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HIP HOP MC ALMOND MILK Teen Age Wasteland (Save As Collective) ●●●●● LIVE SESSION COMPILATION VARIOUS ARTISTS Split 12-inch v3 (Song, By Toad) ●●●●●
According to the journalists’ culinary almanac (or ‘Wikipedia’ as it is otherwise known), Almond Milk ‘comes in plain or vanilla flavours, and is beige in colour’. Radioactive Govan rapper MC Almond Milk is nothing like that. With rhymes as effervescent as the ‘Crystal Clear Cola’ he propagandises, and Day-Glo electronica as bright and refreshing as his titles (‘Neon Beerz’), sonic polymath James Scott proves he is equally adept at making inventive, melodic hip hop (under the alias MC Almond Milk), hallucinogenic fuzz-rock (as The Japanese War Effort) and machine-pop alchemy (as half of Conquering Animal Sound).
Scott is part of Glasgow’s stellar Save As Collective (Miaoux Miaoux, Jonnie Common, Globules, etc), whose spiritual HQ is Shawlands’ Glad Café. Many of the crew’s estimable members and allies feature on Teen Age Wasteland (which is available for free download); from Common’s sonic dalliance on the progressively heady ‘How2DoBizness In 2k14’, through Globules’ aural insignia on ‘Kid’s Show’, to the beatific techno-chaos of FOUND’s River of Slime, who is all over ‘Crystal Clear Cola’ and ‘Blood Donor Selfie’. The delights go on, as do the surprises. If the opening bars of the album’s
It’s hard to imagine Edinburgh’s (or Scotland’s) grassroots pop landscape without Song, By Toad. Over the past decade, it has evolved from a music blog to a podcast, community hub and local promoter (see August’s ace Pale Imitation festival) – not to mention an excellent DIY label and in-house studio, whose acts include Meursault, the Leg, Sparrow and the Workshop, and Rob St John. It also releases online live sessions (PAWS, Josh T Pearson), one-off collaborations (Cold Seeds, Bastard Mountain) and occasional split-LPs, of which this is the third in a vinyl series. It is meticulously packaged, as ever.
While former split-LPs have comprised live Toad Session home-recordings, Split 12-inch v3 is compiled from bespoke sessions at last year’s Insider Festival. The album’s voices are varied and gorgeous, balancing names new to the label such as David Thomas Broughton, who’ll release a full-length collaboration next month; and the show-stopping Siobhan Wilson, now trading as Ella The Bird, with enduring allies like Jonnie Common, also of Song, By Toad pop-wizards Inspector Tapehead; and porch-rock seducers Sparrow and the Workshop, who released their third album, Murderopolis, on the imprint last year.
‘(Wasteland Theme)’ echo Icehouse’s ‘Hey Little Girl’, then they’re soon replaced by the less ambiguous riffage, and wordage, of the Who’s ‘Baba O’Riley’ – a motif that recurs throughout the album (‘Out Here in the Fields’; ‘I Don’t Need to Fight to Prove I’m Right’). Sonic Youth, too, play a stylistic role – Teen Age
It’s impressively cohesive for an artist compilation, and themes of mortality, love and loss resonate throughout, from the baritone-folk of DTB’s ‘My Ageing Heart’ (the guitar melodies in the song’s twilight bars are sublime), through a sparse reworking of Sparrow and the Workshop’s wondrous Murderopolis
Wasteland is a nod to the band’s seminal ‘Teen Age Riot’. And if subjects like big business, life on the road, pop culture, fizzy drinks, vegetarianism and football might be expected by anyone who follows Scott’s Twitter feed, his attention to detail and auxiliary footage is nonetheless remarkable – not least the featured commentary from Inverness Caley Thistle’s penalty shootout win over Hearts in 2014’s League Cup semi-final. Scott’s take on local rap and beats is modest yet all- conquering. (Nicola Meighan) opener ‘Valley of Death’, to Jonnie Common’s frailty-stricken aria, ‘So and So’. There is rebirth, too – Common breathes new life into ‘Summer is for Going Places,’ a highlight from his 2011 LP, Master of None; Sparrow and the Workshop reanimate James Yorkston’s ‘Queen of Spain’ (as ‘Chalkhill Blue’); and Wilson’s offering, ‘Dear God’, is a devastating, exquisite lullaby which heralds great promise for the singer-songwriter, as she takes flight as Ella the Bird. (Nicola Meighan)
PROG METAL OPETH Pale Communion (Roadrunner Records) ●●●●● DANCE-PUNK REUNION DEATH FROM ABOVE 1979 The Physical World Last Gang Records / Fiction / Caroline ●●●●●
Opeth and their principal songwriter Mikael Akerfeldt have balls. Big balls. When your calling card is crunching metal and death growls, turning the distortion dial down and going almost 70s prog is pretty risky. But this band had the chutzpah to do exactly that with 2011’s excellent Heritage and now they’ve only gone and done it again – with even more panache – with Pale Communion, the Swedish quintet’s 11th album.
Opeth have always had diversity, previously injecting guttural metal with
elegant, melancholic interludes, but it seems on this eight-track offering there’s something for everyone to grab onto. Hell, there are even shades of country. Opener ‘Eternal Rains Will Come’ sets the pace keenly, instantly catapulting into adroit, fusion-led chops before going 70s with big keyboards and lush vocal harmonies, while the ten-minute opus ‘Moon Above, Sun Below’ follows suit by slithering through passages of gruff rock and off-kilter lulls. It can be difficult to encapsulate guitarist and vocalist Akerfeldt’s brilliantly
inventive songwriting; it sprawls through entire libraries of wistful notes, finding the right melody just about every time. This album is dripping with the hooky stuff; acoustic ‘Elysian Woes’ is a folky haze, while the old-school prog nods in groovy instrumental ‘Goblin’ are definite earworms. And then there’s ‘River’. Perhaps the most contentious song Opeth’s die-hard metal fans will have to digest, it features a happy sounding – yes, happy – intro that’s reminiscent of arena icons Alter Bridge before it drops into a country/70s pop- rock hybrid. Is this the same band that coined 1998’s metal typhoon ‘Demon of the Fall’? Indeed it is, and that’s what makes this band’s evolution so enchanting.
There’s still the crepuscular bleakness and hard edges but cinematic closer ‘Faith in Others’, featuring a string section, sums it all up. There’s an ever-increasing amount of colour on Opeth’s palette and, despite having been conceived in 1990, they’re on the form of their lives. (Chris Cope)
It’s hard to work out Death from Above 1979’s reasons for putting out The Physical World: they’ve talked in interviews about the constant nagging from fans and the press, but denied they’re doing it for them; they’ve said it’ll allow them to play live, but they’ve been doing that since their hipster-pant-wetting 2011 reunion anyway.
As ever, it’s probably all part of the great self-mythologising game that Jesse
Keeler and Sebastien Grainger love to play: from the tall tales about their meeting, to the ubiquitous two-headed elephant-trunked logo, to writing their own press bio describing themselves as a ‘force of humanity’. Oh yeah, and there’s that ten-year gap since debut You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine. And they’re still playing it: the first track made public, ‘Trainwreck 1979’, opens with the signature squeal of feedback and Keeler’s meaty, percussive guitar sound, before Grainger’s familiar howl claims he was born ‘on a highway’ amid the Mississauga train disaster of 1979, when a train carrying chemicals derailed, causing poisonous explosions and mass evacuations. (He was born in that year and that town, but probably not there and then.) Given the pair’s five-year separation and varied musical activities in that time,
it’s surprising how little their sound has changed. The influence of producer Dave Sardy (replacing Keeler’s MSTRKRFT cohort Alex Puodziukas) is felt, though, and not for the better: the vocals are much less prominent and the sound overall
has had its roughest, rawest edges shaved off. These are still punchy, hook-driven rock songs, however, and satisfying enough. The shades of frustration have changed from the virile break- up-inspired despair of 2005 to a world-weary variety that sounds like regret, getting older and wondering what you did with your life. It’ll be interesting to see, with Keeler and Grainger having found their place together again, whether it’s another ten years before we hear something more adventurous. (Laura Ennor) 21 Aug–18 Sep 2014 THE LIST 71