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HOT NATURED DIFFERENT SIDES OF THE SUN Hot Creations / Warner 5/20 When Hot Natured’s Benediction breached the UK’s Top 40, band member Jamie Jones felt compelled to defend himself. They’d been accused of “selling out”; of making some Faustian pact with The Major Labels. Some even claimed Jones planned to collaborate with Akon. Hot Natured haven’t ‘sold out’. For that to be true, they’d have to be making music they didn’t like purely for money. They are making music they love; music that, it just so happens, is popular. Consequently, some of Hot Natured’s critics seem less motivated by protecting the integrity of True Underground House and more by an anger that ‘their’ music has become more mainstream, less esoteric and, therefore, less cool. This isn’t the problem we have with Hot Natured. Dance music that is also pop music is fine with us. What is not fine, however, is releasing tracks of such complete, ket-laced insipidness it’s difficult to know when they stop being boring and start being offensive. Album opener Operate starts promisingly with some Detroit-esque pads and choppy, filtered guitar. Then the vocals start, the lyrics those of a high-schooler aiming for snappy poeticism, but instead barfing-up clumsy banality. Then, Isis (Magic Carpet Ride). Apparently, the fact that Isis is an Ancient Egyptian goddess can be represented sonically by ‘snake-charmer flutes’, and lyrically by the imagined sensuality of an enigmatic woman. The first and last minutes have just about every stereotypical ‘Egyptian’ sound there is. You’d have thought Egyptians have enough to worry about at the moment without their history and culture being patronisingly appropriated in this way. There are then 13 other songs. Reverse Skydiving sees singer Anabel Englund mistake laziness for insouciance; Different Sides has a decent clap, a more intricate beat, but the same bass sound they use in everything and some truly nonsensical lyrics; and so on for most of the rest, apart from Forward Motion and Benediction. These are both decent dance tracks that deserved the airplay and plaudits they’ve received. But they’re already old in dance-music-terms, and they can’t salvage this. Hot Natured have not sacrificed True Underground House upon the altar of Commercial Success. The Hot Creations camp have always released music that skirted around the poppier edges of house and techno. But Different Sides... is a bad album. Hot Natured sound spent. What are they delivering that’s unique anymore?Nothing, because they themselves did it years ago. This is what dance music sounds like when the industry’s ‘fresh new sound’ is used first as an incubator, then a mausoleum. RB
JAY Z MAGNA CARTA HOLY GRAIL Roc Nation
CASSY FABRIC71 fabric
6/20
18/20
It’s never a good sign when the pretext of a record can be summed up in three bullet points: Jay Z used to deal drugs in Brooklyn. Jay Z now has lots of money. Jay Z is married to Beyonce. It’s tough not to be frustrated by almost every aspect of the Magna Carta Holy Grail experience, from him allowing Justin Timberlake to sing like Bruno Mars on the opening track, to the fact he effortlessly persuaded Billboard to change their age-old rules just so his partnership with Samsung could lead to another stat that he can rap about in a year or so. The album’s pop culture references – take the lyrics about Miley Cyrus twerking or Instagram, for example – feel a bit like the efforts made by those educational films that are tirelessly trying to be down with the youth. With Timberlake and Kanye constantly helping to reignite his name, Hova has maintained a position at the top, and it can’t be denied he can rap when aptly inspired. However, there’s an overriding problem seeping through Magna Carta Holy Grail: the staggering lack of ideas on offer can only be thinly veiled by Jay Z’s increasingly shallow and unconvincing bravado. DH
A few weeks ago, Maceo Plex contributed to an ignominious tradition of men telling women how to make & market dance music when he criticised Nina Kraviz. In apparent contrast to Kraviz, Plex held up Cassy Britton as one of a few women he deemed to be ‘doing it right’. Kraviz was quick to post the cover for Cassy’s Panorama Bar mix, where she appears nude. Cassy didn’t get involved, perhaps because she didn’t care. Based on the new instalment in fabric’s long-running mix series, she doesn’t need to either. fabric71 starts with Arttu’s Tune In, propelled by a chest-perforating broken beat and soothing pads. Kuumba Project’s Black Thoughts meshes in nicely, lifting the tempo before Livio Improta’s Mare010 kicks the mix into heads-down territory. Until the mid-section it’s all fairly deep, with intricate rhythms and looped melodies, slick transitions and smart selections. The sandwiching of Pachanga Boys’ John Talabot remix between two Basic Soul Unit cuts is a particular highlight, and you’d be hard pushed to pinpoint where one begins and another finishes. Closing on Duster Valentine’s Against the Wall is a particularly soulful and satisfying touch. We can easily imagine Cassy stood behind the decks, smiling, packing up her records – not giving a fuck about Maceo Plex. RB
WASHED OUT PARACOSM Sub Pop
HOLOGRAMS FOREVER Captured Tracks
16/20
11/20
With the heavenly ascent into It All Feels Right, complete with harp brushes, choir voices and birdsong, Ernest Greene, i.e Washed Out, makes a bold statement of where he stands on his comeback. The figurehead of chillwave may have had to endure the slow death of the genre’s prominence, but he certainly seems to be enjoying a cosseted afterlife on Paracosm, as there’s been an injection of analogue sounds, fevered percussive rhythms and bubbles of psychedelic splendour that breathe life into his dreamy aura. Don’t Give Up is an infectious example of this, with a throng of vibrantly arranged instruments crisply converging around a central vocal hook. The pumping All I Know stands out with its cannon-like synthesizer beams, and the title track features oozing slide guitars beneath a nauseating swirl of tampered harps. While the heavy glue that saturates the record could make for a somewhat exhausting listen if digested whole, sharply cut beats, the living, breathing guitars, and the chimes of closer All Over Now remind you that there’s some magic hidden under that downy blanket. JTB
Last year Swedish upstarts Holograms released a highly assured record, soaked in teenage sweat, attitude and unlikely hooks. It made 99% of more established musicians look like a bunch of fassies. There was a sense of excitement surrounding the youngsters as they hit the road and made anyone who got in their way very aware of their presence with rabid live sets and a relentlessly disdainful attitude. A little over a year later and the release of second record Forever sees the band staying unremarkably, disappointingly still. There are a few great noises, like the scratching, twangy guitar of Blaze on The Hillside, but nothing comes within a mile of being as fulfilling or instantly moving as the likes of ABC City from their debut. If Holograms had made the same record twice we’d at least have been happy to hear new songs, but the sad truth is it sounds like they’ve tried to make the same record twice and failed. Perhaps they just needed more time, possibly they were exhausted and a little overwhelmed. Either way, it’s early days for the boys, far too early to write them off, and far be it from us to accuse Holograms of being little more than a balloon that’s burst before its time. But we can’t help feeling that, for what might yet be a very special band, Forever falls short of the mark. BB
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