Green Day, under another name, attempt to play 60s American garage rock music, and in points succeed with their mission and at other points they fail. At points they sound like Green Day, at other points you can’t tell it’s them at all. At points it’s good, at points it’s rubs.
The thing is, I don’t know if I want them to sound like Green Day doing this style of music, or if I want them to sound completely different. It’s just a bit confusing.
The best songs, I think, are the ones where they succeed to put an image of 60s America in my brain, and I just see them all stood about in black and white.
The songs which succeed in this are songs like ‘Ruby Room’ and She’s a Saint not a Celebrity’.
Overall, I think they have a winning album with this, and it’s an interesting concept. They even split the album into 2 sides to keep in with their 60s ideology which is an interesting touch, but seems a bit pointless when listening to the album on CD or on your mp3 player. Maybe putting it on 2 CDs would give it the authentic vinyl feel as you have to make that extra effort to change CDs.
It’s exciting, it’s interesting and it makes me want to boogie.
Listen to this album: In 60’s black and white with your mum’s old clothes on.
Rating 81%
Extracts from ‘Ruby Room’, ‘Red Tide’ and ‘27th Ave Shuffle’
This is a dance version of calligraphy. It’s swirly and curly and appealing at first glance, but when you try to read it, you can’t really see what the content is. The album is a rather pleasant sounding experience, for the most part and I very much enjoyed it while I was listening to it, but once the album had finished, I felt rather empty inside, like there wasn’t any point to what I’d just heard. There isn’t any conviction to the music. Dance music is supposed to capture you and whisk you away, but this album doesn’t do that.
I was personally rather indifferent to Moby until I saw him on Never Mind the Buzzcocks and thought he was hilarious. This caused me to take rather a liking to the man, but I still stayed indifferent to his music.
This album is like the weak kid at school who keeps trying to be everyone’s friend, but nobody wants anything to do with him, even though he is generally pleasant, he’s not friend material and it’s the same with this album, the songs are nice but they don’t really make me want to buy the album.
The best songs on the album take a step in the right direction and make me wish the rest of the album had the same determination as these songs.
There’s only one outstandingly bad song on the album, and that is ‘Everyday it’s 1989′ which is just too much for me to handle, it has some wailing woman all the way through and I just want her to just SHUT UP!
The best songs on the album are ‘257.zero’, ‘Alice’ and ‘The Stars’ which all combine decent beats, cool funky sounds and some great use of words.
Having read the 3 step guide to singing modern indie, Santogold realises she read the copy for men.
This is quite a confusing album because she sets out to break in to a genre very much dominated by white people and fails very badly with it, although when it comes to the songs which are more reggae and hip hop influenced, they are very good. Even though she says she “has made a point of not performing R&B or rap like other “brown girls”,saying she is “not like Ciara.” Wiki
These are some of the best songs on the album, and it also sounds a bit pretentious, why can’t she just do it and not mention race?
The indie based songs are bad, it sounds forced and not very good. It’s like the male singer of some naff indie band has had his balls chopped off. Every song that isn’t grouped into this genre is exceptionally good.
‘Shove it’ which has some reggae sounding influences is very enjoyable, ‘Creator’ which is very hip hop had me dancing in my seat and ‘My Superman’ which sounds more like something Goldfrapp would produce is lovely.
Overall, this album is good once you cut out the indie bits, all the other stuff is really very good. Some interesting influences are brought in to play in the album and more than a couple of times i was jigging away to her tunes.
While trying to pic some samples to put below here, I found myself wanting to put most of the songs on, so that goes to show that there must be a good few worthy of putting up., I was just very put off by the indie.
Listen to this album: Covering your ears when she tries to do indie.
Rating: 80%
Extracts from ‘Shove It’, ‘Say Aha’, ‘Creator’ and ‘My Superman’
The general genre of this music is cute female singer songwriter. There’s plenty of them out at the moment and they are all quite similar and it really is just based on personal preference which ones you like and which ones you loathe. Gemma Hayes flops lazily into my loathe tray and refuses to move, The music is quite heavy in weight and is very demanding, being really quite flat and uninteresting. I prefer my female singer/songwriters to be cool and quirky and Hayes fails to meet my very specific requirements.
There’s a lot of noise in the songs and this gives me a bit of a headache, it’s not clean, it’s not crisp, it’s just saggy and unappealing. At one point in ‘Out of our hands’, I had to pause the music, to make sure that there wasn’t something else making noise on my computer and mixing with the album, creating a frightful din. It turned out it was just the song.
It also sounds like it was recorded in someone’s living room, which I would have forgiven, had the music been good.
Listen to this album: With your head in a carrier bag.
Rating: 59%
Extracts from ‘This is what you do’, ‘Out of our hands’, ‘In over my head’, ‘Don’t Forget’, and ‘At Constant Speed’
You know when somebody gets turned into an insect on TV and it shows the world from their perspective, and everything sounds like it’s coming from far away and muffled and slightly strange. Well that’s the effect this album has on you. It’s like they just stuck a tiny microphone in the ears of various different insects,and recorded the sounds that came through.
This mess of noises was then fed through a synthesiser and stripped down to it’s most prominent noises and slapped on CD and shipped off for people to listen to. If you listen carefully, you might just hear that conversation you has with your mistress the other week, you thought nobody was listening, but there was a literal fly on the wall that overheard.
All the songs on the album, are quite slow and boring, with glimpses of interesting material in the background that if you listen closely, you’ll just be able to hear, but it seems like too much hard work for such little content.
Listen to this album: Crawling in the grass.
Rating: 63%
Extracts from ‘Out There On The Ice’, ‘Midnight Runner’, ‘Far Away’ and ‘Nobody Lost, Nobody Found’
Why was this released in the spring? It is a summer album.
Although, with the recent weather we’ve been having in England, they could be forgiven for being mistaken. This album is the perfect accompaniment for sitting in the garden and drinking Pimms, cool Jazz and cool Funk join forces and float whimsically over the heads of all listening and reduce the day to a minimalist bliss. It just drifts in and carries you away.
There’s something good about music, TV and films that are completely inoffensive but still manage to be good. This album gently persuades you to enjoy it, even if you didn’t really want to, but isn’t big headed about it.
So pour a cool one, light a spliff and chillax to the sound of politeness.
Listen to this album: All summer long
Rating: 78%
Extracts from ‘I come alive’, ‘I remember a time’, ‘Never look back’ and ‘When words are just word’
Because she’s not and it’s quite embarrassing to see her trying to be cool and failing. It’s like when your mum tries to take an interest in pop music, or your dad trying to dance at a wedding. You just cringe and feel a huge amount of embarrassment for them.
Yes, she used to be shocking and abrasive, but we’ve seen it all now and there’s nothing left for her to do but shut up and go away.
She obviously does it because she enjoys it, and I respect that, I just find it hard to believe she actually thinks she does it well.
On this album, she’s just surrounded herself with rap artists and I do believe that the people who will buy this album, will do so, not for her, but for all the other people on the album. Does this make her the winner?
Everything on the album does have a degree of success, plenty of the songs are quite catching and I find myself bopping along to the music, but seeing where Madonna came from it just feels like such a fall from grace.
Listen to this album: While being a mutton dressed as lamb.
Rating: 67%
Extracts from ‘Miles Away’, ‘Heartbeat’ and ‘Incredible’
It really confuses me when I listen to an album that is very well performed and contains some very good music, but it just doesn’t inspire me.
Hardcore Punk is one of those genres that has a small margin between brilliant and very poor, and this album is very good, but it’s quite formulaic and I think it’s this that causes me to be less than excited about the album. Maybe it’s also because I’m lying in bed, at 10:50am and this isn’t the correct position to be listening to the album. I can imagine loving the album if I heard it performed live at a rock festival.
Another complaint about the album is the same complaint most people have about Formula 1 racing, that it kicks off at 200mph and goes round and round at that speed until the end and nothing much happens. This is true up to the tracks, ‘Bastard Waltz’ and ‘Sorceress’ which is like the pit-stop of the album. These tracks happen and suddenly there’s lots of excitement going on and people are racing all over the place and there’s lots of change and variety and fun.
After these two songs, it goes a bit bland again, until the last three songs, which again pick up and take us to the end of the album. This kind of trickery, to end the album on a high, tries to make us regard the album as better than it was and make up for the slightly uninspiring rest of the album. This trickery doesn’t work on me. I see through your lies.
This album is on par. It should have been at least a birdie.
Listen to this album: While angry.
Rating: 77%
Extracts from ‘Deathsmarch’, ‘Bastard’s Waltz’, ‘Sorceress’ and ‘Lucifer’s Rocking Chair’
Atmosphere is in a place in the middle of many different criteria within art. He’s in a soap bubble of vocal skill, word play and poetic licence.
The thing is, I wouldn’t call it poetry, it’s still most definitely rapping, it’s just that it’s filled with poetic devices to help with the narrative contained in the song.
Slug, the rapper in Atmosphere, is one of the most intelligent wordsmiths in music today, some of the political messages are very well thought out and he will even give a balanced argument for and against the subject he’s talking about. I find this completely amazing and many people, not only music but in life too, could learn a lot from him.
This album is pretty much all about the rapping and the lyrics and the music behind it, is more a device for the words, rather than a musical entity within itself. Minimalist, light beats with slight hints of bassy flavour contrast the very technical, complex rhymes and messages within the words. Having very simple, unimposing music really helps you to listen to the words in the songs and really take in everything that’s said and gives you room to think about what’s been said and then form your own opinions about the topics contained within those very witty lyrics.
A lot of the songs are about society and how we as a people react to certain issues. Slug writes in a very personal way, and I find myself relating to him. This drags me further in to the album and causes me to really empathise with him. The song ‘Yesterday’ plays all the way through with the chorus:
“Yesterday, was that you
Looked just like you
Strange things my imagination might do
Take a breath reflect on what we’ve been through
Or am I just going crazy cause I miss you”
It’s only at the end you actually realise who it is that he thought he saw and why he felt it necessary to write about it. I’m not going to spoil it, just go and listen to it. It’s the song in the youtube video at the bottom.
This isn’t really an album that you want to listen to on a regular basis, as it’s not the most musically adept album, not even the most musical Atmosphere album, but it’s still very much worth a listen, especially when you feel a bit sad, so you can feel empowered by your sadness, due to the positive messages that derive from negative situations.
Listen to this album: when you feel a bit sad, so you can feel empowered by your sadness, due to the positive messages that derive from negative situations.
82%
Extracts from ‘Like the rest of us’, ‘Your Glass House’, ‘Wild Wild Horses’ and ‘In Her Music Box’
Techno-metal-punk-type stuff all boxed in a small explosive package that is left in a bin in a train station.
I find it strange reviewing an album of a band that I have liked for a while. I become very biassed and want to just rave about the album. I also end up just comparing the album to other albums by the same artist and become very objective about it.
MSI’s style is very unique and contains big drums with keyboards, punk guitars and the very unique vocal style of Jimmy Urine.
MSI are one of my very favourite bands and you definitely need to hear them and also see them live. I saw them live and it blew my mind, they are just so animated and fun and entertaining. But this isn’t about the gig, it’s about their new album. It’s just important not to take MSI too seriously.
The first song introduces everything I would expect from an MSI album. It’s loud and lewd and brash. It makes me very excited and I start to perspire. After this song I wonder what happened. ‘Evening Wear’ is weak and melodic and it’s not very good. We then go into a rhythm of one on, one off until ‘Get it up’ which is just abismal. ‘Get it up’ may not only be the low point of this album, but the low point of the entire album. It’s quite simply an awful song.
Then we get to ‘Revenge’ and suddenly, out of the ashes of a crumpled, weak version of a band that I love comes a ten armed monster attacking me and ripping my head off. Songs 7-15, quite literally blew my socks off, so as far as I’m concerned, MSI owe me some new socks.
Why they couldn’t be this good for the whole album is beyond me, but all I know is that the first 6 tracks fade into my distant memories as I am filled from toe to head with a mist of love for a band that I was begining to doubt and I’m sorry for this.
The final song is a bit wierd and contains a number of interludes and strange singing bits. This is like a little extra bit of nonsense that bares little relation to the rest of the album, but is interesting nonetheless.
Overall, there are a couple of weak points in this album, and I’m probably a little over sensitive about it, becauase I love the album so much, but don’t let me put you off.
Listen to this album: With big comedy boots on.
Rating: 78%
Extracts from ‘Never Wanted To Dance’, ‘Evening Wear’, ‘Get It Up’, ‘Revenge’ and ‘Mastermind’
