The lyrics seem very generic and unintelligent. It’s a beautiful night, you’re beautiful, relationships can be difficult but ending them is harder, that kind of toss that we have listened to again and again. I would forgive it, if it was written by a 16 year old, but not an adult. You might think that someone of Beverley’s age might be able to think of something insightful and interesting to convey about the nature of love and relationships, but you’d be forged to think again.

There’s a behind the scenes of the music video on youtube, that has Beverley telling us how impressed and excited she is by the prospect of having two dancers portraying the highs and lows of a relationship through dance. It’s the kind of thing you would expect an A Level Performing Arts student to begin to tire of, let alone professional performers.

The whole thing is nice, but dull. I expect many grandma’s would buy it.

43%

The other new songs on the greatest hits are “Tear The Place Up”, which it a full rockfest shoutyness extravoganza and “Because of You” which is a dynamic operatic rock experience. I like both of these songs better than Squander.

I can’t really pinpoint what irks me about Squander. It just rubs me up the wrong way, giving me an urge to turn it off. I like Skunk Anansie and met Ace once and he’s a really nice guy, so it pains me to talk ill of his new song. I wouldn’t discourage anyone from checking out this song, as it has merit points in all the right places. The lyrics are passionate and meaningful, the vocals are haunting and embracing, the guitar it tender, the bass is soft and squishy, and the drums are like a silk-gloved hand under the whole thing. It works in potential, but not in practice, for me. I think it might just be a grower, and not a shower. I think that if you listen to it within the context of the “Smashes and Trashes” album, among all the old favourites, then it will become as loved as the rest of their songs.

Incredibly pleasant. The Mountain Goats’ seventeenth album is the first of theirs that I’ve listened to, and it’s a shame I haven’t listened to them earlier. The overall tone of The Life of the World to Come, is one of calm and peace and tenderness and warmth that radiates out of the music in a way that makes you feel all the bitterness and hatred flow out of you and drain away. The Mountain Goats encompass everything that I think music should be. You can’t make seventeen albums unless you really love to make music, and the fact they’re not huge but seem to have a small number of vary loyal fans that they keep very happy by producing album after album of high quality, heartfelt music that tugs your emotional puppet strings and ties them up, leaving you stranded, swinging too and fro, but feeling safe and warm, but with a tear of contentment rolling down your cheek. I think it’s a shame that I’m listening to this album on 128kps mp3, and not on CD as I think that the warmth that comes from this music would me greater in a format it was meant to be heard in, whereas the compressed version will have lost some of the love that exists at the far ends of the spectrum.

The thing that is mentioned in all literature about The Mountain Goats is how lo-fi their recordings are. I’m going to reiterate this point by saying that in any song that contains a piano, you can hear the pedals being pedalled. I think that there’s something endearing about an album that isn’t sugar coated. Rawness of recording is an attribute that I mostly associate with punk and punk derivatives, but it’s really refreshing to hear this kind of music presented in such an unpolished way. Everything about the style and composition of The Life of the World to Come, and indeed most of The Mountain Goats’ work that makes it seem entirely possible that you’re all sat in your living room and they’re playing their music for you. Every element of the work seems to be picked from a place of care and love and that the people creating the music would be very approachable and they’d let you buy them a pint and then drink it with you.

The tracks of The Life of the World to Come are based loosely around and named after verses of the Bible. Darnielle claims that he hasn’t found religion, but merely found the Bible an interesting stimulus for his strongly lyrical form of music. If the song titles didn’t mention the passages, then you would probably not even think twice about them being related to any religious material, although once you know, you end up picking out words that could relate to religion and that they could have been picked from the Bible, but it isn’t an overwhelming revelation. Sometimes the exchange from the passage to the lyric is quite an easy one, once you’ve looked up the passage, you can see the transition, but other times, the development from passage to song isn’t as obvious.

Romans 10:9
That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
becomes
If you will believe in your heart
And confess with your lips
Surely you will be saved some day
whereas
1 John 4:16
And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.
becomes
And someone leads the beast in on it’s chain
But I know you’re thinking of my ’cause it’s just about to rain
So I won’t be afraid of anything ever again

The lyricism of the album is thoughtful and insightful and while it talks to you in a very real and neutral tone, Darnielle doesn’t compromise the integrity of song writing by being explicit with the meanings in his songs. It’s like an old man giving you a piece of advice that you don’t quite understand, but it’s comforting, because it must be useful at some point. Most of the imagery in the lyrics tugs all the same strings as the music style and it all layers nicely together to create a complete package that is insightful, humorous, lovely and caring, and still very smooth on the ears and the brain.

* Seventeen, past and present at time of writing, surely more by the time you’ve read this.

78%

Listening to Acylum for the first time got me quite excited, as it sounded like a heavy industrial album that I could get involved with, but the more I listened to it, the flatter it sounded. The differing strong elements are powerful at first, but the more I listen to it, the more generic and casual it sounds. It’s a shame, as my initial excitement when I heard it only led to the disappointment as I tired of it. Many noisecore  fans may disagree with me, but I think I’m pretty liberal with this kind of music, and feel that I can justly review this album without just dismissing it as a racket, but that’s how I would describe this album. Acylum seem to have gotten a new piece of noise-making hardware and wanted to try out all of the new features as quickly as possible and while the elements within themselves are decent enough, the arrangement seems to be lacking.

The sound of heavily digitised industrial electronic on The Enemy is one that can be quite overwhelming, the constant barrage of assaulting elements can sound undynamic and even dull. I would expect that a genre that can be so brutal would at least cause me to have strong opinions one way or the other, but Acylum seem to have found the boring in something that can be exciting, overwhelming and pungent.

The variety of styles on the album is sometimes lacking and sometimes refreshing. Just when I’ve written about how dull I find Acylum, I hear something that causes me to reconsider, then just as I’ve written how interesting it all is, I’m bombarded by dullness.  The underlying tone of Acylum’s work it quite repetitive and single minded, but around this through-line are entertaining sprinkles of variety that add an extra dimension to what could be an otherwise oppressively dull album. It’s like when you’re on the train, and there are embankments on both sides, so you can’t see the scenery and there’s a baby crying and some children being naughty, but then the train pulls into a station and those people get off and you end up riding over some impressive valley’s and it’s really interesting, but at the next stop, more annoying people get on the train, and the embankments come back. It’s exactly like that.

The Enemy has many trance elements. The synth is high, repetitive and contrasts the grimy drum line in some quite interesting ways. I could easily imagine a room full of drunk, drugged up idiots showing off their dance moves to many of the songs on this album, and many times I find my legs dancing about as the music drags me kicking and screaming under it’s power. I’m not a big fan of trance, as a rule, but the trance elements of The Enemy are the ones that I most enjoy. The dynamism that the added instruments provide, insight the most interesting segments of the album.

The vocals play a supporting role on The Enemy, and in the most part could be removed to get the same effect that they wanted from the songs. There are a few where the male shouting of repetitive phrases is used and others where a female vocalist sing behind the more trance based tracks, but there’s not much in the way of content. It’s like someone dwelling on the use of cowbell in Blue Oyster Cult’s Don’t Fear The Reaper.

From what I’ve read, the opinions within the genre are mostly positive, but as an outsider looking in, this is one of the more exclusive releases, and while there are elements that I really enjoyed throughout, there’s too much dirt covering the shiny gems of interest.

52%

Firstly we’ll tackle the original track. A club scene song about a girl who won’t necessarily want to have sex with you seems strange at first, although they do justify this opinion my saying that she’s “Crazy”. They spend the first two minutes of the three and a quarter minute song, discussing how incredibly attractive this girl is and how infatuated they are with her. They build up the typical picture of how she dances well and that she’s rich and they also help build the character by telling us that her favourite colour is “Navy Navy” as a result of her always wanting to be in the “Navy Navy”. It’s these ultra intelligent lyrics that really draw me in to this type of music emotional and intellectually, the power of these lyrics is amazing! [/sarcasm]. I’m then a little surprised to hear that:

“It doesn’t mean she’s a hoe, ’cause she likes to have fun, she might come to your hotel but you won’t get none,  she might drink all your drinks, but she won’t get drunk.”

These lyrics then continue to say how, while she may look like your typical skank that you can fill with drink and drugs and then sleep with, this girl is different and she won’t let you do what you like to her. Although the fact that she’s let you buy her drinks all night, it’s the least she can do. It’s only polite, after all.

The sound of the track, itself, is simple, with a simple drum beat and some tight rhythms. The track it tightly knit without being overcomplicated. It’s fine, but nothing special, it’s these lyrics that hold the most interest.

We then have the Sway remix, which if you like any kind of drum and bass, will delight you. Sway’s dirty dnb style fits the club nature of the original track well and the track steams along like an unstoppable train. The rhythm of this track is infective and I find it impossible to not dance around in my seat. Over this amazing beat, the first two minutes of lyrics are overlaid. These are the boring lyrics about the girl going out partying and drinking and taking drugs. While it all sounds very nice, I would like to see some of the stuff about her “Looking like a hooker but she’s always well behaved” and see how they fit that into the remix.

The aural-aesthetics of Sway’s remix are pretty impressive, and the track as a whole is tight and a delight to listen to, but the lyrics that were chosen don’t interest me. The original version is more interesting lyrically, but isn’t as nice to listen to.

Dialogue’s influence from electronic music isn’t new, but I’ve never heard it taken to this extreme. many of the backing tracks sound like Aphex Twin demos. The act as a comfort zone, which, when incorporated with the vocals creates this fascinating package and as the album progresses, I find myself repeatedly surprised with the way they devise this pairing of genres in ever more dramatic ways.

Sometimes I feel, though, that the album focuses more on the musical side of things and the vocals are left behind. at times they fade into the background and become part of the overall noise that you hear and rather than shouting out and communicating the message in the words, I find that virtually none of the lyrics shine through and it
no longer matters what is being said. The times that the message is prominent, they are very interesting and provide a commentary on a large variety of subjects and it’s a shame that this is lost in parts during the album.

Thavius Beck has a rather conversational tone throughout most of the album. He’s quietly discussing his views with you, as though you’re actually in the same room as him. Instead of preaching his ideas at you, like quite a lot of hip-hop does, you feel as though he sees himself on the same level as you and doesn’t patronize you in any way. Thavius Beck’s articulation isn’t the best and some of the enunciation is lost, leaving the message behind the words behind.

The tracks where he does talk at the audience, rather than to them are, I feel, the worst on the album. They have a very rushed feel to them, with very few lyrics and a lot of repetition. They often have the most interesting music tracks, but also have the most pronounced vocals, riding over the music and ruining it, without adding any content, or creating any sort of interesting dynamic It seems a bit backwards to me, that the tracks with the least interesting lyrics have the loudest vocals. The last 3 tracks, “Sometimes”, “Pressure” and “4 Part 2″ seem as though they had a track that they wanted to use for the album, but didn’t have any vocals to put on there, so they just threw something on, to fill the space until they had time to create something better, but just ran out of time and put the tracks out anywhere. It’s a real shame that the album ends on such a poor note, for me, as I really enjoyed a lot of it, but it ends so sourly that I come away with a more negative  opinion than I would have, had the album been ended on “Transmission” which, while it does have the repetitive vocals, they aren’t nearly as prominent on the track, and thus tie in much better to the song.

Overall, the album is more interesting than good and I love to see people pushing the genre forward. While there are things here that I don’t think work, there’s a lot of positive things that are very enjoyable.

Back after a number of years apart, Anti-Pop Consortium have reunited and dropped in with an explosion of technically interesting beats, intelligent lyrics and a coalition of styles that make this one of the most discussion worthy hip-hop  albums of the year. I say discussion worthy, because there’s a lot in Fluorescent Black that you will either love or hate, and the fact that every artistic decision they’ve made on the album is well thought out and is musically valid, while still being very playful with the conventions of the genre, there’ll be much in here that will split opinion. I find myself shifting my stance on each track on each listen.

Now that I’ve heard Fluorescent Black a number of times, I find it hard to describe what I thought of it the first time I heard of it, but I didn’t like it. The vocals were monotonous, the beats were too messy and exaggerated, the effects were very overproduced and it left me quite frustrated. As I listened, and the initial impact of the album began to wear off, I began to experience some of the nuances of the production and my enjoyment of the Fluorescent Black escalated. It’s a little bit like when you get in a hot bath, firstly, you burn your knackers off lowering yourself into the steaming water. It’s uncomfortable, unnatural and it’s killing your sperm. But soon, you’re used to the heat and you can start enjoying yourself.

We start off Fluorescent Black with a messy guitar solo that peters out to be relapsed by a fuzzy bassline and a slow hiphop beat. The lethargic nature of this first track is a slow and steady build up to an album that is filled with fun and excitement. This is where my first indecision about the album. Is it clever to have your slowest song as an introduction or should you start off with a big, heavy, impressive song to plunge the listener right into the middle of Florescent Black, down the deep dark hole that is the rest of the album?

Then the next few tracks follow a more general, slightly uptempo hip-hop style, albeit with style and grace, with a very competent eclectic of different elements of hip-hop. They incorporate these elements in interesting ways, offset beats, synths, basslines and the vocals all melt nicely over one or another and is very delicious. Here ends anything that you could call a conventional rap song. They’ve lured us in with things we can relate to and can understand and will not freak out our conventions, only to smack us in the back of the head, while we’re not looking.

Then we get to what many people are saying is the cherry on this cake. “Volcano” is the first single from this album, and had gotten a great deal of positive criticism from every angle. With it’s catchy hook, it’s clean and easy to follow rhythm and dynamic form, it’s new without being too experimental and deserves all the positive opinions that it has been getting.

“Timpani” follows the catchy “Volcano” with what seems more like a 4:09 interlude to the album. We slow right down with some very simple rhythmic drums and some chanting, overlain with a very long monotonous rap that threads between the other elements. Then half way through the track, we get a more techno beat and electronic tones punctuating the heavy beat, intermittently splitting from the left to the right channel, with a very disorientating effect in my headphones. I fell down on the ground during this song and couldn’t get up until it had finished. I was rolling around all over the floor, shrieking and vomiting. Then I got off the bus…

Post-vomiting and rolling about, the Robots take over and say that they want to add robotic parts to our human forms to help us to deal with stress. The song discusses the fact that the human’s call this a revolution, but the ‘bots claim that it’s evolution. This difference of opinions is repeated ad nauseum with overly processed robotic voices that are very difficult to understand and it did take me a few listens to even begin to understand what they were talking about, which to me, seems a little counter-productive. This song is probably some kind of comment on our current dependence on computers and the internet, etc. Maybe it’s just a fantastical story of friendly robots trying to help us?

Fluorescent Black continues on with a number of very successful tracks that include more interesting beats, synthy overtones and fascinating lyrics, spoken with dynamism and presence that all fits together to provide us with something very unexpected and definitely worth the time it takes to get used to the irregular style. Scattered in with these fantastic works of art, are some experiments that didn’t work. Like Frankingstein’s monster, they come to life, then turn around and smack you in the face! The thing is, that which are which will depend on the listener and even sometimes it’s different section of the same song that shift between exciting and discouraging. I can guarantee that most of you will hate something about this section of the album, but don’t let this discourage you, because a lot of it is really great, but due to the experimental nature of Fluorescent Black, you can’t have everything work 100%, but this is how we move forward and advance with anything.

Wow, this review has gone long and I’ve barely scratched the surface of this album, such is the depth of the music and the huge variety that it offers, though without compromising or shifting from their hip-hop mission statement.

“We Want In” has everything you would expect from the pioneers of Thug Life. Guns, Bitches and the hatred of fellow black Americans is all par for the course in these situations and such inspiring lyrics as “Thuggin’ ’till I die” and “You gotta git dat, git dat, git dat, git dat” really draw you into the protagonist’s life and really force you to empathise with the troubles of this group of men.The fact that these troubles seem to be the same troubles that they were facing might just show that they’re not learning from their mistakes. Songs such as “Hunger Pains” explain the hardship of not having enough money to buy food, but after 28 albums in 13 years, they really need to get a better record deal. Although their Myspace claims: “The only group in music history to be featured on over 40 million albums sold worldwide and never put out an album of their own on a major label!” Which might go somewhere to explaining their money troubles.

There are some tracks that are musically very good, “Love of Money” had a very full sound, with some dynamic beats and an eclectic use of different effects. In fact, most of the music is musically very tight, the different collaborating voices work very well together and overall it represents the genre very well. The fact that it’s a style that many have tried to emulate and failed, but Outlawz still manage to make it sound fresh. At least they’re still trying to represent their roots and talk about the things that they think their audience would relate to, which is the same thing they were talking about when they first broke into the big time, but I can’t imagine that they are still having to fear for their life in the ghetto, and shooting people on a regular basis, which is what they continue to rap about as well as the tracks about poverty.

There is a nice homage to the people they know who have been killed, among those being 2pac. While this is a nice sentiment, I’m sure there’s probably one of these on each of the albums that the Outlawz have released, and though I haven’t kept up to date with Outlawz much, I can’t imagine there’s much new ground covered in this track.

Overall, “We Want In” is solid and sounds pretty good, but it’s all style over content and there’s nothing here that wasn’t there when 2pac first introduced them to the world.

The music style seems as though it’s copied straight out of the Early Hip-Hop Handbook and is as impressive as when a child shows you a picture that they traced out of a book. You pretend to be impressed and grin and nod, but you know that the child has no real skills, they just copied the thing out of a book. This is the lasting impression I get from The Day After Forever and you end up feeling a bit cheated.

I recently made a comment to someone that when I listen to Rapper’s Delight nowadays, it sounds a bit rubbish. I was rightfully vilified for this comment, but I do still stand by it. I know it was ground breaking and pushed hip-hop forwards, but listening to it, the rhymes are very basic, the beat is simple and based on what we have in the genre at the moment, it lacks a lot. Now we have Crown City Rockers that are mimicking that era of music, but have none of the prestige and monument surrounding their music and this just drags the whole thing down into an area of worthlessness that can’t compare. At least when people try something new and fail, they can justify their failure as an experiment, but when you try something that has been successful for 30 years, and fail, where does that leave you?

There are fer too many moments in The Day After Forever that put me in mind of another song by another group and I find myself struggling to find where that memory fits and who that bit sounded like and instead of appreciating the music for what it is, I’m thinking about something else and flicking through my music collection to jog my memory.

There’s a lot of expectation for this band in the media, especially in the Bay Area, where the band are from, where they seem to be lapping it up, so there definitely is a market for bland re-runs of old music, but not in my house. Like I said, I’ve tired slightly of that genre as a whole, but it is the nostalgia that keeps me close to that music and I will continue to come back to the music that started it all, but not something that rehashes old ideas with little to no merit.

All in all, it’s solid and the basics are strong, but because these basics are from the late 70s and early 80s, “The Day After Forever” is tedious and tenuous.

Halfway between Eels and Randy Newman, Adrian Killens takes the soft music style and layers it with an uncharacteristic anger that creates a juxtaposition of style and content to create a collection of songs that are endearing funny and thought provoking.

Lyrics such as “I call you prettyish ’cause pretty’s such a strong word in case you turned your back on me and all your friends would have heard” really show that mixture of emotion in the song, between being a bit of a dick and saying that this girl is pretty-ish and hedging his bets and not wanting to take a risk by being too honest is really what makes this album appealing to me. The pleasantness of the music and the harsh realities in the lyrics continue throughout the album scrutinizing various situations and being very honest about the way they make him feel leaves no bad taste in my mouth.

Some of the subjects in the songs are very trivial and I enjoy this. Killens dedicates a whole song to being bored at work during the week and instead of going on and on about how drunk he’s going to get at the weekend, there’s one line that states he’s going to drink to forget, while the rest of the song goes on at length about the boring week. It’s this base of reality that I find so refreshing.

There are going to be people that don’t get the irony in the songs, and taking them at face value may miss the treasure that I found laying under the surface. It’s here where I get my comparison with Randy Newman, as this sideways look at what’s straight in front of him is something that I find very amusing and very appealing.

“From what I can tell the lyrics are about setting your aims/goals so low, you avoid disappointment. Perhaps this is tongue in cheek or perhaps it’s a reality for Aidy, hope its tongue in cheek but for me its all so very predictable.”  thebeatsurrender.co.uk

This is one example of someone who just didn’t get it. I bet this reviewer thinks that Randy Newman really did love LA.

The style of rock on this album is one that I’m not sure of the technical name for the subgenre, but is one that would cover bands such as Eels, Cake, Beck, Weezer etc and is lo-fi, simple and very light and bright and if someone can educate me on what that’s called, I’d be grateful as it’s a genre that I had dismissed until very recently, but now that I’ve discovered it, I’ve found that I love it.

Adrian Killens seems like a funny guy, not only are his songs peppered with humour, his website had funny self-aggrandizing sections and over pompous comments that can only be construed as sarcasm and thus funny. Think Ricky Gervais before he became shit.

“Check out this stylish black and white picture of me, I look fucking great don’t I!! Yeah, I do!! That’s a Fender Jagstang I’m playing, possibly the coolest looking guitar in the world, it was designed by Kurt Cobain, and that means that I am as cool as Kurt, but he shot himself when he was 27, and I didn’t.

http://www.shakenstir.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/aidy-122×330.jpg

He’s also released his entire collection of songs on his site as mp3s, which is really cool, as there’s a load of content there, and I’ve already downloaded it all.

http://www.aidy.com/music.asp

I really think he deserves some money for his efforts, so should I get the chance, I’m going to go and see him live. He has no upcoming gigs on his site, but seems to gig fairly regularly in Cambridge, so next time I’m over that way, I’ll hopefully be able to check him out.

On his website I see the following:
“Imagine how happy I was after spending all my spare time and hard earned money recording, duplicating, and posting it out to reviewers, only to be presented with 1 out of a possible 5, and phrases such as ‘so very predictable‘ and ‘a bit lame‘. Well, I can tell you, I wasn’t very happy at all! In fact it made me sad, but upon reflection things could be far worse…”

How can you dislike someone who makes those kind of comments? Well, here you go, Adrian, a very good review and recommendation for you.