Review - Space Guerilla

Space Guerilla
Boundless EP

 This album is immense. That's the word that springs to mind, immense - there's just a bigness to this EP, a sense of size and weight that most rock music these days is sorely lacking. It's heavy, but not in an aggressive way - this is a joyful, uplifting kind of heaviness, closer to Jimi Hendrix than Godflesh. Space Guerilla are a jam band par excellence - the five instrumental tracks that make up this twenty-three minute EP all sound like something a band would bash out at a rehearsal, but they've been honed, perfected, as if the band have road-tested them considerably. There's something for everyone on here - stunning riffs, perfectly swinging rhythms, masterful solos. If you don;t like Space Guerilla, you don't like rock music.

8/10

Review - Azealia Banks

Azealia Banks
Broke With Expensive Taste

I would struggle to tell you what most of the songs on this album are about - I was so caught up in the music I missed most of the lyrics. That very rarely happens to me. In fact, I can't think of another album this year that's had that effect on me. Then again, this was bound to be something special - anyone who heard "212" (ie. everyone) already knew Banks had serious talent. What noone could have predicted was just how good it would be.  This album is a perfect storm; it takes a rapper who would sound great over any backing track and pairs her with backing tracks that would sound great regardless of who did the vocals. The result, as you can imagine, is a hell of a record. It's full of those moments that make you pause the track and stare at the computer screen, thinking, How the fuck did she do that? Hell, there are about three of those moments on "212" alone.

The best word I can think of to describe this album is "euphoric". It's just...fun. I can honestly say that this was one of the most enjoyable albums I've heard all year. It's fast, energetic, with Banks' lyrics piled up on each other against frenetically upbeat music - basically, you should buy this.

9/10

Review - FKA Twigs

FKA Twigs
LP1

"I love another / And thus I hate myself". Those are the words with which FKA Twigs starts off her phenomenal new album, and right from the start you know this is going to be something different. It's difficult to describe her sound, but the most obvious point of reference is Prince. Just like the Purple One, Twigs' music oozes sex from every note, but without Prince's swagger. This is slow, dark music, like Burial producing Nick Cave, and on top of it all she has the dancing talent and the decidedly English phrasing of Kate Bush. But all these wild associations still don't fully describe her sound. To be honest, I don't think I can describe it. It's minimal, but layered; sweaty and claustrophobic, but with the glacial chill of Kraftwerk. And then there's her voice. FKA Twigs' voice is a unique instrument, with a sound like a human theremin. She manages to combine braggadocio, creepiness and vulnerability not only in the same song, but in the way she sings a single word. This album is like nothing I've heard before, and it's one that I know I'll be listening to a lot in the near future.

9/10

Review - Shellac

Shellac
Dude Incredible

Steve Albini's current band kick off their new album with a song about monkeys trying to get laid - this is completely unsurprising. That's the kind of guys we're dealing with here. I've got to be honest, Shellac has always been my least-favourite Albini band, and this album hasn't changed that, but they're still better than ninety per cent of the other bands out there, and Dude Incredible is a solid album. As always, Shellac know their way around a groove, and most of the songs here are built around repetitive, swinging guitar lines and rolling drums that give the album a great drive. The whole thing could be the soundtrack to some epic battle scene in a war film. In a lot of ways, Shellac are a jam band, but without any of the self-indulgent noodling that that implies - they know how to take a riff and run with it, while ensuring that no song overstays its welcome. This is an album that definitely deserves repeat listens.

Rating: 7/10

Armistice Day poetry

The French Woman

She was not young

Nor was her flesh as faultless as the smooth sepia girls of French postcards

A soft, round-arsed woman in a warm room

The wallpaper peeling

At her hips and stomach

Age and three children had lined her

As deeply as the Flanders countryside

He undressed nervously

Fumbling, clumsy from apprehension and Dutch courage

He had never before been naked in front of a woman

He was half afraid she would laugh

He took a quiet pride in her orgasm

As he would in a medal

Or a successful bet.

1915

When he ran through

Air filled with machineguns’ ratatatat

Bodies slumping over folded in half like broken shotguns

Limbless as department store mannequins

But mannequins don’t scream

                                    leave red patches in the mud

                                    call for morphine or their mothers

                                    shit themselves

                                    and go mad

When the shells sent up showers of mud and men

He saw the French woman.

No Mons angel

but her inviting big-arsed nakedness

hung before him in the bullet-blistered sunlight.

When he woke in the night to the sound of a sniper's bullet

colandering a skull

and the night air burned his lungs like chlorine gas

it was from dreams of her that he was roused.

And when he returned to that same town

that same bed

that same round, sagging body

he saw the face of a German he had bayoneted and stamped into the mud.

The French Woman’s Soldier

He looked faintly ridiculous

A young man

                        barely more than a boy

in an ill-fitting uniform. Not so much older

than her own sons.

He approached her body like all virgins,

first tentative, then insatiable,

his flesh a live wire under her hands.

He trembled like a frightened animal.

She put her mouth on him and drew out the fear

                                                                the homesickness

                                                                the thoughts of looking down to find

                                                                      his legs

                                                                           sheared

   off

                                                                           like

                                                                           daffodils

The longing for his mother

and crumpets dripping with butter

a warm bed with time to sleep in.

By the time he came that way again,

she had forgotten his face.

But she treated him with the same kindness she showed to all her soldiers.

Like a priest performing the last rites.

Home

The London streets were stranger to him

than all the bloody yards of France.

He met a girl there

who let him think he was her first.

At his proposal, her eyes filled

with the realisation that she had something else to lose.

Then back to where the guns

were louder than church bells,

and her face faded

like the light in the eyes of a dying man.

He sought out other women, whose paid-for bodies

did not remind him of his comrades’ shattered limbs.

It was easier to replace love with a transaction;

money for flesh. The fighting had taken away

his appetite for complicated things. And he built

a little jar in a corner of his heart,

to keep his love in. So it could be

kept fresh for her,

like something frozen.

Walls

He slogged through the war-churned mud

And wondered

At how many heroic dreams he once had had.

How strange that seemed,

Among these corpses clustered in each ditch

Like moths might gather round a candle flame.

He learned to separate himself;

To build up walls secure as any bunker

Around the part of him that still dreamed of Camden Town.

He kept it walled in

Like a countess.

He became as simple and blunt as a club

And old thoughts of courage did not trouble him

Anymore than they would trouble the rats he caught

With cheese on the end of a bayonet.

Against the flies, the lice,

The flag-charged dying of the place

He held the French woman

And all the facsimiles of her he had sought

In a dozen cheap whorehouses

And so he did not mind

That he woke each morning to the smell of cordite and rotten flesh.

Secure within his walls,

He saved the part of him he would bring home.

And leave the bloody soldier in some foreign field.

Walls (2)

He was silent as a shell-hole

Beneath the guns’ harsh syllables

His rifle barked its orders

Like a major

All at once the walls fell

Swiftly as death

No

Not death

For death is a lazy thing,

And all too often drags its feet.

            He had seen

            Death

            Move slower than a cloud on a breezeless day

            Crawling over the broken living shells of men

            Long since past saving

           

            Death the malingerer

            Arriving hours after

            The crashing of a bullet into some vital place

            The bowels strewn like confetti

            The howitzer’s inarguable command

Something else, then;

Some image more fitting

The dropping of a kestrel

Fast and simple as a stone

Thrown down from the sun-choked sky.

The walls came down.

Out poured the Camden boy

                  the love of home

                  of tea and toast by the fire

                  and other unheroic things

For the first time in three years,

He was seized with the urge to live.

He lay in the hole for three days

Before they found him,

Swollen and black with decay.

He would not live to see his soft, comfortable grandchildren

Wave flags

Wear their poppies like medals

And talk of the glorious dead.

Lou Reed - Lulu revisited

One year ago today, Lou Reed died. A year or two before that, he released his final album, which he described - in his own inimitable way - as "maybe the greatest thing anyone has ever done". That album was Lulu, a fusion of metal, poetry and nineteenth-century German drama, made in collaboration with Metallica. The responses from reviewers were predictable - they were baffled at best and outright scornful at worst, as they always are to anything outside their comfort zone. Hell, even I hated it when I first heard it. But now, a year on from Reed's death, it seems like a good time to revisit an album that, even if it didn't quite live up to its creator's hyperbole, was still a major work by one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century.

Lulu kicks off simply, with the strummed acoustic guitar and sung/spoken lyrics that kick off "Brandenburg Gate". After a few bars of that, it explodes, with James Hetfield playing a simple yet stunning chord progression that would not have sounded out of place on Set the Twilight Reeling. The lyrics are difficult to decipher at times, but overall the song paints a picture of someone arriving in a new town, with a lot of history behind her. Lulu, the eponymous protagonist of this album, has arrived. If she is a stranger in a strange land in that song, in the next she's moved up the ladder quite a bit. "The View" presents Lulu as a deity, a creature of immense and destructive sexual power. It also contains some of Reed's greatest lyrics - "I am the truth, the beauty / That causes you to cross / Your sacred boundaries / I have no morals / Some think me cheap / And someone who despises / The normalcy of heartbreak / The purity of love / But I worship the young / And just-formed angel / Who sits upon the pin of lust". That is pure poetry. She possesses all the dark power of a character in a Howard Barker play - hers is a sexuality that destroys all those drawn into her orbit - and yes, she is the table.

The next track, "Pumping Blood," is "Venus in Furs" turned up to 11. This is no longer sex as a weapon - this is pure sex, albeit in a uniquely Lou Reed way. The opening to "Mistress Dread" drags a little - well, it drags a lot - but once Reed starts singing, it's worth it. "insert a fist, an arm / Some lost appendage / Please open me I beg" - those lyrics, man. This is something beyond simple submission - like Sarah Kane's Phaedra, Lulu is a character who wants to be completely subsumed into her lover. This is love as self-abnegation. "Iced Honey" is about the impossibility of that kind of love, and the pain that all love entails, and as such it's an incredibly moving song even with James Hetfield groaning in the background. "Cheat on Me" has another overlong intro which, coupled with Hetfield's desperate attempts to hit the notes, makes it weaker than the preceding songs. There are some great lines, though, and it's a pretty effective song of self-loathing - Lulu has hit rock bottom. "Frustration" switches the perspective around, giving us the point of view of one of Lulu's jealous, obsessed lovers. There are moments that remind me of nothing so much as Scott Walker.

"Little Dog" is chilling, though I'm not sure where it fits into the narrative. Are we hearing Lulu's voice, or that of the previous song's narrator? It seems as though we're getting a new part of Lulu here - she's become a prostitute and returned to her position as sexual force and agent of domination from "The View". But there's a sadness in this song that I can't quite figure out. "Dragon" gives us the other side of the coin - the spurned lover condemns Lulu over a serviceable metal riff. But throughout the vitriol, there runs a thread of love - despite all, this man cannot help but care for Lulu. "Junior Dad," the album's final song, is a climactic outpouring of desperate love, and one of Lou Reed's finest songs.

In conclusion, Lulu was one of Lou Reed's best albums. If you're a Lou Reed fan, buy it. If you're a Metallica fan, get your parents to buy it for you (also, you can read! Well done!)

His week still beats your year.

Review - Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen
Popular Problems

Leonard Cohen has never been one to put too much thought into his album covers - most of them just consist of a picture of his face - so it's no surprise that the cover of his new record looks like it was put together using ClipArt. Still, when you spend decades working on a single song, I guess you don't have much time left to worry about the packaging, and when the songs are this good, what does it matter what the album looks like? And the songs are great. Over his last three albums, Cohen has moved away from the dense, symbolically rich language that has been his trademark, and towards a sparser, simpler lyrical style more reminiscent of his poetry. Compare, for example, the following lines from "Sing Another Song, Boys" -

His fingernails

I see they are broken

His ships,

They are all on fire

The money-lender's lovely little daughter

She's eaten, ah she's eaten with desire

With the following, from Popular Problems' "Did I Ever Love You?" - 

Did I ever love you?

Did I ever need you? 

Did I ever fight you?

Did I ever want you?

Like Beckett, Cohen is condensing his language, trying to strip it back to the absolute bare minimum, and the same could be said of the production. Gone are the lush strings of Songs of Leonard Cohen, the synth-pop pomp of I'm Your Man  and the jazz arrangements of Ten New Songs. Instead, the arrangements on Popular Problems are, for the most part, simple, to the point where - if not for the backing singers - this album sounds like it could have been recorded in someone's living room. In fact, I'm pretty sure some tracks were - there's one song in particular where the clacking of the keys on Cohen's electric keyboard is clearly audible. But don't think that that is a criticism - like the lyrics, the bare-bones production is that way because that's the way it should be, and what would sound half-arsed on any other record sounds perfect here. Simplicity is an art, like everything else - Len does it exceptionally well. 

One of the best things about this album is the vocals. Since the '90s, Cohen has proven that he is one of the best vocalists on the planet, and his singing has never been better than now. Whether he's growling out the ominous "Nevermind" or singing the wistful chorus of "Samson in New Orleans," his voice is a formidable instrument despite - and because of - its limitations. From a technical point of view, he has the vocal range of a kazoo, but that's why he's so great - because he can't hit so many notes as other singers, he has had to become really, really good at the important part of singing - the emotion. And noone puts more feeling into a vocal performance than Leonard Cohen.

All in all, this is a great album. 

Rating - 10/10