Music RECORDS
VITRIOLIC / ROMANTIC POP MARTIN CREED Love To You (Moshi Moshi) ●●●●●
It’s de rigeur for Turner Prize winners to play in bands these days, and any- one familiar with Martin Creed’s oeuvre from his 2010 Edinburgh Art Festival show at the Fruitmarket Gallery and accompanying live song-and-dance routine at the Traverse will know what to expect from this most calculated of borderline autistic, OCD auteurs. To whit, in this pre-Olympic run-up to orchestrating all the bells in the country to ring out for three minutes, Creed thrashes out 18 miniatures of love and hate that fuse the desperate yearning of playwright Sarah Kane and the No Wave minimalism of Glenn Branca with the DIY messthetics of Swell Maps and the brattish cartoon petulance of Jilted John.
Bookended by ‘Ooh’ and ‘Aah’, which soundtracked the Fruitmarket lift’s rise and fall, ‘Love To You’ is a bumpy, 37-minute ride through the confes- sional ups and downs of fatal attraction, obsession, rejection, frustration and apparent acceptance. If ‘1234’ and ‘Fuck Off’ strip the concept of a love song to its bare bones and machine-gun it into Billy Childish-style garage- band submission, ‘I Can’t Move’ and the title track are prom-night paeans to Creed’s object of desire, girly harmonies and all on an insistently honest heart-to heart in which opposites attract in not-so-perfect symmetry. (Neil Cooper)
AVANT ROCK DIRTY PROJECTORS Swing Lo Magellan (Domino) ●●●●● Fresh from his recent collaboration with Björk, Dave Longstreth appears to have had his mind opened further by several degrees. Upon early listens this appears to be a work of flawed but undoubtedly ambitious genius, certainly when you hear a song like ‘Just From Chevron’, a full-voiced croon with echoes of Edwyn Collins and an almost wilful musical discor- dancy. The theme continues: ‘Dance For You’ climaxes like two different songs playing over one another and ‘See What She Saying’ pairs Long- streth’s voice with a hum of electronic chatter. There are more accessible pieces – ‘Offspring Are Blank’s gospel hum and Who-like rock explosion, the homespun charm of the title track – but occasional comparisons to The Beatles’ White Album apply to this record’s difficulty as well as its sense of adventure. (David Pollock)
ROCK/PUNK JAPANDROIDS Celebration Rock (Polyvinyl) ●●●●● It shouldn’t take much to convince any sensible listener that any claims that ‘guitar music is dead’ are unfounded as they are unnecessary. But for the more stubborn among you, Japandroids’ latest album, Celebration Rock, may be enough to comfort you, if not entirely sway you. The Vancouver duo might not be reinventing the wheel, so to speak, nor are they playing it safe within any set template or genre. ‘For the Love of Ivy’ may go some way to justifying the ‘garage’ com- parisons with its thigh-slapping attack on the blues, but ‘The Nights of Wine and Roses’ and ‘Fire’s Highway’ are more in line with some of the more economical, chest-beating gems Springsteen has been known to carry in his vault; further building on the idea that whatever you do, if you play it hard and with heart, it’ll show. (Ryan Drever)
CLASSIC REISSUES VAN DYKE PARKS Song Cycle/Discover America/ Clang of the Yankee Reaper (Bella Union) ●●●●● Until its completion and re-release last year, lyricist and songwriter Van Dyke Parks’ best-known work – the co-composed Beach Boys album Smile – had never seen the light of day. As such, his first three 60s-70s vintage solo albums are now the work of a maverick who’s remem- bered only by real connoisseurs, even though the first, 1968’s Song Cycle, was one of the most expensive produced at the time, a grand sweep of old-style orchestral Hollywood film scores (Parks’ old job) blended with a peculiar note of LSD-abetted mania. Discover America (1972) and Clang of the Yankee Reaper (1975) would go on to explore a fascination with calypso; the former is somehow richer than the bland country-rock dynamic of the latter. (David Pollock)
90 THE LIST 21 Jun–19 Jul 2012
INDIE/DREAM-POP DIIV Oshin (Captured Tracks) ●●●●● SYNTH-POP TWIN SHADOW Confess (4AD) ●●●●●
ART POP KOTKI DWA Staycations (National Trust) ●●●●●
The thimble-deep musical gene pool at hipper-than-thou Brooklyn indie label Captured Tracks overfloweth not with the arrival of the debut album by DIIV (formerly Dive), the lat- est soundalike gang of scruffy young New Yorkers making a wan, dreamy, reverb-doused racket. Individuality isn’t their selling point, then, though DIIV’s indelible way with a groove and a melody could be. Fulcrum Zachary Cole Smith, also a touring member of labelmates Beach Fossils (the link is clear, the two sound almost identical), varies his songwriting a bit with the odd dark, driving Krautrocky instrumental à la ‘(Druun Pt. II)’. The blurry standard fare of ‘Past Lives’ and ‘Sometime’ won’t change your life, but it might capture the odd moment quite beau- tifully. (Malcolm Jack)
George Lewis Jr is the perfect 21st century pop star. Handsome, talented, fêted and ridiculously cool, it’s quite possible he was grown in a petri dish to satisfy the desires of contemporary audiences who feel they can discern what is genuine from what is ersatz from ten seconds of a YouTube clip. As Twin Shadow he carried this
burden with impressive poise on his new-wave drenched debut Forget, and he does it again here. The swag- ger, the healthy frisson of sexuality, the lovelorn lyrics that underpin a priapic desire are all present, and couched in Lewis Jr’s smart, shimmering and slick, if a little superfi cial, productions, notably ‘Five Seconds’ and ‘Golden Light’. It all just seems so easy for him, and at times it’s just a little too easy for the listener. (Mark Keane)
And there we were thinking indie was dead and buried, when all the while Kotki Dwa were round the back of the bike sheds pashing it into life. Produced in collabora- tion with the National Trust and recorded in many of their historic properties, Staycations is the sec- ond effort from this artsy trio whose name is Polish for ‘two kittens’. Now your gag reflex may be going into overdrive right now but bear with us, Kotki Dwa are great. From perky riff and hook-ridden pop songs like ‘The End’, ‘Guests’ and ‘Bad Timing’, to the plonked pianos of ‘You & I’ and album standout ‘She Likes It’, which trills and trips along in a flurry of flutes, strings and electronics, Staycations is packed full of sprightly delights. (Camilla Pia)