Music RECORDS
FOLK DARREN HAYMAN & THE LONG PARLIAMENT The Violence (Fortuna Pop) ●●●●●
Darren Hayman would be the first to acknowledge that he hasn’t been blessed with a glorious voice. And surely even his most ardent admirers will concede that he’s not immune to penning some fatally bad lines: ‘You’re three times prettier than your portrait’ and ‘you were beautiful when I met you/you were beautiful in jail’ are just a couple of the sprightly doozies in this concept album about the Essex Witch Trials of 1645. While it sounds like Hayman and his lengthy parliamentarians might be going for a Sufjan Stevens, earthy indie folkster vibe, they fall cringe-inducingly short, with the only tolerable moments arriving in the handful of evocative instrumen- tals in this collection of 20 (yes, 20) numbers. (Brian Donaldson)
INDIE ROCK RINGO DEATHSTARR Mauve (Club AC30) ●●●●● Undoutedly the only thing to bring a smile to the face on listening to Ringo Deathstarr is their name. Everything else about this nugazing trio should make you feel pretty down even if you happen to like their 25-years-after-the-event schtick. A volley of brash guitars, drums and morose vocals all suggest they’re running late for a close relative’s funeral.
DISCO-FOLK-JAZZ WOUNDED KNEE Museum of Kind Man (Krapp Tapes) ●●●●● ‘More lo-fi spiritual folk-jazz from Leith’s finest exponent of lo-fi spiritual folk-jazz,’ promises Krapp’s fourth tape, Museum of Kind Man – a play on Pat Conte’s Secret Museum of Mankind ‘Ethnic Classic’ anthologies (Wounded Knee, aka Drew Wright is nothing if not playful) – but it could equally almost be subtitled, ‘Wounded Knee’s disco album’.
The mood is lifted by ‘Brightest There’s toy-box hoedown ‘Dubh
Star’, a welcome salve of lush ambience, which you just know will be wrecked any second by another migraine-inspiring blitzkrieg. And sure enough, the calm is unsubtly ruptured on ‘Waste’, ‘Drain’ and ‘Please Don’t Kill Yourself’. The best that can be said about RDS (other than the name) is that they’re never dull. (Brian Donaldson) It’ for starters, the rare groove of ‘Tar Tan Tat’, and amid a typically warm and welcoming throng of DIY lullabies, folk harangues and a cappella punk (‘Wightman’s Blues’ is a notable rant inspired by Scottish land defender Andy Wightman), there’s a mantra for life on ‘Always Disco’: ‘disco, disco, always disco,’ Wright laughs. Amen to that. (Nicola Meighan)
HIP HOP STANLEY ODD Reject (Circular) ●●●●●
Edinburgh six-strong hip hop ensemble Stanley Odd are the first to acknowledge that their debut album Oddio (2010), was not hugely forward-looking, and it’s this sonic volte-face, teamed with MC Dave ‘Solareye’ Hook’s electrifying rhymes, that make its follow-up so arresting. It’s easy to fall for Reject’s melo-
dies, beats, piano sweeps and vivid production (the band chopped and remixed every song, and this methodology has reinvigorated their sound): musically, it’s as pop-orientated a rap album as you could hope for, thanks to vocalist Veronika Electronika’s terrific cho- ruses. But its real sucker-punches come in Solareye’s cerebral dia- tribes, from ‘Marriage Counselling’ to the spectacular, vote-promoting ‘Antiheroics’. (Nicola Meighan)
FOLK/ ACOUSTIC GUITAR FINN LEMARINEL Violence (Ubisano) ●●●●● ROCK GREEN DAY ¡Uno! (Reprise) ●●●●●
Within 20 seconds of listening to Violence, the following have crossed my mind: RM Hubbert, The Flaming Lips, Supertramp, Joanna Newsom, Yes and a sense of wonder. Can the rest of Glasgow singer-songwriter Finn LeMarinel’s debut album live up to this first-flush? I’ll spare you the suspense: yes it can. This is a glorious calling card. Opener ‘Garden’ is an archetypal salutation, all sparse arrangements, gorgeous vocals and hyper-expres- sive nylon guitars, and there are myriad other sinuous thrills from the sometime Trapped in Kansas man, notably ‘Roll in the Grime’ and ‘Sown’. Exquisite centrepiece ‘Known Voices’, meanwhile, is a reminder of all that we have in life, and is one of the year’s most beautiful songs. (Nicola Meighan)
All credit to Green Day for show- ing some adventure and record- ing an album trilogy (¡Uno!, ¡Dos! and ¡Tre!) for release over three months, but Billie Joe Armstrong’s claim that they’re going ‘epic as fuck’ is somewhat misleading. Back to basics is more like it, an enthusiastic if watered down stew of 50s rock’n’roll, Ramones-style punk rock and eyebrow-furrowing college radio rock. ‘Stay the Night’ and ‘Fell For You’ are soppy love songs trying to play it cool, ‘Kill the DJ’ is an evisceration of club culture set to a bouncing ‘Take Me Out’ beat and ‘Loss of Control’ is a sweary facsimile of real teen angst. A decent pop record trying hard to be something more. (David Pollock) ■ To win tickets to Green Day’s American Idiot, the musical, see page 91.
METAL NEUROSIS Honor Found in Decay (Neurot) ●●●●●
Ten albums in, Neurosis con- tinue to evolve. Kicking off with the uncharacteristically forthright riff ‘We All Rage in Gold’, Honor Found in Decay occupies a space between their more contemplative, work and the confrontational style of 2007’s Given to the Rising. Other bands deploying this
über-macho vocal delivery and oppressive metallic trudge might be grim and ponderous. But every time Neurosis themselves are at risk of this, they do something that transcends their genre. ‘My Heart for Deliverance’, for one, is remark- ably inventive, sweetly poignant and planet-crushingly heavy all at the same time. It’s these kinds of moments that justify Neurosis’ sta- tus as elder gods of the style they pioneered. (Matt Evans)
ALT-FOLK JO MANGO Murmuration (Olive Grove Records) ●●●●●
Cautiously choosing her path in music these last several years, this Glasgow-based alt.folkie has fol- lowed the low-key self-releasing route, while completing a doctorate in musicology, when she could have gone major label. Wider exposure predictably
remains elusive, but her prodigious talent hasn’t stayed unrecognised – she’s worked with Vashti Bunyan, David Byrne and Devendra Banhart. Considering her chosen path led to Murmuration, it has to have been the right one, Mango’s slight enigma only augmenting its dreamlike feel.
Guitar, kalimba, squeezebox and the like set a spare, shimmering backdrop to an intimately detailed, delicately sung little lyrical tableaux. (Malcolm Jack)
88 THE LIST 18 Oct–15 Nov 2012