“Midnight City”, a hugely party orientated track with fantastic vocals contrasts completely with another one of the stand-outs on the album, “My Tears are Becoming a Sea”. This song shows M83’s full potential as a vocalist and also contains loads of brilliant orchestral flourishes. Despite many stand out songs on the album, Hurry Up doesn’t quite
do it for me. It seems over worked and too long to be properly enjoyed, not to mention the huge amount of dull ambient interludes throughout the album (5!). On second thought, this album isn’t quite Blade Runner, it’s more of an ET: The Extraterrestrial.
Eoin Hennessy
Joker - The Vision
W
hen Joker first appeared on our radars in 2007, at the tender age of 16, he was credited as the future of UK urban music. It’s now four years on and with the release of his debut LP, The Vision, Joker has changed a fair amount. Joker, when asked in 2009, what direction his music was headed, replied: “A bit more uglier, a bit more grimy”. In this sense, Joker meant ugly in a good way. On this album we can see where this ugliness has come into play with tracks like the hugely Grime inspired “Back In The Days” and the bass heavy self titled track “The Vision”. However, this nasty sound which Joker described back in 2009 does not appear throughout the album. In fact, it barely appears at
all. On this album, Joker seems to have made tracks that he thinks will inevitably reach chart success. Songs like “Slaughter House”, “On My Mind” (which sounds suspiciously like Justin Timberlake’s “My Love”) and “Lost” all sound as if they are only there to get Joker out to the masses. Despite being the figure head of Dubstep and Grime in 2007 and 2008 with tracks like “Gully Brook Lane”, Joker seems to have fallen at the final hurdle and has produced an album that can neither appeal to chart listeners or dubstep heads. While the stand-out track on the album, the wobbly Dr. Dre inspired “Tron”, will remain a classic for years to come, sadly this LP will not.
Eoin Hennessy
Jeffrey Lewis - A Turn in the Dream Song
O
ne would have thought that after five albums Jeffrey Lewis would have lost some of his lyrical dexterity, however this is not the case. On A Turn In The Dream Song, Lewis shows us why Jarvis Cocker called him the best lyricist in the US today. The huge variance in content adds to Lewis’s appeal, from talking about whether to take your bag to the toilet with you when eating in a restaurant by yourself (“When You’re By Yourself”) to a brand of sludge which Lewis claims we all grew out of
M83 - Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming
T
he the sixth album released by Anthony “M83” Gonzalez, Hurry Up We’re Dreaming, sounds as if it was recorded in 1982 and was the soundtrack to Blade Runner. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. The good thing is that the album is “very, very, very epic” (Gonzalez’s words), the bad thing is that
it is almost as long as Blade Runner and does not contain scenes with Harrison Ford. This 74-minute mish-mash of songs, inspired by dreams, 1980s pop and Gonzalez’s childhood, sounds all too familiar. Mathew Dear, Ford & Lopatin and Jimmy Edgar all ring bells. However, the 2 disc CD package does have some amazingly intricate and enjoyable songs.
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at the dawn of time (“Krongu Green Slime”). On “Cult Boyfriend”, Lewis addresses his status in the music world and compares it to a cult boyfriend: “worshiped by a few but ignored on the whole”. While long tracks like “Water Leaking, Water Moving” and “So What If I Couldn’t Take It” may seem daunting, one cannot fault them on becoming boring. Let us hope, for Lewis’s sake, that on the next album he will be able to upgrade his status from cult boyfriend to folk pioneer.
Eoin Hennessy