musicsingles
06 THEA GILMORE Fever Beats (Flying Sparks)
THEA GILMORE: cynical
TETRA SPLENDOUR Pollen Fever (Wishakismo)
THE PORTHCAWL quartet are back, and they mean business with this slice of cool psychadelic-guitar pop. Hauntingly atmospheric, with strong, soaring vocals and soft guitars, the ‘Splendour take us on a swirling mind-trip through their world. Having already obtained a bit of a cult fanbase, Pollen Fever looks set to make the world take notice (of course it helps that they’re all pretty boys), and with a new album due out soon these boys are going to be big. Catch them while you can. Gemma Jones
ALIZÉE Moi...Lolita
(Requiem Publishing)
musicalbums
OH LÀ LÀ, those French. Britney and Christina may have traded on their youthful sexuality to shift units, but let’s face it: neither of them were ever likely to be virgins. Alizée, on the other hand, recorded a song with the title Moi...Lolita when she was fifteen – now seventeen, its release in the UK was presumably delayed until she’d at least reached the age of consent. Both her image and music subtly fuse innocence and eroticism in a way that neither brash American could ever understand; if anything, Moi...Lolita is a deliberate invocation of the original Nabokovian Lolita. It’s also the most fantastic pop song – and with the most scandalous video to boot – since the aforementioned Britney’s debut. “C’est pas ma
BOARDS OF CANADA Geogaddi (Warp)
IN 1998 Marcus Eoin and Michael Sandison, generally know as Boards Of Canada, turned the IDM electronica scene on it’s head with the seminal Music Has The Right To Children. A psychedelic flashback of childhood memories, lost films and summer’s evenings, the melody heavy album stunned everyone who heard it and has been cited as one of the major sources for Radiohead’s movement towards more experimental music. You can therefore get an idea of the hype that has surrounded the release of their second major album – the first full-length release in four years. Expectation is extremely high and already rumour is rife on the internet, with people trying to decipher the meanings behind the songs and discovering that reversed messages are placed into tracks such as A is to B as B is to C. The great news is that the wait has been well worth it. Following the Grolsch ideal of only releasing material when it’s fully ready, Geogaddi is bursting with ideas and layer upon layer of melody and sound. The level of attention to detail is amazing: on each listen I find something new, exciting and different. Right from the start as the analogue introduction of Ready Lets Go slides gracefully into the supreme Music Is Math you know the
THERE ARE very few artists out there whose prolificacy rivals Thea Gilmore’s. At 21, she already has three LPs in the bag, and barely five months from releasing the latest of them – the superb Rules For Jokers – a new single has appeared. Then again, there are very few artists out there whose talent rivals Gilmore’s. Her forte is barbed, cynical social commentary, and clearly she has much to write about; in this case, it’s a sophisticated deconstruction of the anticulture stance which – ironically – constitutes popular culture. As the lady herself sneers, “it’s tragic but it’s true, my friend.” Alex Macpherson faute”, pouts Alizée coquettishly over pervy, bouncy synths, before declaring that “Je suis un phénomène”. Quite. Alex Macpherson
ANGIE STONE FEAT. ALICIA KEYS + EVE Brotha (Arista)
BLACK WOMEN are undeniably in the ascendancy right now, as illustrated perfectly by the three virtuoso talents on display here. It’s somewhat fitting, then, that Stone and her fellow soul sisters should channel their passion into destroying a few stereotypes in a superbly executed vindication of their male counterparts. “For your information/ a lot of my brothas got education”, croons Stone in the languid, soulful original, before Keys and Eve arrive armed with sampled horns, joyous harmonies and a swinging beat for Brotha Part II. A classy affair. Alex Macpherson
Love With A Girl backs pithy wisdom (“My left brain knows all love is fleeting/ I must be fine cos my heart’s still beating”) with a flurry of exuberant guitars and remorseless melody, and is less than two minutes in length. And, taking the word ‘basic’ to new levels, b-sides Let’s Shake Hands and Lafayette Blues sound like country hoedowns on speed. Jack White squawks; Meg White plays, apparently, a cardboard box; the world thrills. Alex Macpherson
WILL YOUNG Evergreen (BMG)
SO NOW, not only do we have our Pop Idol, we also have his brand new single, and quite frankly, it’s a bit of a disappointment. The fact that one of the songs on the single is a cover of a Westlife song seems to imply that Simon Cowell and his BMG cronies truly thought Gareth Gates would win the competition, because no record executive who wants to make serious money would give this flimsy excuse for a song to the huge vocal master that is Will Young. Don’t get me wrong, I like Will, in fact, I love him, but I am not so blinded by adoration that I cannot see that Evergreen is too wishy washy and girly for him. But that is entirely irrelevant, for people will buy the single anyway, and dammit, I encourage you all to do so, if only because he looks so nice on the front cover. Go on, people, make this boy a star. Daniel Barnes (Will’s number one fan)
HEFNER The Hefner Brain (Too Pure)
THE NEW Smiths take us deep into their quirky psychosis with an electronised remix of Dead Media album track When The Angels Play Their Drum Machines leading us off into a kaleidoscopic magic carpet of loops, phasers, drawling drumbeats and synths on the Human League inspired Dark Hearted Discos, itself paradoxically coupled with the Dolly Parton-esque, guitar sliding, deadpan acoustic lament of Can’t Help Losing You. Whilst the sublime piano ballad of All I’ll Ever Need orchestrated by Darren Hayman’s Jarvisesque social parodies; “She is a light left on at home/ A ringing telephone”, complete the ‘Roxy Music would be proud’ romantic ironisation at work. Simian(ites) take note, Britain’s answer to the Eels are at it again. Lee Davies
NICKELBACK How You Remind Me (Roadrunner)
IT SURPRISED me that this hadn’t already been released seeing as it’s been on the MTV/ Kerrang circuit for what seems like forever. A former US number one, Canadian post-grungers Nickelback hit us with this emotive power ballad containing enough angst (“I’m mistaken for handing you a heart worth breaking”) to keep the average teen happy. If bands like Staind, Creed and Bush are your cup of tea, How You Remind Me won’t disappoint as this is of the same calibre. Gemma Jones
THE WHITE STRIPES Fell In Love With A Girl (XL)
THE OTHER night, watching the Winter Olympics in true insomniac stylee, Music discovered a new sport. It involved people skiing at top speed up a ramp, taking off vertically into the air and turning three or four somersaults of varying twists and turns, before landing upright again. Over in a few seconds, it was exhilarating and compelling; indeed, it was the perfect analogy for listening to the White Stripes. Fell In Scottish duo have come up with another certified classic. Each track takes time to worm it’s way under your skin and into your subconscious, so after five listens it becomes painfully apparent that You Could Feel The Sky is one of the most beautiful pieces of electronic music ever written and that the rest of the album isn’t far off with it’s gorgeous psychedelic loops, gentle melodies and chunky beats. Some of the ‘filler’ tracks are a little weak, but there’s always a fragment of melody or a background sound that makes them essential as part of the whole. I could spend days writing about how good this album is and how the band have once again raised the stakes for electronic music, but it’s certainly better to discover for yourself and get a copy of this tremendous album, close your eyes and be transported to another world. Album of the year already? Believe me – it won’t be far off. A truly magical breathtaking album. Andy Parsons
NINE INCH NAILS And All That Could Have Been (Nothing)
IF LIMP Bizkit and friends exist to show us that metal music can be fun through, the slightly suffocating genre we are calling nu-metal, then US rockers Nine Inch Nails represent All That Could Have Been had darker (and less cartoon-friendly) ‘old’ metal taken on Top of the Pops instead. NIN’ live album features over a decade’s worth of tracks, all recorded on the
WILL: “buy my record god dammit I’m a pop idol...”
band’s Fragile V2.0 tour, and produced by frontman Trent Reznor. Unfortunately the CD has been slightly over-produced and much of the band’s raw energy is lost. Over such a broad period of time, NIN have inevitably undergone stylistic changes, leaving tracks such as 1989’s Sin sounding out of place with its Frankie Goes To Hollywood bassline and 80s synthesizers. Standout tracks include Piggy, with its dark, plodding bassline and maudlin vocals, The Frail/ The Wretched which moves from a hauntingly gothic piano solo through to mesmerising chants and raw guitars only describable as pure evil in analogue form. More recent tracks such as The Great Below demonstrate the band’s musical maturity, building up rich layers of emotive vocals and sombre guitars, while 1992’s Wish shows us the truly dark side, placing crazy rantings over speeding guitars to create a raucous barrage of noise. While this album is certainly going to be a bit of a specialist affair, it does form a nice back catalogue of one of the nineties’ most important rock bands. If there’s one lesson to be learned here, it’s that Fred Durst is not the most evil man on the planet. Sorry kids it’s true. Don’t have nightmares. Maria Lane
90 DAY MEN To Everybody (Southern)
CHICAGO BASED 90 Day Men have a hard task ahead. While the truly encapsulating locking together of piano and guitar rebuffs
static musical boundaries, To Everybody will still regrettably be pushed aside whilst the music industry remains glued to Will Young’s pop idol arse. And that’s quite an obstacle to overcome. But with the current infatuation on these shores with American alternative guitar acts, maybe now is a more receptive period within the British industry to overseas charmers. Not that it’s possible to instinctively link 90 Day Men to top dogs The White Stripes or The Strokes though. In fact, the ingenuity of the six track mini album and its exploring of a positioning well devoid of arrogance or bravado, amidst a rolling, loose spontaneous sounding construction, means that they are not easily compared with others at all. Partly due to the compelling positioning of the piano within a sprawling musical backdrop on Last Night, A DJ Saved My Life, an unpolished but nevertheless hypnotic appeal results. On I’ve Got Designs on You, dark undertones and gruff lead vocals condescendingly spit out lines like “And I drink to forget what I’m about to do,” and it is less of a hollow threat of impending nastiness and more an inevitable outcome. This is no knees-up party album to be sure, but instead a celebration of an adventurous jaunt, between Nick Cave levels of melancholy and Pavement-esque degrees of structural flexibility. It may be undeniably awkward to pinpoint quite why, with their unconformable ways and decidedly testing formulation, but 90 Day Men are worthy of their 10 minutes of fame and much more besides. Gemma Curtis