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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 19:12:09 GMT
As discussed on the Management Special Album Choice thread. We listened to the winner and most people were less than overwhelmed, so I thought it might be interesting for us to listen to the albums on the shortlist for this years Mercury Music Prize to see what we think should have been the winner. Here's the list: 1. Lily Allen - ' No Shame' 2. Arctic Monkeys - 'Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino' 3. Everything Everything - 'A Fever Dream' 4. Everything Is Recorded - 'Everything Is Recorded' 5. Florence + the Machine - 'High as Hope' 6. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds - 'Who Built the Moon?' 7. King Krule - 'The Ooz' 8. Novelist - 'Novelist Guy' 9. Nadine Shah - 'Holiday Destination' 10. Jorja Smith - 'Lost and Found' 11. Sons of Kemet - 'Your Queen is a Reptile' 12. Wolf Alice - 'Visions of a Life' I'll post a copy of the review of each album from The Guardian, (the first source that I could find for all of them) in the next 12 posts. Please vote in the poll.
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 19:40:11 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.1 Lily Allen - ' No Shame'Lily Allen: No Shame review – divorce, deceit and the Daily Mail in gloriously raw return4 out of 5 stars. The singer’s broken marriage is laid bare in an album that offers spikiness, regret and vulnerability via uniformly first-rate pop Alexis Petridis It’s hard not to heave a weary sigh as Lily Allen’s fourth album gets under way. From the title down, No Shame has been trumpeted as a ballsy return to form following 2014’s Sheezus – and yet the opening track, Come on Then, sounds remarkably like something off that album. A relative of Wind Your Neck In or URL Badman without the latter’s acerbic wit, it’s a prickly, defensive whinge about “the socials”, their cyclical relationship with the tattle mags and tabloids and Allen’s depiction therein. Of course, Allen has plenty to feel prickly about – growing up in public, she’s been given the kind of hard time that Twitter’s grimmer corners and sidebar-of-shame authors seem to reserve exclusively for young women who make their voices heard. Nevertheless, as she demands to know why what’s written about her is “so far from the truth”, it’s hard to assuage the feeling that you’ve heard this all before, and not just from her. Modern pop is already waist-deep in songs bemoaning haters, deceitful journalists and the disparity between public perception and reality. It’s the equivalent of 70s rock stars complaining that life on the road was lonely and tedious: a complaint about a downside of stardom that’s been repeated to the point of cliche. A groan of “here we go again” is no way to start any album, especially one heralded as a big comeback. Yet the rest of No Shame is not like its opening track at all. At its centre are a suite of songs depicting in unsparing detail the collapse of Allen’s marriage, and the emotional tone shifts continually: from self-loathing to blame-laying, from denial to melancholy, nostalgia and regret. It never otherwise deals in prickly defensiveness; Family Man and What You Waiting For are not songs from which the author emerges covered in glory. It all feels very realistic. You listen to Allen accusing and admitting, contradicting and doubling back on herself, filled with second thoughts, and think: yeah, that’s probably exactly what divorce is like. It would be a hard listen were it not for the fact that the music is so great: tropical house shot in soft-focus and slow-motion, orchestrated 70s singer-songwriter ballads, every melody and chorus finished to a uniformly high standard. It’s the negative image of Coldplay’s similarly themed Ghost Stories, an album that moped around in its dressing gown, too listless and depressed to come up with a memorable tune. Elsewhere, her confidence shows up in other ways. Scattering your album with guest spots from UK rappers – Giggs, Meridian Dan, Lady Chann – could look like a desperate lunge for contemporaneity, but it never does. Allen’s early work bore the sonic hallmarks of an artist who’d spent their life with “one foot in the rave”, as she puts it on Trigger Bang, immersed in London’s urban music past and present: it takes an innate understanding of reggae, ska, calypso and hip-hop to blend them so successfully into the pop confection of 2006’s Alright, Still. Similarly, on No Shame, she seems to know exactly what to do with her guest stars: their appearances feel integral, never grafted on; the moment Lady Chann and Allen start singing together on Waste is pure joy. On Three, meanwhile, she’s confident enough to even try a gushy paean to her kids, something all rock and pop artists should be contractually obliged not to do – if Stevie Wonder at the zenith of his powers couldn’t get the baby snaps out without making you want to die of embarrassment, you’ve got no chance. So it proves. Writing a song from the point of view of a toddler proves impossible to do without sounding cutesy; the piano ballad accompaniment is the least interesting on the album. Pushing Up Daisies meanwhile, hymns a new relationship with til-death-us-do-part fealty. The lyrical update of When I’m 64 is very witty – will you still need me, it ponders, “when we’re just a strain on the NHS … when I’m a Daily Mail-reading know-what’s-best” – but feels weird after seven tracks that depict a marriage falling apart in unforgiving depth. It’s as if Ingmar Bergman’s punishing Scenes from a Marriage had ended with the cast putting paper hats on and doing the conga. So, No Shame is a slightly odd album, where the horror of divorce is laid bare next to cheery pledges of everlasting love, where stuff wrapped in cliche coexists with songs that are painfully honest and revealing. Still, as Allen would doubtless point out, she never claimed to be perfect. What she is, No Shame strongly suggests, is ready and able to tough it out. SOURCE: The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jun/08/lily-allen-no-shame-review
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 19:45:00 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.2. Arctic Monkeys - 'Tranquility Base Hotel and Casino' Arctic Monkeys: Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino review – funny, fresh and a little smug3 out of 5 stars. Channelling Serge Gainsbourg and the Beach Boys, the Arctic Monkeys move on from stadium indie in a smart album that sees Alex Turner wearing a constant smirk Alexis Petridis “I just wanted to be one of the Strokes,” sings Alex Turner at the outset of the Arctic Monkeys’ sixth album. “Now look at the mess you made me make.” Certainly, he and his band seem to have traversed a far greater distance in the last 12 years than any of their peers, to the point where they seem almost unrecognisable. This is evident from the way they look – posing in snakeskin shoes and expensive overcoats they resemble characters from a film, something you could only have said of them in 2006 if it had been directed by Ken Loach – to the way they sound. There is almost nothing to connect the music on Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino with the muscled-up stadium indie rock of its 2013 predecessor AM, let alone the contents of their debut. Instead, Tranquility Base displays the same endearingly puppyish, have-you-heard-this? enthusiasm for Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds as the first album by Turner’s side project Last Shadow Puppets did for late 60s Scott Walker. Low-slung and agile, virtually every rhythm track and bassline here could have stepped straight off Gainsbourg’s 1970 masterpiece, while Pet Sounds is paid homage everywhere from the vocal harmonies to the forensic recreation of its sound on The World’s First Ever Monster Truck Front Flip. Their combined influence is heard not just in the sound, but in the songs, which are melodically far richer and less concerned with verses and choruses than anything Arctic Monkeys have previously produced. At their best, they’re fantastic – American Sports and Four Out of Five sound lavish and fresh, their tunes and chord sequences twisting and turning unexpectedly. At worst, uncoupling the songs from a standard structure makes them ramble, as on Batphone. Along the way, Turner has had to deal with the problem that inevitably affects artists who become hugely successful by offering up sharp-eyed vignettes of everyday life: what happens when you become, as Philip Larkin alliteratively put it, the shit in the shuttered chateau, insulated by wealth and fame from the everyday life that initially inspired you? On Tranquility Base, Turner settles on an imagistic collage approach to writing, where snatches of overheard conversation are jumbled together with snappy observations and a dash of Father John Misty-esque fourth-wall-breaking (“I want to make a simple point about peace and love but in a sexy way where it’s not obvious”). Turner is clearly a very smart guy: smart enough to treat rock-star ennui as a joke rather than a subject that’s supposed to elicit sympathy – “I’m gonna run for government,” burbles the jaded narrator of One Point Perspective, “I’m gonna form a covers band an’ all” – and smart enough to tackle the hackneyed topic of social media and its impact with real wit and originality. It’s hard to stifle a groan when it becomes clear the latter is one of Tranquility Base’s preoccupations, but Turner is both funny – “dance as if someone’s watching, because they are” – and bold enough to suggest that the face-to-face contact always promoted as the solution to social media’s remote unreality is a pretty fraught business, too: “I’m so full of shite, I need to spend less time stood in bars waffling on to strangers”. The problem is that a smart guy is sometimes all Turner seems to be. The songs can feel like less than the sum of their parts: a selection of one-liners, wry observations and knowing winks to camera that leave you struggling to work out what he’s driving at – and wondering if he knows, or cares – and to locate any real emotional connection or impact. You find yourself occasionally wishing the kid who plaintively, incisively skewered the demonisation of chavs on their debut album closer A Certain Romance would show himself again. It’s an issue compounded by Turner’s voice, which has changed a lot. The Yorkshire dialect that was once his USP is now deployed sparingly, as a jolting effect: “He’s got him sen a theme tune.” Elsewhere, his voice carries traces of Gainsbourg’s sprechgesang, and Jake Thackray’s careful enunciation and chewy vowels; he regularly shifts into a mid-Atlantic easy-listening croon (“a lounge singer shimmer,” as Star Treatment has it) that seems deliberately mannered, another knowing wink to camera. It’s an odd mix that’s sometimes compelling and sometimes a bit pleased with itself, as if Turner is delivering every line through a supercilious smirk. At turns thrilling, smug, clever and oddly cold, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is only a qualified success; there’s something quietly impressive about the fact that it exists at all, at least as an Arctic Monkeys album. The obvious, craven thing to do would have been to release it as a solo project, then make a crowd-pleasing album in AM’s vein. Instead, here it is, evidence – albeit flawed – of a certain musical restlessness: the very thing, one suspects, that’s caused the band to travel so much further than their contemporaries that they’re virtually the last indie band standing. SOURCE: The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/10/arctic-monkeys-tranquility-hotel-base-casino-review
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 20:11:23 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.3 - Everything Everything: A Fever Dream
Everything Everything: A Fever Dream review – nerdish pop for a troubled planet4 out of 5 stars. The Manchester math-rock band’s idea of political pop is a singular, anxiety-pulsing vision. But its inventiveness is welcome Rachel Aroesti The geeks may not have inherited the earth quite yet, but they’ve certainly colonised great swaths of the pop culture landscape. Alongside comic book-saturated cinema, shows and bookish comedy kings are the pale and awkward squad who double as the world’s biggest rock stars – the likes of , , Muse and Arcade Fire, shifting records and ruling festival bills. Yet a stranger subset of nerd-rock has emerged over recent years. It stems from the turn of the decade, when the hordes of swaggering indie lads began to disperse, making way for something more brainy, ambitious and less concerned with cool. Bands who came across as individual oddbods, such as Foals, Alt-J, Wild Beasts and Glass Animals, were actually bound together, often by outlandish, high-pitched vocals, intuition-defying rhythms, multi-layered melodies and comically bizarre imagery. Much of their music was derived from math-rock (one of the nerdiest subgenres, needless to say), and they paid tribute to the internet age by recreating the resulting information overload in sonic form. As their name suggests, Manchester’s Everything Everything were always especially concerned with the latter – their 2010 debut Man Alive saw vocalist Jonathan Higgs chatter in double time about everything from Iraq to Photoshop over a tapestry of erratic beats and barbershop harmonies. For their fourth record, however, the bringers of maximalist mayhem return with a more singular thematic focus. So singular in fact, that it’s led them to add another anorakish trope to their arsenal: A Fever Dream could easily qualify as a concept album. The setting is the populism-fuelled nightmare that is the present day, a place so teeming with surreal political upheavals and clownish leaders that it has Higgs wondering “how did we get here, and how do we leave?” on the title track. The album sees him dart between the characters whose hatred and hope make up this strange new world: on Big Game, he is sickened by a leader who can only be Trump, finding new ways to be revolted by the “bovine balloon” as “witless and rank as a fat-filled hole”; on Desire he embodies a certain class of Brexiteer, “a pencil-pusher with the pencil-pusher blues” who has nothing to lose. On Good Shot, Good Soldier, he’s a blinkered moralist, on Can’t Do, he’s a quivering mess. There are references to bombs and to Waitrose. Throughout, there’s a sense that the world’s horrors have escaped their far-flung homes and invaded hitherto sheltered lives. While other attempts to convert the political climate into pop (a category that is admittedly largely limited to Katy Perry’s recent eye-watering take on the zeitgeist) have elicited snorts of derision, A Fever Dream is more likely to prompt anxious sweating. This might not be an album to kick back, relax and bury your head in the sand to – it is as much rock opera as traumatic event – but the band’s deep dive into this undercurrent of fear and loathing feels necessary, as if they’re hauling the elephant in the room on to the coffee table. And it’s not all stomach-churning stuff. Sonically, the band are able to offer a sliver of solace – not so much by toning down their antic groove, but by bringing palliative pop melodies to the fore. Night of the Long Knives might centre on the sound of a falling bomb, but the ambiguous horror is tempered with umpteen earwormy hooks. Big Game, meanwhile, sees the band morph into a glam-rock Radiohead, stirring bombastic guitar licks and theatrical vocals into Thom Yorke and co’s fiddly-to-transcendent sound; the combination of eerie beauty and kitchen-sink rock converting the vitriolic verses into something strangely joyful. Yet, at other points the band’s pop nous seems a bit too much like compromise. When a big, basic chorus blunders in on otherwise startlingly inventive tracks it can feel counterintuitive. On Desire, the playground chant of the title is an unwelcome intrusion into a song that sounds variously like U2 doing math-rock, a pixellated waterfall of synth, and a choir of dour middle managers taking part in a musical. Can’t Do, meanwhile, boasts glitchy New Order-style basslines and hissing drums, but the star attraction is another gratingly repetitive titular refrain. If this is Everything Everything’s concession to the mainstream, it’s understandable. The band, who have unfairly spent their career lingering on the sidelines of substantial success, cannot easily be boiled down to a sellable proposition – too odd for the dead-eyed charts, too brazen and obvious for chin-stroking tastemakers. But they don’t need to dumb down, not even in the name of a catchy chorus or a more comprehensible cool. In its subtler, more sophisticated moments, A Fever Dream is an astounding album: anxiety-inducing, perhaps, but also appropriate. Everything Everything might struggle to fit into the music scene as it currently stands, but if pop culture continues on its dorky course, it will be only a matter of time before these nerds rule. SOURCE: Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2017/aug/17/everything-everything-a-fever-dream-review-sony
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 20:15:22 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.4. Everything Is Recorded - 'Everything Is Recorded' Everything Is Recorded: Everything Is Recorded By Richard Russell review – mogul music with a stellar castAs head of XL, Richard Russell shaped UK music for three decades. His own debut release finds its voice in many singers Kitty Empire Imagine, for a moment, being the man who signed Adele. You run a label – XL – home to mavericks as diverse as Dizzee Rascal, Radiohead and Arca, and you produce records by your heroes – Gil Scott-Heron, Bobby Womack – in what one might laughably call your spare time. By many people’s definitions, you’d be about as fulfilled, three-dimensional and jammy a human as there is. In 2015, your net worth was guessed at £75m, but your impact on British music is harder to calculate. Then imagine being paralysed. One minute, you’re putting out Gil Scott-Heron’s final album. And then – insert an obscure sound effect here, the kind that you collect – you’re laid low by Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disease that attacks the nervous system. It’s 2013, you’re in hospital, and you can just about twiddle your fingers. Geoff Barrow, on behalf of Portishead, sends you a dinky synth – a pocket piano by Critter & Guitari to be precise – to retrain your synapses and stop you going mad. You can’t help but read Russell’s paralysis as one of those defining moments that would map the road ahead, if he could ever get his motor skills back. Russell is now recovered, and is releasing what is effectively his debut album as artist: Everything Is Recorded. Throughout, he makes the beats and plays synths, guitar, bass and the pocket piano, but doesn’t sing. EIR is not entirely about his neurological brush with the abyss. It’s about memory, our inability to express ourselves and other pitfalls of being human, refracted through a lifelong love of hip-hop and soul and a dedication to sampled textures. But time and again, the album returns to a sermon by TD Jakes, an Oprah-endorsed pastor, and the statement “There are moments in our lives where we feel completely alone.” Russell jammed this record together, keeping the tape rolling after he wrapped up the latest album by Ibeyi – two Beyoncé-endorsed French-Cuban sisters combining hip-hop, soul, Yoruba legend and 21st-century digital technology. He called on the kind of people you can call on if you’re Richard Russell: Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, arranger Owen Pallett, the amazing Warren Ellis. Kamasi Washington, the LA horn player and leading light of woke jazz, contributes on tracks like She Said (also featuring Obongjayar), while people like Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside and Peter Gabriel are ancillary presences. Giggs is here, representing XL’s stake in UK rap on Wet Looking Road (which samples a reggae track, Keith Hudson’s Dark Night on a Wet Looking Road). On it, the rapper who the Met Police’s Operation Trident warned Russell not to sign sounds almost personable. A significant slice of these artists formed part of a four-day-long Everything Is Recorded art installation-cum-gig in Hackney, east London, which ended this weekend. The ace up Russell’s sleeve, though, is a Mercury prize-winning voice – Sampha’s – whose capacity for simultaneously conveying hurt and succour is hard to rival. You want to punch the air every time Sampha turns up – on the title track, or other standouts like the almost passive-aggressive Show Love, also featuring Syd. “I know what my purpose was,” Syd sings, “show love.” Everything Is Recorded can be read a few ways – there’s the Orwellian dystopia we’re sleepwalked into, for one, where every internet search or WhatsApp message is logged. From the producer’s point of view, however, recording is salvation. The album begins with a few beeps, a sound that means “this thing is on”. Producers want to capture everything, in case the artist does something immense once the record button is turned off. It’s OK, Russell is saying (perhaps to himself): we’ve got it locked down. Here, though, is where Everything Is Recorded becomes more slippery. What is Richard Russell – teenage hip-hop head, rave pioneer, enabler of others – about as an artist, now? His default soundbed is a kind of headphone-dazzling trip-hop, where susurrations and just-so samples provide a canvas on which the assembled artists can create freely. Reluctant to take centre-stage vocally, Russell ends up delegating. Ibeyi sing a cover of a Gil Scott-Heron song, Cane – some XL dots, nicely joined – but what is the significance of this allusive song, about the lives of women in the southern US in the 1920s, to Russell? It’s unclear, too, whose words take precedence. At its least interesting, Everything Is Recorded is a compilation album, not a million miles from Albarn’s Gorillaz (fortysomething English guy makes hip-hop-derived album with stellar cast). But it is one whose centre remains tantalisingly unreachable. How much is Russell letting his vocal collaborators speak their own truths – you don’t put words in Giggs’s mouth – and how much of Russell’s essence are they tasked with conveying? On Close But Not Quite, Sampha’s vocal audibly reacts to a sample of Curtis Mayfield’s The Makings of You, sampled so extensively on the track, it becomes a sort of duet. It’s unclear, though, who’s in the lyrical driving seat. The same thought recurs on possibly the best track on the album, Bloodshot Red Eyes, which foregrounds the dulcet tones of newcomer Infinite Coles, who happens to be the offspring of Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah, alongside Gartside. There’s rancour here, about wasted time and wasted love. Whose? For a man who hit the UK top 10 in 1992 with a banging rave tune, The Bouncer, as one half of Kicks Like a Mule, and whose roster, never mind his record collection, ranges far, wide and deep, Russell frustratingly holds back, too, from any meaningfully esoteric or challenging music on Everything Is Recorded. None of this music looks into the void and holds its gaze. By the time Be My Friend rolls round, though, you’ve given up trying to winnow out author from mouthpiece, intention from delivery. The point of Everything Is Recorded is its collaborative nature, and the song’s meaning is abundantly clear. “Love forgiving, heal and mend/ Never leave me/ Be my friend,” beseeches Infinite. Another TD Jakes sample unfurls, adamant that although we may feel alone, we are not. SOURCE: Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2018/feb/18/everything-is-recorded-review-mogul-music-with-a-stellar-cast-richard-russell-xl
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 20:18:46 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.5. Florence + the Machine - 'High as Hope' Florence + the Machine: High As Hope review – older, wiser, comparatively calmer3 out of 5 stars. Florence Welch’s fourth album is most powerful when focused on the small, telling details of encroaching adulthood Alexis Petridis Florence Welch recently told a journalist that her fourth album pursues a noticeably different direction. It is, she confirmed, less “Florence-y”. It’s a statement that is hard to read without raising a quizzical eyebrow. Being Florence-y means dealing in a showy kind of musical melodrama, where tribal drums meet sawing orchestras, grandiloquent piano and the singer’s war-cry voice, heavy on the vibrato. It’s an approach that has earned her three platinum albums and a level of fame that’s led Penguin to collect and publish her biro-written poems, lyrics and inspirational notes-to-self in a book. Moreover, we have been here before. Her last album, How Big How Blue How Beautiful, arrived in 2015 after advanced publicity suggested it was going to be less Florence-y, too: the stripped-down work, as she put it then, of “a quiet person”. In reality, it sounded like the work of a person who could drown out a car alarm at 20 paces; an album during which you couldn’t swing the proverbial cat without clobbering a 36-piece orchestra, a lyrical metaphor involving Greek mythology or a massed choir of multi-tracked Florences turned up to 11. But the first single from High As Hope suggested that, this time, she might mean it. Sky Full of Song dials things down considerably compared with the florid arrangements and bug-eyed vocals of What Kind of Man?, the song that introduced How Big How Blue How Beautiful. The orchestra are present but hovering in the distance behind a muted double-bass. The Choir of the Massed Florences are in a subdued mood, the vocals so close-miked that you can hear her breathing between lines. There is a sense of someone who realised that heading any further down the path of her previous albums might have led her into the realms of self-parody. On occasion, the urge to go full-steam am-dram proves too hard to resist. The song 100 Years spends five exhausting minutes pelting the listener with every trick in the Florence book. Hunger takes a similarly Sturm und Drang approach, although its melodic foundations – and, indeed, her stark depiction of a teenage eating disorder – are strong enough to support the storeys of embellishment stuck on top. Elsewhere, she is capable of more restraint than ever before. Frequently, Welch’s notion of reining herself in simply involves waiting until the closing moments of a track before letting fly with the operatic vocal leaps and the thunderous drums. Nevertheless, these songs are allowed significantly more room to breathe than those on her previous albums. The relative lack of clutter reveals something intriguing. Clearly desperate to be the kind of artist who constructs a phantasmagorical world in which listeners might lose themselves, Welch turns out to be really adept at something more earthbound. The music is most appealing when it is pared back – as on the sparse opener June – and her voice is most powerful when she isn’t belting it out. Similarly, High As Hope’s most emotionally impactful lyrics come when she abandons the rococo metaphors and focuses on small, telling details. She is very sharp on that point in your early 30s when the realisation dawns that you can’t keep deluding yourself you’re not really an adult yet. There’s a lovely section in Hunger in which the music builds as she feels the mounting excitement of Friday approaching, only to realise that the messy hedonism of the weekend is something she is better off observing fondly from a distance: “Oh you and all your vibrant youth,” she sings, looking on, “how could anything bad ever happen to you?” South London Forever mixes up fuzzy memories of youthful indiscretions – staggering from a pub, “holding hands with someone I just met” while on ecstasy – with a warning that you should enjoy that stuff while you can, before indulging in it makes you a crushing embarrassment: “It doesn’t get any better.” The latter song is poignant and airily beautiful: it doesn’t need a tacked-on grand finale. That it has one highlights the problem at the heart of High As Hope, an album that is undoubtedly a progression from her previous work, filled with well-written songs but still frustrating to listen to. It gives the distinct impression that there is a different artist somewhere within Florence Welch, struggling against the desire for grandiosity and the kind of big musical statements that have powered her career. High as Hope suggests she should sweat the small stuff more often. SOURCE: Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jun/28/florence-and-the-machine-high-as-hope-review
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 20:22:20 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.6. Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds - 'Who Built the Moon?' Noel Gallagher's High Flying Birds: Who Built the Moon? review – like Oasis on a sun lounger4 out of 5 stars. Rachel Aroesti The third record from Noel Gallagher’s solo outfit is, according to the ex-Oasis man, merely him in “more colourful clothes”. Brightness is certainly the first thing that strikes you about Who Built the Moon, an album that cloaks Gallagher’s hardy guitar-pop in glowing Smithsian riffs, tin whistle samples from novelty 60s tunes and a heady fug of riotous glam rock. Particular highlights include the gloriously Slade-esque Holy Mountain and the singalong-friendly Black and White Sunshine, which resembles Oasis basking on a sun lounger. Even the fact that the album regularly recalls some of the duller post-Britpop bands – It’s a Beautiful World is basically an Elbow track backed by a breakbeat – can’t dampen the joy that rings out from every corner. Producer David Holmes may be responsible for Noel’s change of pace, but the vibrancy and strains of psychedelia never feel like intruders: instead, they act as the perfect foil for the record’s blissed-out lyrics about life-changing love. SOURCE: The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2017/nov/23/noel-gallaghers-high-flying-birds-who-built-the-moon-review-oasis
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 20:24:50 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.7. King Krule - 'The Ooz'
King Krule: The Ooz review – a self-indulgent splurge3 out of 5 stars. Archy Marshall’s second album as King Krule is a wilfully idiosyncratic outpouring of songs about depression and bodily fluids Alexis Petridis Among the multitude of aliases under which Archy Marshall has released music – he’s called himself everything from King Krule to DJ JD Sports, Lankslacks and Edgar the Beatmaker, the latter purporting to be a hip-hop producer from the Czech Republic – one of the more obscure is Dik Ooz. A rum anagram of another Marshall alias, Zoo Kid, it served as the name of a band Marshall played in with his brother Jack. They didn’t leave much of an imprint – a handful of lo-fi tracks on Bandcamp and MySpace, some shaky mobile phone footage of a pub gig from 2011 and a Tumblr that contains a grand total of four images, one of them of the Slits on stage – but clearly something about the name stuck with the 23-year-old: half of it has turned up again as the title of his second album as King Krule. It’s intended to signify, as he recently told one interviewer: “the shit you do subconsciously, like the snot, the earwax, your spit, your jizz, your piss, your shit, your beard, your nails. You don’t ever think, ‘Wow, I’m actually pushing all this stuff constantly – my brain’s creating all this gunk, this force-field.’” That sounds suspiciously like the kind of concept you might propound with your eyes half-open, shortly before falling asleep surrounded by torn Rizla packets. But listening to The Ooz, you see how it fits: sprawling and opaque, the record has an improvised, stream-of-consciousness feel to it. Even its weirdest musical juxtapositions – not least Dum Surfer, which exists at the unlikely intersection between jazz-rock and slack-jawed 1960s garage punk – feel unforced: they appear to have just happened spontaneously, rather than being thought-through. Elsewhere, the sound is woozily dreamlike and disorientating. Primitive drum machines tick and tock, loops offer scrappy approximations of somnambulant 90s hip-hop beats, the pitches of keyboards and guitars alike keep bending out of tune, a saxophone honks mournfully, chord progressions slip and slide in unlikely directions and musical motifs lurch into view before vanishing. The Locomotive keeps launching into something that sounds like an anthemic chorus, before collapsing after two lines. Delivered in a voice that alternates between a mumble, a bruised croon that in less adventurous hands might be deployed knocking out radio-friendly post-Winehouse soul, an inchoate Joe Strummer-ish yammer and an agonised yell, the lyrics are as hazy and as hard to pin down as the music. But you can pick out certain themes. There’s the collapse of a relationship and some kind of mental breakdown (“Why did you leave me?” wonders Midnight 01, “Because of my depression?”), a bout of writer’s block and a bleak view of contemporary London as “this city of parasites”. equally scarred by gentrification and crime. Occasionally, the songs are leavened by wit – opener Biscuit Town rhymes “bipolar” with “Gianfranco Zola” – but it’s laughter in the dark: no one is going to remember The Ooz as a bountiful source of ROFLs. It’s a difficult listen, and a certain self-indulgence is obviously the point here. After he found a place on the BBC’s Sound of 2013 list, some journalists lumbered Marshall with the “voice of a generation” tag. Listening to The Ooz, you do wonder if its introversion is a reaction to the kind of attention received by the songs on his debut album, 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, which included endorsements from Beyoncé and cover versions by Willow Smith. There is absolutely no way of interpreting this album as any kind of state-of-the-nation address: it clearly speaks for no one but Marshall himself. But self-indulgence is also its biggest drawback. As evidenced by the constant stream of music he uploads to the internet under his various aliases, Marshall is not big on the notion of self-editing. The Ooz lasts more than an hour and virtually every track is allowed to ramble on for longer than it needs to. Thrilling pieces of music – Vidual’s primitive south London take on rockabilly; the title track’s sickly drift; the tape hiss-laden (A Slide In) New Drugs, which carries a similar air of authentically damaged spookiness to Skip Spence’s War in Peace or Syd Barrett’s Long Gone – are cast adrift amid formless longueurs. The end result is by turns gripping, idiosyncratic, baffling and frustrating: not so much an ooze as a splurge of ideas – that’s nevertheless worth picking through. SOURCE: The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2017/oct/12/king-krule-the-ooz-review-archy-marshall
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 20:27:35 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.8. Novelist - 'Novelist Guy'
Novelist: Novelist Guy review – young grime star shows his social conscience3 out of 5 stars. Kieran Yates The true test of whether a scene has a lifespan is to look at the new crop of talent following the greats. Grime might have had a mainstream moment, but what’s next? The answer for many fans comes in the form of 21-year-old Novelist, the south London MC who fondly bought us Lewisham McDeez as part of grime crew the Square, a jubilant homage to a local landmark. This introspective offering takes us through his frustrations with industry obstacles, black masculinity and our current political moment. At its best, with punchy tracks such as Afro Pick, he reminds us that he’s not divorced from the young people you might be reading about in the news: “Afro pick in my hair / Look but I don’t recommend you stare … I do what I do for the young youth from back in the day when I ran for the mayor,” touches on his brief stint as former deputy young mayor of Lewisham. His politically confrontational moments are the best – on Stop Killing the Mandem he furiously repeats the title, taken from a sign that went viral when he held it up at a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest in London, 16 times before we even hear him rap. The production too, can be a thrilling exercise in beat-spotting from an artist who pays his dues. Nov Wait Stop Wait pays homage to Rebound X’s iconic Rhythm and Gash grime instrumental, and the radio skit (Nov B2B DeeCee) is a nostalgic revisiting of pirate radio sessions, but there are points, like on Gangster, when songs feel unfinished, taking a while to draw us in. Overall, though, this is a confident salute to a scene still rich in talent. SOURCE: The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/13/novelist-novelist-guy-review-young-grime-star-shows-his-social-conscience
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 20:29:43 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.9. Nadine Shah - 'Holiday Destination'
Nadine Shah: Holiday Destination review – simmering post-punk from the edge4 out of 5 stars. Dave Simpson Nadine Shah doesn’t hold back on her third album, a powerful state-of-the-world address. – inspired by witnessing the xenophobia of holidaymakers on the – looks at the wider treatment of refugees and asks “How you gonna sleep tonight?” The north-easterner (of Norwegian-Pakistani heritage) brings personal experience and powerful argument to Out the Way’s dissection of anti-immigration feeling (“Where would you have me go? I’m second-generation, don’t you know?”). The song 2016 looks especially prescient in light of Charlottesville (“There’s a fascist in the Whitehouse”). Such zingers are delivered over darkly classy post-punk, in which the ghosts of PJ Harvey and Siouxsie and the Banshees hover over grinding guitars and rasping sax. Yes Men is the catchiest of some strong (if not always immediate) tunes, put together with long-term collaborator, Ben Hillier. She’s not yet gone for the poppier approach to take her messages more mainstream, but few current artists make music with such a simmering edge. SOURCE: The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2017/aug/24/nadine-shah-holiday-destination-review-simmering-post-punk-from-the-edge
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 20:32:23 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.10. Jorja Smith - 'Lost and Found'
Jorja Smith: Lost & Found review – soulful debut from R&B prodigy3 out of 5 stars. Kieran Yates Most people will know Jorja Smith either by voice, thanks to her sunny R&B vocals on Drake’s Get It Together, or by face, thanks to her many magazine covers, five-storey high billboard campaigns and fashion brand endorsements. Others in the music industry will know her as Bruno Mars’s tour support, and Kendrick Lamar’s co-writer on I Am from the Black Panther soundtrack. After a clutch of singles and a Brits critics’ choice award, this pop-R&B debut album is her proper introduction as a solo artist, working it all out in real time as we listen in. The highlights include Wandering Romance, where, between bass stabs, she wholly exposes her desire and frustration. You can almost see her face writhe as she belts: “No one keeps me dirty like you do … so take it how you want it, take all my love.” The effect is rousing, to say the least. The delicate yearning on February 3rd hears her begging someone to “lose themselves from playing games”, conjuring those raw moments of trying to make a lover commit. On Lifeboats (Freestyle) she ponders “so why are the richest in floats and all my brothers drowning?” over gentle piano lines and soft hums – she channels Estelle’s cockney conversation, but without quite matching her finesse. The album can sound laboured, and not just lyrically. You can feel her voice strain and contort even in the first few notes of the opening track, where she walks on the edge of the overly saccharine, only to eventually crash to a fall with Tomorrow (“Don’t you wonder why / I won’t say goodbye / I won’t even cry.”) Lost & Found is a well-paced album full of gentle vocals, catchy pop hooks and a playful relationship with the pains of youth, love and insecurity. Smith’s voice moves between arrestingly husky and overly nasal, with plenty of room to develop, but the sparse and uninspiring production doesn’t save the songs from feeling forgettable at times. As far as the poetry of trying, failing and picking yourself up again goes, this has merit, but as for staking a claim as pop’s biggest new R&B talent, it doesn’t quite stand five stories tall. SOURCE: The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2018/jun/08/jorja-smith-lost-found-review
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 20:37:58 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.11. Sons of Kemet - 'Your Queen is a Reptile'
(No review here, but there is a short interview) Shabaka Hutchings : ‘Young musicians aren’t trying to satisfy the standards that were set by jazz in the past’London-based bandleader and saxophone and clarinet player, 33 Interview by Kate Hutchinson Shabaka Hutchings is easily one of the most interesting bandleaders of the past decade. He deals in shape-shifting sax and clarinet, but it’s his carefree approach to other genres that’s established him as a musical outlier who’s rattling rigid jazz traditions. His three projects, Shabaka and the Ancestors, Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming – the latter a nominee in the Mercury’s “token jazz category”, he jokes – are peppered variously with calypso, dub, Afrofuturist beats and hat-tips to Sun Ra, Miles Davis and sweat‑soaked New Orleans party music. Trumpeter and Gondwana label boss, Matthew Halsall, calls Hutchings “the Kamasi Washington of the UK jazz scene” and it’s easy to see why. Hutchings – who is from Birmingham by way of Barbados, where he lived till he was 16 – is a similarly gifted brass player, has a commanding presence, and comes with a penchant for all things cosmic. He is also as ubiquitous, having played with the likes of mid-00s breakthroughs Melt Yourself Down, Ethio-jazz pioneer Mulatu Astatke and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, on the latter’s soundtrack for Paul Thomas Anderson’s film The Master. The fact that Hutchings has “never been completely comfortable with jazz” figures. “When I was younger, I struggled with how to play jazz as the great art form,” he says, which is why his music pulls from so many different places instead. “I might be in a regular jazz quartet, and I might want to write something that’s complex, [but I’ll] rack my brains and come out with something more simple – and maybe that’s a bashment bassline.” There’s plenty of the latter on the new Sons of Kemet album, Your Queen Is a Reptile, which explores dual Caribbean and British identities. Its songs, named after lesser-heralded influential women from history, reject the monarchy, finding new “queens” to celebrate instead – such as Angela Davis and Doreen Lawrence – with Hutchings’s sax and clarinet tangled with Theon Cross’s tuba and guest MCing from junglist Congo Natty. Hutchings is also helping to document the scene, and last month oversaw We Out Here, a compilation that spotlights south London’s rising stars. He gathered together Maisha, Ezra Collective, Moses Boyd, Theon Cross, Nubya Garcia, Triforce, Joe Armon-Jones and Kokoroko and recorded them over three days of jamming last year. He says of these musicians that, much like him, “the differences in the generation now and generations past is that it feels like young musicians aren’t trying to satisfy the standards that were set by jazz in the past. They’re just going, ‘What is the music that represents me today?’” This generation are bringing with them a younger audience, though it tickles Hutchings because, at 33, he’s old enough to remember “the time where jazz wasn’t cool at all. If you said, ‘I play jazz’, people were just like, ‘Oh no, that’s terrible’.” But he suggests that jazz will continue to innovate regardless of trends. Like punk, “it’s an attitude of, ‘Fuck it, we’re doing something that’s probably not going to be popular anyway’. Jazz is that music that no one’s expecting to go anywhere, and the musicians are just getting on with it.” SOURCE: The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2018/apr/08/british-jazz-invasion-moses-boyd-matthew-halsall-nubya-garcia
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 3, 2018 20:40:15 GMT
MERCURY MUSIC PRIZE SHORTLIST ALBUM No.12. Wolf Alice - 'Visions of a Life'
Wolf Alice: Visions of a Life review – exuberant guitar-driven genre jumble4 out of 5 stars. Gwilym Mumford A rare success story in this era of British guitar music’s managed decline, Wolf Alice’s ambitions stretch far beyond the old genre labels, not only hoping to top this week’s album charts with their second album, but also set to squeak into the box office Top 10 as the subjects of Michael Winterbottom’s not-quite-rock-doc On the Road. It’s indicative of a freewheeling outlook that sets them apart from more orthodox arena-bothering peers like Royal Blood. Visions of a Life sees the band refine the exuberant jumble of dream-pop and grunge that characterised their debut My Love is Cool, while also finding new areas of exploration, from Drive soundtrack synthpop (Don’t Delete the Kisses) to snarling punk (Yuk Foo) and everything in between. Reigning over all is guitarist-vocalist Ellie Rowsell, a hugely charismatic presence in the style of 90s alt-rock heroines like Juliana Hatfield or Kristin Hersh, who spends much of her time here vacillating between lobbing sardonic spitballs from the back of the classroom and picking away at the scab of her own insecurity. “Head way up in a storm cloud / calm but so extreme”, she sings on the Heathers-referencing Beautifully Unconventional. Either way, she and Wolf Alice are never dull. SOURCE: The Guardian www.theguardian.com/music/2017/sep/28/wolf-alice-visions-of-a-life-review
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Post by MartinT on Oct 3, 2018 21:06:20 GMT
I'm going to give all of these a listen. The Florence sounds good so far, the Lily Allen lasted 19s and that was way too much.
More later.
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Post by John on Oct 4, 2018 7:21:33 GMT
Unfortunately I pay no attention to awards. My musical taste has never been mainstream and past history has shown little to offer me. I rarely listen to pop music
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Post by ChrisB on Oct 4, 2018 7:46:12 GMT
Try the Sons of Kemet album, John. Not pop by any stretch of the imagination.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 4, 2018 15:57:07 GMT
So far listened to the Lily Allen which was ok apart from the pointless and mindless swearing which was pathetic.
Liking the Arctic Monkeys album. A bit of a change in style and tempo in comparison to their early albums.
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Post by julesd68 on Oct 4, 2018 16:03:30 GMT
I couldn't manage a whole Lily Allen track at a time so just sampled each one. She has made a few decent tunes in the past but these are all so similar and just blur into each other - very mid-tempo and same kind of vocals. Found it annoying after a while. Can't see how it could have been up for any kind of award!
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Post by daytona600 on Oct 4, 2018 20:56:29 GMT
King Krule & Sons of kemit , the rest heard them all before
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Post by Deleted on Oct 5, 2018 15:49:03 GMT
Quite like the Everything Everything album so far.
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