive, playfully creative, Actor is extremely difficult to categorise, but the bigger question is this: how can a series of such strange songs be so damn catchy?
Opening track ‘The Strangers’ changes time signature several times, with flute runs and growling guitar riffs taking centre stage at different times, surrounded by the recurring vocal refrain “Paint the black hole blacker”, before the coda evokes a Sondheim torch song: and that’s all in the space of four minutes. Then we go into the David Lynch reverie that is ‘Save Me From What I Want’, whose only musical point of comparison is David Bowie in his Scary Monsters heyday.
Elsewhere ‘The Party’ is a series of potent vignettes (“I lick the ice cube from your empty glass/So we stay much too late ‘til they’re cleaning the ashtrays”) and the two-chord ‘Just The Same But Brand New’ floats away on ethereal keys that drift in and out of tune before the anchoring drums burst in midway through – and then, amid all the weirdness, ‘Actor Out Of Work’ is a huge stomping pop song. That said, it’s near-impossible to pin down highlights on an album that reveals brand new depths with every listen.
Andrew P Street
Available at www.7digital.com.
