list.co.uk/music POP/ROCK THE NEW MENDICANTS Into the Lime (One Little Indian) ●●●●●
The year’s finest new band from Canada who aren’t Canadian at all, The New Mendicants are a collaboration between Norman Blake (a Scot) of Teenage Fanclub, Joe Pernice (an American) of The Pernice Brothers, and sometime drummer for the Pernices Mike Belisky. Only the third member is Canadian, but all three currently live in Toronto, which is where this collaboration came together as a result of Blake and Pernice’s 13-year friendship, stretching all the way back to the night the latter supported the former in London in 2000. Those familiar with either Blake or Pernice’s work won’t find their expectations greatly challenged here. The record opens on ‘Sarasota’, a few swaying minutes of lighters-up alt-country built around the 70s-purloined mantra ‘It’s free’, before the rather lovely seasonal offering ‘A Very Sorry Christmas’, whose title and key lyric ‘I’m carrying a cross you won’t believe’ belie a breezily bittersweet song about redemption that’s founded upon Blake’s chiming slide guitar.
The Byrds are unavoidably a key influence here, although there’s a jaunty beat group bounce to ‘Cruel Annette’, with the core duo spreading harmonies like honey over their imagined shared lover. There’s plenty of wistful, cantering balladry too, including their own ‘ Follow You Down’, ‘If Only You Knew Her’ and a cover of late Fairport Convention chanteuse Sandy Denny’s ‘By the Time It Gets Dark’.
Sonic invention’s certainly not the order of these ten tracks, but between
them Blake and Pernice conjure something lower-key but just as lasting, an old-fashioned songwriter partnership that rests upon the delightful symmetry of their similarly toned but distinctive vocals as much as their way with a lyric and a resonantly expressed emotion. To their credit, just when you think it’s all getting a bit mellow, they have the wit to blow our expectations out of the water with the fuzz-toned psych and seemingly freeform vocal associations of closer ‘Lifelike Hair’, a highlight here. (David Pollock)
Records | MUSIC
CAREER RETROSPECTIVE THE BETA BAND The Regal Years (1997–2004) (Parlophone) ●●●●●
When they went on the publicity trail to ‘promote’ their eponymous debut album in 1999, the Beta Band boys were refreshingly, almost too brutally, honest. Having released a much-acclaimed collection of three EPs (entitled, curiously, ‘The Three EPs’), expectations were high, but the Fife-ish quartet nailed those hopes to the board by declaiming the album to be a total disaster. ‘Oh, the cheeky japesters,’ thought the expectant critics and burgeoning
fanbase. Except they were absolutely on the money: The Beta Band is a quite dreadful record, but its inclusion on The Regal Years is a necessary evil if you are to get a panoramic view of the recorded career of this most frustrating of bands.
At their best, they could be funked-up and playful, tuneful and eclectic, witty and weird, but at their worst, unfettered visions went seriously off the rails and veered into either psyched-out drivel or spliced-up tedium. As well as the studio quartet of The Three EPs, The Beta Band, Hot Shots II and Heroes to Zeros (with extra rehashes such as the Roman Nose mix of ‘Squares’ and a Depth Charge reworking of ‘Out-Side’), we are hurled a couple of extra CDs with live recordings from the likes of Glasto ’99, T in the Park ’04 and some early Radio 1 Sessions.
For those never wholly convinced by Steve Mason as a powerhouse frontman, there is some more proof here as he struggles to get his vocal range around live versions of ‘Dry the Rain’, arguably the band’s finest moment and the track that briefly elevated their status after its appearance in the 2000 movie of High Fidelity.
And yet other evidence suggests just how incendiary they were on stage: the 2004 Shepherd’s Bush Empire version of ‘Squares’ shows what could happen when they streamlined their best bits into one slab of wonder. Blobs of genius are certainly dripped around this six-CD sonic memoir, but those golden moments are sullied by a little too much monkeying around. (Brian Donaldson)
ALT-FOLK TOM BROSSEAU Grass Punks (Tin Angel) ●●●●● POP LADY GAGA ARTPOP ●●●●●
Recorded in a house near Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard – or rather ‘put to tape’, as Tom Brosseau phrases it, anachronisms being something of a forte – this is the first solo album in five years and seventh album to date from the North Dakotan storyteller/songwriter. Typically Grass Punks has the vague aura of something unearthed from a John Lomax field recording, with its harkening to Depression-era American folksong and the single-microphone austerity of its capturing. Brosseau’s distinctly a man stumblingly out of step with his own time and place. ‘Something’s come between us, and no it ain’t what you think,’ he begins ‘Cradle Your Device’, which documents leaving a lover he’s tired of seeing neglect him for . . . her mobile phone. ‘I only wish you’d pay as much attention to me when we’re in bed,’ he sighs. Other pursuits of late have included touring as part of actor/musician John C Reilly’s bluegrass band, with whom he also recorded under the production auspices of that celebrated contemporary gatekeeper of vintage Americana Jack White. Future music Brosseau’s plainly ain’t – set mainly to acoustic guitar, these are songs so skinny you can see the bones, yet they’re ruggedly durable and blessed with some properly lovely moments of everyday poetry.
‘Stuck On The Roof Again’ seems mired in tired metaphor between allusions to an ‘icy framed cage’ and ‘taking a leap of faith’, until you realise it’s literally a lament about getting stuck on the roof of his house while clearing snow. A
Oh, that title. Yes, there’s a tension between art and commerce in Lady Gaga’s work. We know. ARTPOP. Art + pop. You know, like pop art, like Lichtenstein or Warhol – only they were artists doing pop while she’s a pop star doing art. Or vice versa. DO YOU SEE . . .? This hammering-it-home-with-a-big-neon- hammer approach pervades the whole album, but subtlety is a crutch for those afraid to rhyme ‘Uranus’ with ‘My ass is famous’.
When it works, ARTPOP is remarkably good – the flamenco flourishes, sinister chanteusing and dubstep-infused fluorescence of ‘Aura’; the post-Squarepusher glitchiness of ‘Sexxx Dreams’; the absurdly cartoonish Broadway-meets-Meatloaf mid-eight of ‘Mary Jane Holland’. ‘Gypsy’ finds Gaga lauding her itinerant lifestyle via rousing 1980s bratpack AOR filtered through a 21st century dance aesthetic. Current single ‘Applause’ brings Gaga’s wilder ideas and über-pop instincts together in a perfect symbiosis. And ‘Swine’ is arguably the highlight, a furious anti- chauvinist tirade that sounds like classic Girls Aloud given a post-dubstep twist. There’s a really concise, focused, idiosyncratic pop album somewhere in here,
but at 15 songs and an hour long, ARTPOP is not quite it. For every genuinely thrilling, way-out idea, there’s a corresponding nondescript chart-music cliché. The faultline is usually clearly delineated, too, with bold, imaginative verses and shamelessly obvious chart-bait choruses, continuing the tradition of ‘Poker Face’ and ‘Bad Romance’.
dextrously janglin’ electric guitar decorates ‘Today Is A Bright New Day’, which crests upliftingly on its titular chorus until the line ‘Ain’t that what you’re supposed to say, if you want to make it through?’ sharply transforms a song of triumphant optimism into one of quiet disillusion. ‘Gregory Page of San Diego’ rings with sharply strummed and plucked mandolin, and like several standout songs on Grass Punks finds much in common with Seven Swans-period Sufjan Stevens in its spare and plaintive prettiness. (Malcolm Jack)
At worst, Gaga’s artistic aspirations make her pop side seem arch and cynical, whereas her pop sensibility makes the art side seem flimsy and obvious. But the biggest problem is that the central premise is mistaken. Pop is art and art is pop. In extension of this false dichotomy, Gaga takes the most blatantly obvious signifiers from both worlds and mashes them together into a weirdly lumpen and unwieldy hybrid – albeit one that’s pretty damn exciting more often than it has any right to be. (Matt Evans)
12 Dec 2013–23 Jan 2014 THE LIST 97