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RECORDS Music
Damned Things are a supergroup, featuring members of erstwhile metal outfits Anthrax and Every Time I Die, but oft-uttered words ‘poisoned chalice’ aren’t applicable to this unlikely mob. ‘A Great Reckoning’ seeps with blues-metal dirt while standout ‘We’ve Got a Situation Here’ is a sum of all parts – metal chops, but with a sublimely infectious chorus, there’s something here to keep even Fall Out Boys happy. (Chris Cope) NOISE KYLIE MINOISE Sid Vicious Occult School Of Motoring (Warner Bros) ●●●●●
Glasgow-based noise artist Lea Cummings has been releasing prolifically as Kylie Minoise for five years, notching up split releases with Thurston Moore and tours in Japan, Canada and Europe along the way. The territory he’s carved out for himself is one specialising in abrasive, shredded textures entrenched in a creepy atmosphere – and a healthy sense of humour.
His latest full-length is brutal from the outset. Opener ‘You . . . Fetishist!’ is a looped sample of what could easily be a conventional rock track, rendered unrecogniseable by shards of abrasive distortion and featuring glimpses of what are possibly vocals, but could equally be a guitar, such is the degree of mangling.
Short tracks serve as appetisers and palette cleansers for 30-minute closing track ‘Princess Diana 13th Pillar Ritual Sacrifice To Reptilian Hecate!’ Variously incorporating sections of pounding machine primitivism that could pass for 1970s US proto-punks Suicide, ear-shredding noise and some eerie Gregorian chant, it reaches a
lengthy conclusion of elated ambient calm – a post-cathartic relief from the atmosphere of encroaching terror that occupies the whole album. (Hamish Brown) ALT-POP JENNY AND JOHNNY I’m Having Fun Now (Warner Bros) ●●●●●
OK: Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice date. Yet, this old news, mentioned by almost every critic between here and fair Omaha where they met in 2005, shouldn’t detract from their first official collaboration. There are no cloying
sentiments; the Rilo Kiley frontwoman’s biting lyrical prowess abounding. ‘I don’t believe in sucking your way to the top,’ she says in ‘My Pet Snakes’, while the sundrenched ‘Big Wave’ monitors the economic debacle.
This offering, slickly produced by Mike Mogis (who’s produced Rilo Kiley and Bright Eyes), may lack the stylistic range of some of Lewis’ previous work, but is no cutesy affair – just her trademark alt- pop, somewhere near its finest. (Lauren Mayberry)
LIVE DOUBLE ALBUM MALCOLM MIDDLETON Long Dark Night/Live in Zurich! (Around7Corners) ●●●●●
Evoking Simple Minds’ Live in the City of Light and Mogwai’s Special Moves, Malcolm Middleton has affirmed his status as a bona fide local alt-rock deity with this live double album that straddles all-out rawk in Europe (Live in
ALSO RELEASED
Various Shapes 10:02 (Tru Thoughts) ●●●●●
Disc one of this com- pilation by Brighton- based Tru Thoughts is a glorious jazz and reggae mix; unfor- tunately let down by a more uptempo CD two, with remixes of Maddslinky and The Bamboos, that grates quickly.
To Bury A Ghost The Hurt Kingdom (self-released) ●●●●●
The debut EP from the unfortunately acronymmed TBAG comfortably occupies Muse/Radiohead territory with big orchestration and plaintive wails, but lacks the spark that makes those bands so successful. Duffy Endlessly (Polydor) ●●●●●
More tinny warbling from the Welsh song- stress. This time, she ventures away from the Winehouse- sanctioned retro template towards a more standardised pop palette, and is less interesting as a result. 30 Pounds of Bone Method (Armellodie) ●●●●●
Trad-folk from the Glasgow micro-label. Multi-instrumentalist Johny Lamb’s shanties on drunknen -ness and heartbreak are neither massively unpleasant nor very memorable.
Josh Groban Illuminations (143/ Reprise) ●●●●●
While it’s difficult to argue with Groban’s sales figures, vocal talent or way with a piano, this album feels like the leftovers from an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Stone Ghost Collective Unrequited Love- songs (Shark Batter) ●●●●●
After the harpsichord- and-Vocoder horror ‘She Doesn’t Care’, this develops into pleasing indie-pop. (Niki Boyle)
16 Dec 2010 – 6 Jan 2011 THE LIST 83
FILM SCORE DEBUT DAFT PUNK TRON: Legacy OST (EMI) ●●●●●
There’s as much hype and hyperbole around Daft Punk’s TRON: Legacy score as there is around the film itself. Putting aside the massive media assault that is now building around the Disney sequel, the hiring of the Parisian electronic dons for the project seemed too good to be true – who better to orchestrate the reanimation of such a seminal piece of retro-futurism? The finished product is not, however what many are perhaps expecting it to be. As a whole, the score has more in common with Hans Zimmer’s recent work for Christopher Nolan’s Inception than it does with Daft Punk’s oeuvre to date, or even Thomas Bangalter’s fantastically mindbending yet still unmistakeably Daft Punk-esque soundtrack for Gaspar Noé’s Irreversible. The much-vaunted interplay of 90-piece orchestra and Daft Punk’s
familiar electronic approach has perhaps been overstated, but the end product is still an evocative and stirring mix of enormous strings, huge booming drones and finally some familiar and full throttle Daft Punk. The recurring theme first featured in ‘Overture’ owes more than a little to Aaron Copland’s ‘Fanfare for the Common Man’, written in 1942, and the more overtly dancefloor friendly tracks (‘Derezzed’ is ubiquitous in the publicity but is in fact very short) are few and far between. However, a strange sense of melancholy and creeping doom pervades and that’s what really makes it work as a cohesive whole, even if at first listen those few blasts of classic Daft Punk are what catch the ear. Ultimately, the success of a soundtrack is hard to judge in isolation but, even with the weight of expectation, this one doesn’t disappoint. (Sean Welsh)
POST-ROCK THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT St Thomas (Armellodie Records) ●●●●● Scottish post-rock is unique in its ability to give overblown orchestral compositions a flavour of brash reality, with the use of the harsh accent harnessed so well by bands like The Twilight Sad.
The Scottish
Enlightenment’s debut album, St Thomas, charts the rise of intellectual growth against a feeling of ever degrading self-worth, both personally and collectively. Detailing the internal collapse of existential faith, it deals with the dark realisations of a once religious man in ‘The First Will Be Last’ and our irrational fear of the unknown in ‘Earth Angel – With Sticks In Crypt’.
The music is like a rougher Explosions in the Sky, tremoring and reverbing at the brink of eruption, matching the album’s lyrical themes. (Hamish Gibson)
HEAVY METAL/ROCK THE DAMNED THINGS Ironiclast (Mercury) ●●●●● Trapped in an emo-pop band that’s overrun with boyband looks and chirping teenage fans? Want something different? Why not join a metal band! That’s exactly what Fall Out Boy’s Andy Hurley and Joe Trohman have done. One thing – The