list.co.uk/music SPOKEN WORD / PUNK SLEAFORD MODS Divide and Exit (Harbinger Sound) ●●●●●
SLACKER ROCK MAC DEMARCO Salad Days (Captured Tracks) ●●●●● Records | MUSIC
The Nottingham punk / spoken word duo of Jason Williamson (words and snarl) and Andrew Fearn (beats and basslines) are setting more metaphysical bin bags alight here with Divide and Exit, the follow-up to last year’s bombastic Austerity Dogs.
Mac DeMarco is only 23 years old, but already he is world-weary. His second full-length album, Salad Days, sees the Canadian songwriter eschewing the weirdness of previous releases for something approaching wisdom, complete with meditations on love, life, growing apart and growing old.
The fuzzed-out, treated vocals on opener ‘Air Conditioning’ and hypnotic, riot From the opening, title track – where he sings ‘As I’m getting older, chip upon
shout-outs on ‘Tied up in Nottz’ are quite an introductory kick to the knackers – it’s also a fantastic progression, light years away from the lazy John Cooper Clarke and the Streets comparisons that Austerity Dogs got lambasted with. JCC now does ads for McCain’s chips. Williamson’s lyrics are heavy-duty sniper fire, laying waste to Chumbawamba
(‘Chumbawamba weren’t political, they were just crap’), Tiswas, Paul McCartney, selfies, fly tipping, the Royal corgis – and even a scatological breakdown of Conservative politics on ‘Liveable Shit’.
Fearn’s production has really come into its own, with even more blurry punk dissonance – aided by colourful synths and even some horns over the staccato drum patterns of ‘I Keep Out of It’, the electro on ‘You’re Brave’ and the almost industrial toughness on ‘Middle Men’, while still retaining a certain mobile- phone chirp-and-charm minimalism with enough texture to lube up Williamson’s venomous diatribes.
my shoulder’ – it’s clear that DeMarco is looking at the bigger picture, and he doesn’t always like what he’s seeing. It’s not just the lyrical themes that touch all the bases, but musically, too, he covers a lot of ground. One minute he’s kicking out a bona fide soft-rock tune like ‘Let Her Go’, the record’s most straightforward and catchy track; the next he’s crooning over icy synths on ‘Chamber of Reflection’, the album’s most meditative tune. But throughout the record, there’s a cohesiveness to all the songs that makes the disc a rewarding listen.
Jangly guitars and echoes of 80s and 90s college rock are still there, but
there’s a smoothness to his sound that wasn’t present before, and it speaks volumes about the record’s maturity when the closest reference points are Jonathan Richman, Big Star and Harry Nilsson. He channels his inner wise-old- man on ‘Treat Her Better’, one of the album’s best tracks, offering sage advice, ‘Treat her better, boy, if having her by your side’s something you enjoy.’ No longer is he singing an ode to Viceroy, his cigarette brand of choice, as
The brooding sub bass and background field recording of traffic on ‘Smithy’, he did on his debut album. This time he’s musing on life itself, and having a
and the almost singalong anthem ‘Tweet Tweet Tweet’, tie together their most synergetic and mature collection of songs thus far. Overall, it’s a journey that is as depressing as it is raucous, equally as sobering as it is laugh-out-loud hilarious in its observational cynicism. Divide and Exit is the abject
soundtrack to a morally bankrupt Britain, affirmative music that would make David Cameron choke on his pastie – and probably the punkest thing you’ll get to hear all year. (Nick Herd)
few existential moments in the process, singing: ‘Watching my life, passing right in front of my eyes. Hell of a story, or is it boring?’ on ‘Passing Out Pieces’. Maybe he’s bored with all of the rowdiness of his live shows – in a recent interview he admitted that he's tired of touring after being on the road for a year and a half non- stop. In any case, world-weary or not, Salad Days is not only a great record, but also a fun ride to be on. (Colin Robertson) ■ Mac Demarco plays Mono, Glasgow, Tue 20 May.
ELECTRO POP BIS data Panik etcetera (Do Yourself In) ●●●●● SOLO DEBUT DAMON ALBARN Everyday Robots (Parlophone) ●●●●●
With the original trio’s members off enjoying careers in hospitality, motherhood and being in Debukas, this is sadly not the comeback Bis album the word is arguably not waiting for, but which many of us would be very pleased to see. Nor is it a proper Greatest Hits pulled from the three albums they released between 1997 and 2001. Instead, it’s somewhere in between: a compilation of released and unreleased material created together following their split in 2003, bringing the on-record Bis story up to date, in line with their sporadic live reunions. Roughly the first half of the record compiles almost everything they recorded
as the short-lived quintet Data Panik alongside members of Multiplies and Kenickie circa 2005/06, and it’s as good as anything they ever did. ‘Control the Radical’ is pitched in the previously unexplored middle ground between Ash’s spiky punk-pop and Gang of Four’s turbulent agit-prop, featuring some lovely synth lines towards its finale, while ‘Minimum Wage’ bristles with a beautiful kind of impudence you rarely hear in pop these days (‘drink and drugs on a minimum wage . . . as least we won’t die alone’). ‘Rulers and the States’ is a sloganeering, Devo-like electro thrash, and ‘Cubis (I Love You)’ is majestic, a fusion of Nile Rodgers-produced Duran Duran and Magazine. These comparisons come too easily with a band so obviously steeped in a love and knowledge of pop.
The rest of the album is drawn from abortive sessions recorded since then for a prospective fourth Bis offering, and while this hal f-compilation, half-lost album make-up sounds like it should be bitty and half- baked, the record stands up well in its own right. In fact, in some of the tracks above and others, like the irresistible Liquid Liquid-meets-Chic funk of ‘Music Lovers’ and the disco-house party anthem ‘That Love Ain’t Justified’, it contains some of the most mature and exciting work of the band’s career. (David Pollock)
It’s taken him more than two decades in the industry to arrive at his debut solo album, which leads to the rather strange experience of hearing sometime Blur frontman Damon Albarn’s new release being trailed with terms like ‘long- awaited’, as if he hasn’t been a more than prolific recording artist with a wealth of collaborators over the last decade. Although to some this record might promise a blank slate, it actually draws together many of Albarn’s most familiar concerns. Witness the jaunty ‘Mr Tembo’, a whimsical track that recalls its composer’s sonic obsession with Africana and his long-held interest in reflecting his home country: ‘domes, satellites, football pitches, faded flags and lots of dogs, a neon cross on top of a block of flats and a church’, he recites at one point, a typically English psychogeographic shopping list. In tone, Everyday Robots is most like a Blur album, but shorn of Graham Coxon’s crackling guitar and the boisterous rhythms of Alex James and Dave Rowntree. The title track is a sad and weary mantra set to a lazy hip hop beat and what sounds like a whistling repeated cello line, with Albarn’s familiar boyish croak mourning ‘everyday robots on our phones . . . out there on our own’.
The record never completely shifts from this low gear, which might leave some
feeling underwhelmed, but it really is a work that demands an open-minded listen. ‘Lonely Press Play’ is a fizzing slow groove that recalls Terry Callier; ‘The Selfish Giant’ approximates a counterintuitive kind of orchestral country mood (Bat For Lashes’ Natasha Khan contributes understated backing vocals) and the Brian Eno- featuring ‘You and Me’ is utterly compelling, a heroin dirge that bounces along upon an eternally descending electronic whistle.
The mood drags towards a grave fug near the end, but rallies with the upbeat gospel of ‘Heavy Seas of Love’, closing an album that revels not in overstatement or triumphalism, but the studious sonic endeavour and emotive maturity that Albarn’s career has thrived on of late. (David Pollock)
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