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back after a 14-year hiatus with a rag-tag bunch of musicians and no lessening of his confrontational stance, switching between ear- shredding guitar walls and slow-burn menace on this dark, brooding record.
It’s relentless stuff and not exactly easy listening, but the occasional moments of glorious chaos – like when ‘You Fucking People Make Me Sick’ collapses into a mess of horns and timpani – make it worth the ride. (Doug Johnstone)
ALT-ROCK GRINDERMAN Grinderman 2 (Mute) ●●●●●
Provided your senses have overcome the shock of Grinderman as camped-up centurions, (we presume you’ve seen the posters), then let’s turn our attentions to the second long- player from Nick Cave and three Bad Seeds (Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos and Martyn P Casey).
More languorous, choral and psychedelic than its lewd blues predecessor (albeit still rampant with Cave’s borderline daft sexual metaphors), Grinderman 2 works best when embracing Ellis’ string-led Dirty Three atmospherics (‘Mickey Mouse . . .’, ‘When My Baby Comes’); battling manhood anxiety via undulating cowboy rock (‘Worm Tamer’ – snake charmer, geddit?); or losing itself in the swaggering, psych-fried consummation of ‘Bellringer Blues’. (Nicola Meighan)
ELECTROPOP ROBYN Body Talk Pt 2 (Island) ●●●●●
This is cosmic. No, this is literally cosmic. ‘In My Eyes’, the opening track from Robyn’s second of three albums this year, is all zooming
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Kate Walsh Peppermint Radio (Blueberry Pie) ●●●●● A worthwhile candlelit pianostyle covers album featuring Radiohead, Eurythmics and even EMF but it still leaves you yearning for the originals. Hidden Orchestra Night Walks (Tru Thoughts) ●●●●● The Former Joe Acheson Quartet combine multi-track drum parts and jazz to great effect. Look out for the live multiple drummers – they’re usually an impressive sight, especially when they’e actually required by the music. (See page 72 for details of how to win a copy of the album.) Sage Francis Li(f)e (Anti) ●●●●● Largely good-quality acoustic hip hop, spoiled by a few cringe-worthy lyrics, and a truly tortuous album title. Black Mountain Wilderness Heart (Jagjaguwar) ●●●●● This is quite an effective whistle-stop tour of rock music history: Zeppelin, Sabbath, even the White Stripes are imitated but there’s precious little originality or freshness. Edwyn Collins Losing Sleep (Heavenly Recordings) ●●●●● A strong start and well-chosen cast of collaborators: Jonny Marr, Roddy Frame and Ryan Jarman all feature. However, there are very few truly magnificent songs. A welcome comeback from illness though. The Strange Death of Liberal England Drown Your Heart Again (Republic of Music) ●●●●● These latest hopefuls for the title of ‘the British Arcade Fire’ arrive via Editors-like vocals and swelling orchestral arrangements.
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synth-riffs and meteoric ‘Invisible Touch’ (hello, Genesis!) drum- machine patterns. ‘Hey little star, don’t be afraid’, serenades our heroine – and lo, her melodic electropop could soothe the very universe itself. This intro eclipses the
rest of the record, but the clarion chorus on ‘U Should Know Better’ (feat. Snoop Dogg), and the ‘acoustic’ denouement of ‘Indestructible’ (no guitars here thanks, just a string quartet) suggest Robyn still has plenty of tricks – and treats – tucked up her heart-embellished sleeve. (Nicola Meighan)
INDIE COMEBACK THE VASELINES Sex With an X (Sub Pop) ●●●●●
Twenty years after they first split, Glasgow indie capos Eugene Kelly and Frances McKee have made a very good album which doesn’t sully the memory of what went before. How many reformed groups can say that?
Playing once more on their unschooled but lovely voices and a taste for rough-edged guitars and dry lyricism, Sex With an X celebrates rebound sex on the title track and castigates religion on ‘My God’s Bigger Than Your God’. ‘I Hate the 80s’ sentiment is in the right place (‘. . . cos the 80s were shit!’), but it doesn’t have the same musical scope as Kelly’s brooding ‘The Devil Inside Me’ or McKee’s sparse ‘Whitechapel’, which demonstrate how The Vaselines now have the range to back up their attitude. (David Pollock)
ART-POP THE SEXUAL OBJECTS Cucumber (Aktion und Spass) ●●●●● THE NECTARINE NO. 9 Saint Jack (We Can Still Picnic) ●●●●● WIN Freaky Trigger (RPM) ●●●●●
From Fire Engines onwards, Davy Henderson has bridged the pop/art matrix with singularly maverick aplomb. The brief mid-noughties reformation of Edinburgh’s spikiest combo from the Fast Product/Postcard era was just an interlude, however, to show the new wave of post-punkers how it was done before the real work began with The Sexual Objects. The arrival of the SOBs debut just as other blasts from Henderson’s past are reissued makes for a startling body of work that runs from pop euphoria to strung-out velveteen come-downs and back again. Win were post Fire Engines high-concept major label entryism par
excellence, and 1989 second album swan-song Freaky Trigger was a big shiny confection of over-produced sugar-rushing glory peppered with a knowing Prince-inspired groove, gospel backing vocals and shiny synths. If archly titled epics like ‘What’s Love If You Can Kill For Chocolate’ should’ve been huge, future portents lie among the bonus B-sides, a studio-bound grab-bag of club-land cut-ups and stripped-down guitar shuffles. There’s even a cover of the theme to Deep Throat. After Win crashed and burned, Henderson got back to basics with The
Nectarine No 9 on the briefly re-ignited Postcard label. With a three- guitar line-up, if the lo-fi hip-hop of 1992 debut A Sea With Three Stars came out fighting, the download-only reissue of 1995 follow-up Saint Jack sounds like a dark-hearted but no less urgent noir, full of left-field garage band wig-outs and bittersweet laments for what the big bad world can do on a fragile, gorgeous and grown-up affair. Four more Nectos albums and fifteen years later, and with a name
tailor-made for NSFW Google searches, things seem to have got brighter. The SOBs 21st-century glam-boogie-doo-wop drawl on Cucumber mixes Bolan, Beefheart, Prince and Todd Rundgren to sound looser, loucher, lower-slung and more lip-smackingly lascivious than ever. Full penetration and pure genius, then, from the most important band alive. (Neil Cooper)
POST-PUNK RETURN SWANS My Father Will Guide Me Up A Rope To The Sky (Young Gods) ●●●●● ‘Uncompromising’ would
be the best way to sum up legendary post-punk experimentalists Swans, a band who once had the reputation for being the loudest in the history of music. Michael Gira is