album review: spectrals. extended play. 10 october 2010. moshi moshi

this is another ep that i’ve decided to rate as an album. why? partly because i’m lazy and can’t be bothered to execute the simple task of adding a new category, but mainly because i don’t give singles a mark out of ten, but i do so for albums. i think seven tracks is enough to rate out of ten.

i’m feeling seriously shit today, or “srsly rub” as i’ve just text to my better half in a way to try and stay young. going off on a total tangent by the way… i think i proved my age the other day when i was taking the piss out of said other half with the insult “you’re just not up with the kids”. up? up with the kids? it’s down with the kids tim, you retard. anyway, i digress. my reason for pointing out i am ill is as an early excuse for this being a shamefully short review for what is an excellent record.

i first heard spectrals supporting summer camp many months ago at the lexington. i’ve been looking forward to a proper release ever since and ‘extended play’ doesn’t disappoint. standout track ‘peppermint’ is the perfect example of louis jones’ recognisable northern voice and obvious love of sixties classics. the sound is one part beach boys, one part the coral, but mainly eight parts spectrals.

it’s been out for almost a month now and despite continual listening i’m not in the slightest bit bored of it yet. go get it.

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album review: kings of leon. come around sundown. 18 october 2010. rca

to establish an unbiased view of kings of leon‘s new album ‘come around sundown’ an open mind, ignoring the tiresome ‘old kol / new kol’ debate was required. ‘only by the night’, their fourth album brought a fresh wave of fans completely unaware of these tennessee boys before ‘sex on fire’, westlife cover ‘use somebody’ and sexy videos more akin to something beyonce would do. kol lost as many fans as they gained with their last album, but having reminded myself of their brilliance on their third record ‘because of the times’, i was hoping for great things from ‘come around sundown’; either a return to their messy, frenzied bluesy rock, or a completely new direction – with whispers of a ‘beachy’ sounding album, i had high hopes that the polished stadium rock sound they’d uncomfortably slipped into was a one album blip.

sadly the divide between old and new kol remains, i can confirm they’re still playing it safe and keeping their new fans (those playing ‘sex on fire’ off their phones and our take that-loving older sisters) happy with this over produced, stuck in second gear, middle of the road tosh that neither enlightens nor offends. even after three or four listens i couldn’t help thinking the cd would make a nice christmas present for my mum, more suitable for afternoon coffee than brixton academy mosh pits. kol now have a signature commercial sound that is instantly recognisable, yet instantly forgettable. longing for the good times of ‘spiral staircase’ and ‘california waiting’ these new songs make clear those days are well and truly behind us.

it’s not all bad, there are a couple of okay songs, ‘no money’ hints at their pre-2007 excellence with some choppy guitars and fuzzy production -(at last, i thought) but sadly the next song “pony up” immediately reminded me of the steering wheel-tapping beats they now embrace. ‘beach side’ has an interesting intro and bouncy bass, a song that flirts with a new direction, but just as my ears were readying themselves for the song to launch the new 2010 kol sound, it ends abruptly as if for fear of offending their new fans. ‘pyro’ and ‘mary’ are other songs that slightly stood out but still sat on the fence, not daring enough to tip toe next door where all the naughty, fun stuff is…

this album was kol’s chance to slow the monster they’ve become but instead they’ve released a city boy friendly album that just doesn’t do anything. the commercial road in which kol have taken is a very different road we thought we were heading down when we jumped onboard during the moustache and flared denim ‘youth and young manhood’ beginnings. those happy days are assigned to history, i miss them but it seems kol don’t, if they did they wouldn’t have written yet another soundtrack to bono’s wet dreams.

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words by jamie day (twitter, blog)

album review: carl barat. caral barat. arcady records

carlos ashley raphael barat. the brains to the peter doherty natural genius in the libertines. a man who can keep his head when those all around him are talking about mice on youtube. singer songwriter, actor, author. he’s the michael jordan of the music world. in that he’ll try his hand at anything and expects to succeed.

this is probably the hardest review i’ve ever had to write. not because the album is particularly challenging or i’m lost for words by it. it’s hard to write because of how i felt about it going in. i was a big libertines fan, as i’ve mentioned before. this album causes the same feelings as the reunion did. i really want it to work and be a success. i can’t help but have this nagging feeling that it will disappoint though. i deliberately avoided the big libs come back so that i didn’t have to face this possibility. as it turns out, everybody i have spoken to said that they put on a great performance. i’m pleased.

so, how do i judge an album that i’m confused about before even listening to it? i can’t listen to it with an open mind. i sort of like it, but would i if it wasn’t by carl barat? or would i like it more if it was by somebody else because i wouldn’t be comparing it to the libertines? there are certainly elements i know i’d like whoever performed it, but there are bits i’m sure i judge far too harshly.

in conclusion i have no idea whether you’ll like it if you’re a libertines fan, if you’re a libertines hater or even if you’ve never heard of them before. basically, you’ve just wasted three or four minutes of your life reading a review that doesn’t know what it’s saying.

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album review: janelle monae. the archandroid. 18 may 2010. bad boy records

it’s fucking good isn’t it.

probably not worth me going into it too much as i imagine you all listened to it about six months ago. i’ll go into it a bit though, to avoid making this a totally pointless post.

the entire record is very, very listenable. not just now and again, but several times in the row. just ask the woman next to me on the eurostar who had to put up with it from paris to st pancreas yesterday. she didn’t moan once. each listen seems to offer a different highlight as well. during my first play the five & a half minutes that encompassed ‘sir greendown’ and ‘cold war’ back to back was hard to beat. next thing i knew, a little over an hour later i was gushing about ‘make the bus’ (surely the best track about public transport since the divine comedy were at their pomp). and don’t get me started on ‘wonderland’. that chorus is crying out to be annoying. how isn’t it? how? it’s fucking aces.

if it’s good enough for the little lady on the train next to me it’s good enough for me.

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album review. weezer. hurley. 14 sept 2010. epitaph records

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album review: summer camp. young ep. 6 oct 2010. moshi moshi

i’ve bleated on about summer camp a lot over the two incarnations of this blog. it all started when i first heard their cover of ‘i only have eyes for you’ and fell in love. i can’t access the old blog anymore, but i described the sound as something along the lines of “music you want to listen to when walking through an empty adsa car park in the rain, on the way home from a great date.” i stand by this and in a little way i am a bit proud of this description. it really summed up the way you feel when you listen to it well i feel.

i saw them a few times in the next couple of months, including the ‘ghost train’ single launch at the lexington and a great support slot for the equally awesome slow club at koko. i was lucky enough to meet them (elizabeth sankey and jeremy warmsley) at the latter and not only are they producing wonderful music they are also a genuinely nice and funny couple (they are a couple, right?). they continue to be two of my favourite people to follow on twitter and i only didn’t include them in my twitter recommendations a few weeks ago because i don’t want them to think i am actually a stalker. although i am. a bad one. that’s another story though.

so, onto the ep (i’ve counted it as an album because i haven’t got an ep category) i was meant to be writing about. it includes two older tracks, the aforementioned ‘ghost train’ along with ‘was it worth it’. both fit nicely on here and i have previously written about them and how they continue the theme of young love. the difference with summer camp is that there is always a reference point that you can relate to in the lyrics. whether talking about boys wanting to be teen wolf or boys and girls kissing on a dirty blue duvet in ‘veronica sawyer’, you can always picture the scene in your mind.

the real stand out track, not just on this ep but from their entire output so far, is ’round the moon’. from the bent accent of the opening bars to the jeremy’s lazy somewhat closed-mouth vocals it just begs to be put on repeat and listened to all day. when elizabeth comes in with soft support, once again she invokes memories of teenage love. in addition, never has a video been so apt for a single. the visuals are from a swedish love film and i’m so pleased that somebody in the summer camp, erm, camp had stumbled across this movie at some point. josh was right with his fondness of it.

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album review: scott pilgrim vs the world ost. various artists. 10 aug 2010. abkco music & records

first off, full disclosure. i love broken social scene. i love beck. i really want to see scott pilgrim vs the world. this was never going to get a negative review from me. add to the fact that i also love blood red shoes, the rolling stones and metric, all of whom also appear on the soundtrack and you have made a soundtrack you’re going to have to work hard for me not to love.

having said that, this isn’t as perfect for me as the contributors involved would suggest. the reason is broken social scene’s appearance. i first fell for the collective a few years back and, as i may have mentioned before, ‘you forgot it in people’ is one of my top five albums of all time. what’s gone wrong with their contribution here then? three tracks. one re-release (albeit the fantastic ‘anthems for a seventeen-year-old girl’) and two under the guise of crash & the boys that come in at less than a minute each. they are deliberately playing an arty-farty rival band, and i am sure this is relevant to the film, but it still left me a little disappointed.

beck ups the ante with some superb work as both himself and scott’s own band, sex bob-omb, and all other tracks fit the soundtrack nicely – especially metric. i think this may well get to the route of the problem. the soundtrack sounds very much like a soundtrack, not an album. does that make sense? i probably need to see the film to appreciate it properly, and i am fairly confident that i will listen to it many times once i have. that’s the beauty of proper soundtracks though. they don’t just act as music, they also send you back into the cinema.

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i’m really sorry about the amazingly unoriginal post title by the way. it’s been a long day.

album review: mount kimbie. crooks & lovers. 19 july 2010. hotflush recordings

when we went off the see the xx the other day, i think i mentioned in my comments on emma’s review that mount kimbie supported and were pretty fucking awesome. they first came to my attention with some remix work for the big pink and foals earlier in the year. now they are set to release their debut album tomorrow after a couple of excellent eps.

it is good. fucking good. i know that isn’t the most in depth review you’ll ever read, but it is simply the best way to describe it. apparently the sound is called post-dubstep. if you say so. i don’t really know what it means but i don’t like to miss a good bandwagon to jump on if i get the chance, so post-dubstep it is. on the rare occasions that discernible vocals enter the record the sound is soft and dreamy in an air france type way, but it is when the electronic sounds and samples hit that the tracks come to life. i’m in love with the album at the moment and i can only hope that this is the route that dubstep takes, rather than where other acts like magnetic man are going.

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album review: bombay bicycle club. flaws. 12th july 2010. island records

if you’re going to listen to an acoustic album, you need to be in exactly the right mood. my mood today is sleepy, hungover, and ridiculously hot. bombay bicycle club are about to release ‘flaws’, possibly the perfect album for my current state of mind.

this is a massive (presumably temporary) step away from the sound of bbc’s first album ‘i had the blues but i shook them loose’, and there’s not much on ‘flaws’ that will get your heart racing or your arms aloft as their first album did with such indie hits as ‘evening/morning’, but that’s obviously not the angle of this record. what the new songs lack in effects and electronic zest, they make up for in haunted acoustic folk, heavily doused in nick drake and neil young. also on show is a maturing voice delivering more endearing lyrics; lead man jack steadman’s vocals sound particularly impressive fronting this new found folk sound. highlights include the cover of john martyn’s ‘fairytale lullaby’, the song from which the album takes its name ‘flaws’ and the stripped back version of ‘dust on the ground’, which is possibly better than the version found on their debut album. unfortunately i found some songs to be a little repetitive and forgettable as is regularly the issue with an acoustic album, but that’s not to say i didn’t appreciate the crouch end boys new sound, indeed praise is due for displaying such a brave and creative alter-ego. the band now embark on a nationwide church and chapel tour, but have promised to revisit their more varied classical indie sounds for their festival dates.

as my saturday night draws closer, i realise this isn’t going to be the soundtrack to get spruced and bruced to, but for now, as i sit resembling a lobster, struggling in the hot english sunshine, it’s perfect.

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words by jamie day (twitter, blog)

album review: mystery jets. serotonin. 5 july 2010. rough trade records

a few weeks ago, in the infancy of the new sockformation, i made a very quick post about the new mystery jets album being pretty fucking awesome. nothing has changed. i still love it. with the album due to be released tomorrow i thought i’d give it a bit more of a fuller run down though. i’m good to you i know.

i have loved both previous mystery jets offerings… ‘making dens’ brought us the anthem that is ‘zoo time’ and the excellent ‘twenty one’ brought us multiple tracks that would get stuck in your head for days. but in a good way. both albums had heart and fun in equal measure, but is is with the new record that mystery jets have hit the jackpot. i know it is early in the review (but i won’t be going on for long anyway), but i’m going to describe it as the perfect indie pop album now. that’s the second paragraph and i’ve already called it that.

having said that, what would you expect? the album is produced by the man who brought us ‘different class’ and ‘never mind the bollocks’ amongst others. now, this album is not a pulp album (and certainly not a sex pistols album), but it does seem to hit its audience with the same perfect timing as those great albums did. you also get the feeling that it can have the longevity. i can’t imagine ever getting bored of listening to it.

so, what’s so good about it? the inventiveness? yes. the variation? yes. the lyrics? yes. more than anything though this is an album that takes the past mystery jets formula – write a song about love; put a little bit of fun in it; get it produced by some sort of genius – and does it to perfection.

the album title refers to something well scientific that i don’t really understand but makes us feel happy. i can’t think of a better title.

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