Alex's opinion and documents of music

JARVIS COCKER
Jarvis (Rough Trade/Shock)

The long and winding musical road that’s steered the former frontman of UK pop darlings Pulp has been a quiet one for a few years now. One-off projects, collaborations and such have kept him on the radar, but this debut solo effort really does highlight how something’s been missing of late from our pop landscape.

These 14 songs really do reek of class, of a sophistication that when teamed with a really wonderful songwriting craft gives you an abundance of style and substance. Working again with Richard Hawley and Steven Mackey, the orchestration and tone of songs such as ‘Heavy Weather’ and ‘I Will Kill Again’ recall the smoothest and most alluring elements of Leonard Cohen, while ‘Running The World’ and ‘Fat Children’ have real guts and drive.

Whereas pop today seems to be either hollow and visceral or just smulch, Jarvis is neither – a suave and timeless slow-burner.

CONTRIVA
Separate Chambers (Moor/Inertia)

From their quiet German origins, this quartet have beautifully built on the sounds defined on their debut of 2001. With a kind of desert feel like that of Friends of Dean Martinez, this album has layers and layers of pop intricacies woven into it in a kind of Tortoise-styled take on post jazz/electronica.

As confusing as this many sounds may seem, it’s actually comes together as one fluid stream, rich with its undercurrents and all in all giving off the kind of summer cool that could easily chill you out. Maybe Stereolab might touch on the sounds present in ‘Bluebottle’ on their French holidays or maybe it’s the acoustic guitar and violins in ‘Florida/lay-by’ and ‘Centipede’ that feel like the open roads that fill Migala songs. There’s so much to draw from Separate Chambers that by the end you might feel as if you’ve been on a small but exotic vacation of your own.

AARON MARTIN
Almond (Preservation)

This is music that could very well be made up of the scraps and discarded audio that the adults of this world have tossed away – a certain jumble and homespun sound permeates these mellow and contemplative songs.

Soft and unobtrusive strings and guitar make up the core of the music here, with sampled sound bites, toys, strange foreign voices and even nature itself fleshing out the moods. The rustic, backwoods feel to songs such as ‘Water Damage’ and ‘A Robin’ resembles the mood of Tom Waits’ music whereas the childhood innocence that defines ‘Canopy’ has an entirely enchanting feel.

In the vein of Califone or even locals The Ambitious Lovers, these 11 songs are as much a dreamland of sounds as a playpen of wide-eyed imagination.

DAVID FISCHOFF
The Crawl (Secretly Canadian)

Technology helps you go faster, see further and, in the case of David Fischoff’s debut solo album, create and furnish a luscious world of sound all by yourself.

Somewhere between The Shins, Postal Service and The Beach Boys lies this Chicago indietronic’s tunes – all with a real personal sense of space to them. Live instrumentation sits side by side with beats, clicks and cuts and multi-part vocal harmonies. The electronics though do often take control of the mood and tempo in the way that Bowie’s early electronic forays widened the pop landscape – the detail going way beneath the surface. ‘Rain, Rain, Gasoline’, ‘In This Air’ and ‘The Matrimony Vine’ are here, the standout future-pop creations of one man’s wondrous imagination.

SABERTOOTH TIGER
Extinction Is Inevitable (GSL)

Urgent can mean a lot of different things to a lot of people and is often a wasted word. Not a lot of music reinforces the urgency of time that’s fast running out – this album may very well be the soundtrack of you running for your life.

Coming out of hibernation from the Los Angeles underground, this trio make proto-punk rock that is not only viscerally fuelled but seems to still understand the power balance between your tired, your poor, your huddled masses and your corporate skyline. Extinction Is Inevitable takes the impact that sonic predecessors such as Drive Like Jehu had and update it with intelligent articulation – the distilled hypertension of ‘Elephant Army’ and ‘Black Magic Army’ fuck with your brain as much as force your body to lurch.

Sabertooth Tiger will either leave you spent, ready to rise above or out for bloody revenge!

THE RANK DELUX
Self-titled (FatCat/Inertia)

Remember locals Nightstick? Remember how friggin’ cool they were? Well, this British group are a pale but faithful version of that. This six-track EP is all dirty Clash come Buzzcocks guitars and a sound that weights heavily on the element of propulsion. Unfortunately, even with reggae flourishes thrown in (‘What Do You Want’, ‘End In Mind’) these boys come across as a little too snotty-nosed to really leave any kind of lasting impression – a few pints though would probably change that.

WITCHHATS
Wound Of A Little Horse (In-fidelity)

Unhinged, unrepentant and totally combustible – that’s this Melbourne quartet on their debut. The flipside of this dirt-encrusted coin is that their very existence seems to be in the shadows of The Birthday Party, Venom P. Stinger and Bird Blobs before them. So whether it’s more of the same or just the latest update, these five tracks are most certainly the sound of young feeding on the flesh of their parents.

OAKLEY HALL
Gypsum Strings (Spunk/Jagjaguwar)

New York’s Oakley Hall firstly sound as if they’re from the wrong side of country America and secondly as if they have successfully transplanted it into the centre of their metropolis.

Building a bridge between early Crazy Horse and Palace Brothers, this six-piece are all beautiful melodies, harmonies and some dirty guitar. Heavily bowed strings size up beside fuzzed out twang guitars in ‘House Carpenter’ while the echo of their city’s Velvet Underground forefathers seep out of ‘If I Was In Eldorado’. You could almost imagine Emmylou Harris singing ‘Bury Your Burden’.

It’s a ramblin’ and wanderin’ sound that runs through Gypsum Strings, never sounding completely settled in any one prairie or backwoods town. For a bunch of city slickers, they sure are some good storytellers!

WELCOME
Sirs (Fatcat/Inertia)

It would seem that the four members of Welcome are trying to channel another time and another place – early 90s shoegazing and late 60s psych pop. This is all filtered through the kind of now indie-rock aesthetic that binds one too closely to old ideas instead of forging new ground.

That said, this album is wholeheartedly enjoyable and while never building to the heights of guitar squall or total acid trip out, its rollicking spasms of melody (‘Natural Frost’, ‘Sirs’) do leave you feeling worked over. Volume is the key to Sirs: the louder it gets the greater the dynamics seem to push the music and the influences don’t seem so obvious (such as The Breeders’ entire career being summarised in ‘This Minute’). This album is good for another trip through the strawberry fields forever.

MÚM
The Peel Sessions (Fat Cat/Inertia)

This EP is like a perfectly fitting, warm sweater – only it’s more a sweater made of binary code as opposed to pure organics. Having finally found the rhyme and reason to release it, Múm’s only ever Peel session from back in 2002 is only now getting a second airing. The bridge between their first and second albums, ‘Slow Bicycle’, ‘Awake On A Train’, ‘Now There Is That Fear Again’ and ‘Ballard Of The Broken String’ perfectly capture the translation and evolution of their sounds into the live format. Still delicately introverted and fragile, here it’s all given some wonderful electronic force.

GREY DATURAS
Path Of Niners (Heathen Skulls/Stomp)

In some areas of music, 38 minutes could be a whole album – in the realm of Doom Metal, it really could be enough time just to set the scene. These five tracks though rely less on sweeping moods and more on an Old Testament-styled wrath for their feel! From the howling ‘New Neuralgia’ to the locust plagues throughout ‘Cretinism’ or the creeping death of ‘Aurora Australis’, the three years of recordings that span this EP could well be one single, bleak but beautiful nightmare.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Lost At Sea (FUZZnSURF)

Face it, old school, fuzz-filled surf garage will never die! This four-way split not only proves it, but re-instills faith in just how far-reaching the genre still is. This 7” features one song each by The Invisible Surfers from Greece, The Supersonics from Uruguay, Pozor Vlak from Germany and most notably The Tommys from Australia. Three instrumentals and one vocal track demonstrate one unified, fun-filled twang-surf sound that sounds as fresh here as it ever has.

PUBLIC ENEMY & PARIS
Rebirth Of A Nation (Guerrilla Funk/Stomp)

Honestly, the music of Public Enemy has been slowly becoming a spent force over the course of the last 15 years, their trail-blazing first three albums setting a standard even they couldn’t again reach.

And so, some 20 years after their birth, enter the rogue force of Paris. The Washington maverick has written an album specifically for PE, but with the edge that both he has and PE once had – Rebirth Of A Nation is crackling with a fire and energy that is palpable. Paris’s hard leftist militant themes are still right up front, but delivered by a voice as trusted as that of Martin Luther King Jr. Chuck D volleys rhymes with Paris that cover not just change but the realisation of Black Power (‘Rise’) and disgust at the media’s barrage of false messages and goals (‘Can’t Hold Us Back’, ‘Plastic Nation’) – all still backed with rump-shaking bass.

This album is as close to A Nation Of Millions… as PE are going to get, but gone is the good time JB vibe and in its place the grown up, gritty, cerebral beats of raised fists in the streets.

DAVID VANDERVELDE
The Moonstation House Band (Secretly Canadian)

David Vandervelde sounds on record like a bit of a Frankenstein monster, made up of the body parts of Sparklehorse, Pavement and Grandaddy – all coming together with the ramshackle indie pop-rock beauty that enamoured so many to the 90s indie underground.

Add to this sound the surrounds of its creation, which happens to be Jay Bennett from Wilco’s studio, and alt-country experimentation starts to also become apparent in the mix. Made by someone aged 19, this debut bears the marks of a confident sound – Vandervelde’s voice the most prominent component of this, with its Mark Bolan-esque falsetto.

Over the course of these eight songs, things almost get transported back to some kind of 60s psychedelica, but all in all it’s the rampant adventurism that makes this album breathe. A strong springboard from which to launch whatever comes next.

JULIAN DORIAN
Woke Myself Up (Jagjaguwar)

Unfurling songs a little less fragile, a little more fleshed out, Dorian’s seventh solo effort is just as personal a journey for her as well as you – only this time she seems to have found safe and confident paths to travel, not precarious tightropes.

Of the same ilk as her contemporary Chan Marshall, Dorian’s songs waver on a delicate voice and intimate-sounding guitar (‘Swan Pond’, ‘I Left Town’), this more often than not building to complete band accompaniments. The most noticeable addition is actually the pairing of old friends, with fellow Eric’s Trip bandmate Rick White producing and playing on the whole album. Songs such as ‘Yer Kids’ and ‘Don’t Wanna Be’ bear White’s energetic imprint, this in turn giving Dorian’s songs a bristling energy not possible in solo mode.

While there are comparisons aplenty, this is a strong, raw and overwhelmingly beautiful album – something we could probably do with a bit more of.

SOLDIER & NURSE
Marginalia (Brah/Jagjaguwar)

Laying out a highly detailed, almost mediative avant pop, this Massachusetts duo create piano/organ-led songs filled with moody emotions that seem to be in constant argument with its dissonant swaths of guitar.

Marginalia coagulates many of the rainy day moods hinted at in the arrangements here, songs like ‘In The Dark’ and ‘Imaginary Friend’ sitting somewhere between melancholia and agit-pop – all depending on which instrument chooses the lead role. Imagine Mates Of State after an overdose of Quasi heartache and you have the delicate balance that makes these 14 songs work so well. There’s an obvious restraint shown here, with many of the tunes easily tipping into Jesus and Mary Chain collapse should their tethers be undone. The only thing missing from it all is some much needed rays of sunshine, which we can only hope exist somewhere over their horizon.

TEENAGER
Thirteen (Teisco/Timberyard)

There’s a certain discourse that goes hand in hand with youth and when that energy is focused and channelled through a guitar, a catchy melody and attitude it can sometimes speak louder than your speakers can register.

Teenager are very much their name, their debut album though most certainly doesn’t live in some ‘now’-styled vacuum of useless rebellion, the 13 songs here lurching and grappling with various styles and moods from the Jesus and Mary Chain opener ‘Liquid Cement’ to the Ratatat-ish ‘Luke And Angie’. While they regularly swap drum machines for live instruments and back again, it’s really the watery Cure-esque guitars and haunting vocals that create the feelings here and pull you deeper in – even the Peaches-styled ‘Pony’ with its overly sexualised tones fits the anything-goes-if-you’re-up-to-it vibe.

This album is the sound of confusion made sense and a good time without any need for a tomorrow!